About Steve

Steven Zeller is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional, Accredited Investment Fiduciary®, Certified Exit Planner, practicing Wealth Advisor, and is President/CEO of Zeller Kern Wealth Advisors (www.ZellerKern.com). He has 24 years experience within his profession.

Along with traditional wealth advisement, which includes comprehensive retirement planning for individuals, and other financial planning, Steve has many years of experience working closely with first and second generation business owners, and their families.

He advises them on growing and protecting their wealth, consults them on their company retirement plans, deferred compensation plans, solutions to build the value of their companies, and creating comprehensive written business exit plans.

Through his many years of providing Business Exit Planning, he has developed an effective Exit Planning Process that his firm uses today. He is also an active member of the Business Enterprise Institute, a national organization for exit planning professionals, and has been a featured speaker at the annual conferences.

Steve is also a relatively unique advisor for business owners because of his previous background working as a territory manager for a Fortune 500 consumer products company. As a result, he understands branding, distribution channels, product pricing, retail distribution, product promotion, and the overall product life cycle. This uniqueness, along with his business education, and being a business owner himself, makes him uniquely able to understand the business owner’s needs.

What Steve enjoys most about his profession is having a passion for making a positive, life enhancing difference for his clients and their families. He achieves this by developing a deep understanding of them, delivering planning and solutions, and providing the highest level of client service, possible – “It’s a relationship business.”

Steve continues to actively learn, attend conferences, and develop planning processes such as the firm’s Focused Wealth Process, “Purposeful Conversations”, their Business Exit Planning Process, and their firm’s Family Legacy Development Process.

Steve is also experienced in helping high net worth families develop a Family Legacy Plan, which involves facilitating family retreats to help the family establish a family vision statement, mission statement, and financial philosophy statement. Ultimately, a written family legacy plan is created, family meetings follow, and the family then begins on the road to family governance.  

Steve actively participates in the advancement of the wealth advisement profession by writing several articles and conducting regular public speaking engagements on the subjects of business value building, Business exit planning, family legacy development, and other timely topics related to retirement planning, and growing and preserving wealth.  

He is an active participant in his community, volunteering his time on many charitable boards. He is also President and co-founder of the Sacramento Professional Advisors Network, an organization of established advisors for business owners www.sacproadvisors.com.

In his off-hours, Steve enjoys spending time with his wife, Cynthia, and their Short-Haired Border Collie, “Max”, while their Son Kevin, attends school at Creighton University. He enjoys building friendships in the community, giving back, staying fit, traveling, reading books, studying history, economics and capital markets, and is an accomplished guitar player and guitar collector.

Steve holds his series 7, series 31, series 63, and series 65 registrations through Commonwealth Financial Network. CA Insurance Lic# 0B74763