For almost 20 years, a small West Des Moines company started by Don DeWaay has quietly been managing the wealth of affluent investors.

Perhaps too quietly. “The biggest problem this industry suffers from is the homogenization of the whole business,” said DeWaay, who started DeWaay Capital Management 17 years ago. “It’s difficult to differentiate one firm from the next.”

It’s easy for people to discern the difference between a criminal defense lawyer and one who specializes in tort claims, or between a physician practicing family medicine and a specialist. But DeWaay’s company isn’t a typical wealth management firm, and he didn’t want it to be lumped in with those that manage only a portion of a client’s wealth, such as a retirement plan. DeWaay Capital Management coordinates all of its clients’ financial matters, from asset management to retirement planning to estate planning to complex real estate transactions.

DeWaay had a delicate problem: how to increase awareness of his company among individuals with high net worths without resorting to the hard-sell tactics and emotional pleas he finds personally distasteful.

One of the answers to his dilemma was found at WHO radio in Des Moines. The station has at its disposal an arsenal of syndicated radio programs from financial experts around the country. When it came to choosing a program for the 8 to 9 p.m. time slot on Sundays, however, WHO selected “The Profit Zone,” a call-in program DeWaay had pitched.

“He handles himself well,” said Van Harden, WHO’s programming director. “We’ve always thought that as well as being a good financial adviser, he would be a good radio personality, too.”

DeWaay hosts the program with Brian Dean, WHO’s longtime technical director. Because WHO’s signal travels farther at night, calls come from throughout the Midwest. Since the inaugural program on WHO about three years ago, “The Profit Zone” has been picked up by KFAB in Omaha and KCMO in Kansas City, and is now heard in 42 states.

In a partnership with Pioneer Communications and Kennedy Financial Services, DeWaay acts as editorial director of The Profit Zone, a quarterly magazine that goes to DeWaay Capital Management’s 1,000 clients, about 60 percent of whom live in Iowa. The company writes Spare Change, an abbreviated bullet-point monthly newsletter. Its Web site, www.theprofitzone.net, focuses financial advice on topics of interest to Internet users.

Those marketing efforts have helped to distinguish DeWaay Capital Management as a wealth-management company that schedules several “courtship” meetings before a marriage between a client and the company takes place.

The company accepts only affluent investors with portfolios totaling at least $1 million – “and sometimes significantly north of that,” DeWaay said. He didn’t disclose the amount of assets under management, but said the company handles between $1 million and $2 million in cash each week.

DeWaay uses an exhaustive diagnostic process determine the best plans to increase the firms’s clients’ net worths. The company has relationships with expert attorneys in the area of estate planning, CPAs and other professionals – people who don’t always talk to one another with “sometimes disastrous results,” DeWaay said.

“I’m alarmed, frankly, by how often people come in and say they’re working with a reputable law firm or a large CPA firm with national prominence and, in fact, there are tremendous opportunities that are not being capitalized on,” he said. “We coordinate all those affairs for somebody under one roof, but they never have to forsake their own advisers.”

The company is just as picky about the investments it makes as it is about its clients. “We look at hundreds of deals of all shapes and sizes, but we’ll look at them for one to five years before they gain access,” DeWaay said. “Even if they’ve got a track record, we have to feel comfortable – it’s our clients’ money and I have to treat it like their money is mine.”

That’s one of the reasons the company has never had a lawsuit or a complaint from a regulatory agency or client, DeWaay said.