Meet the wealth manager who built a $38 billion firm and gave $100 million to the MBA program that launched him

In 1981, Jeff Thomasson earned his MBA from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, which is regularly ranked among the top programs.

That launched him on the path to building his own wealth management firm, which now has more than $38 billion in assets under advisement.

Now, he’s giving back to the school that made him.

Last week, IU announced Thomasson and his wife, Cheryl, had donated $100 million toward graduate education at Kelley.

The gift will also go toward supporting IU’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and is the largest from an individual in IU history.

In total, the Thomassons have donated more than $111 million to the school, and the board of trustees has approved naming the Kelley School’s graduate division after Thomasson.

“The Kelley MBA program set the foundation for my career, and this gift is our way of paying forward the investment people made in us,” Thomasson said in a statement.

“We hope it encourages others to do the same, creating opportunities that will ripple across generations.” How Jeff Thomasson built Oxford Financial Advisors After earning his MBA from IU, where he specialized in investments and taxation, Thomasson founded Oxford Financial Advisors, a regularly top-ranked registered investment advisor (RIA) firm.

The firm essentially began as a class assignment: Thomasson took the master’s essay he’d written on an ideal wealth management firm and turned it into a blueprint for his own company, he told Forbes in 2011 .

Thomasson also came from a humble background, and the odds were stacked against him when he first established his firm.

His father was a construction worker, was disabled in an accident, and died while Thomasson was in college—and his mother was a bank teller.

A local oil distributor who had employed Thomasson since his teens actually paid for his college education, according to Forbes.

He launched his firm at age 23 with $20,000 in grad school debt during a high-interest, high-unemployment economy in the early 1980s.

Forbes reported that he grew his client base largely through cold calling, holding roughly 1,000 meetings per year and working six days a week.