Enrique Perez started his financial planning career young — before he’d even graduated from college.
As a sophomore at Williams College, Perez helped his parents navigate their finances and retirement plan. Working with his parents, immigrants from Bolivia, later inspired him to start his own financial planning firm, Mission Park Capital, which is named after the dormitory where he lived that year.
“Fortunately, my parents’ position was becoming more secure over time, and it led me to think, maybe this is something where I could become helpful to others as well — and not necessarily high-net-worth individuals,” Perez says.
Perez wants to help people like his parents — immigrants — as well as younger people a few years out of college and others with lower salaries who are often overlooked in the traditional financial planning market, where advisors squabble over higher net worth clients.
But as a young graduate, Perez didn’t go into financial planning right away. Graduating from college into a recession, Perez took a job with the Massachusetts State Senate. He worked for the state’s budget committee and eventually became chief of staff to the secretary of housing and economic development.
“Being prepared, analyzing, giving advice and guidance was something that came early on in my career,” he says, adding that during his government jobs, he became used to analyzing problems, asking questions from all angles and giving advice without judgment.
After his time in government, Perez worked in affordable housing at a Massachusetts social enterprise bank, enjoying the mission-driven aspect of the job. While there, he would also informally give co-workers personal finance advice, which helped spark the idea to start Mission Park Capital.
“I was beginning to think, could this be another way for me to share this knowledge I’ve been able to gain and build and compound over time?” Perez says. “I got to an inflection point in my career where if I didn’t take the risk to start the firm and at least try it, I knew that moment might pass me by.”
Tim Sullivan, one of Perez’s former managers, remembers him as passionate, someone who would go out of his way to help others understand concepts.
“He’s very smart, he’s very good at understanding people’s learning styles,” Sullivan says. “He has this ability to operate at a high level, but also bring it to a granular level and then do it in a style that is absorbed by people with different capacities.”
Sullivan likes maps, and when Perez learned that, he would find opportunities to include them in creative ways during presentations — including a map of Massachusetts colored in orange to denote the hundreds of Dunkin’ Donuts locations in the state.
“One of the things I really admired about him is how deeply connected he was to the mission,” Sullivan says. “He has a kind of real passion for how various things, whether it’s in government or elsewhere, can be done to really help people improve their lives.”
