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The Clarke kids would work hard during the day, but they’d play hard at night. And growing up in Omaha, they had the freedom to do so.
One day, teenaged Todd Clarke, the oldest Clarke child, spray painted the local water tower with the words “Todd Loves Heather.” His mother, Lana, thought her kids were angels and that someone else must have done it. Todd would eventually marry Heather, his high school sweetheart.
Photo: Todd Clarke, right, with Heather at senior prom.
Todd Clarke was a junior in high school when Brett, the youngest Clarke child, was born.
“When my parents told us that they were having Brett, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. You two have got to have separate rooms,’” Todd says. “‘This is disgusting.’”
During one trip to the post office, Brett was mistaken for Todd’s son, and Todd vowed he would never take his brother anywhere with him again.
“We call him the caboose,” Eric says.
With their father owning a business, the Clarke boys soon realized they had to help out as needed. Eric Clarke’s first job at his father’s firm was as the janitor, when he was a junior in high school. “You go over and clean at night after swim practice,” Eric recalls.
There was also a sign out on the street near the office building that had stock tickers. As prices changed on the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average, Eric would be out there changing the lightbulbs.
Photo: Eric Clarke completing a school project in eighth grade.
The Clarke brothers are descendants of Mormon pioneers, who migrated across the plains from the Midwest to Utah in the 1800s. And the family still practices the Mormon religion.
All three Clarke brothers went on a two-year mission when they were younger. Brett, the youngest, went to Mexico City.
“I always tell people it's not the best two years of your life, but it was the most important two years of my life,” Brett recalls. “I had to kind of let go of the world and my cell phone, girls, friends, cars, parties, mountains, skiing, and all of that. By doing that you build relationships like you've never had before. You kind of learn to serve and help and put others' needs first, which has prepared me to be a husband and a father, and then a manager and ... I think I'm a better salesman.”
Photo: From left to right, Jennie, Todd, Scott, Eric. Bottom left, Brett.
NorthStar is not run by one individual, but rather a committee that makes decisions together.
“I didn’t realize how unique that was until we went through this process over the last year of private equity companies as well as strategic partners that looked at us as a possible acquisition,” says Todd Clarke, CEO of CLS Investments. “Because when they walk in the door, they’re like, ‘Wait a second; you run CLS; Eric runs Orion; Andrew Rogers runs Gemini Fund Services; Daniel’s your CFO; Bill’s your head of sales. Who runs NorthStar?’ And the answer is we run it as a team.
“I wouldn’t recommend it though to another company.”
Orion’s client portal is a place where an investor can log in and see their investments. The technology provider realized that a lot of people in our industry would like to own that experience, so they decided to put the whole thing out on open source.
The firm opened a GitHub account, a website that allows you to store and share source codes.
“So any of our customers and the vendors who work with us, they can grab that same piece of code and they can do what they want with it,” said Brad Burgess, chief technology officer at Orion. “They can add enhancements to it. They can modify it. Open source concepts have been around forever. It's a way to inspire people to think a little bit more and to do a little bit more.”
NorthStar’s servers house about 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) of data among all of its subsidiaries. To protect that data, the firm has duplicates of all its hardware in data centers in Papillion, Neb. and Chicago.
In case of emergency, there’s also an alternate worksite with 250 seats and computers in Fremont, Neb.
