When building the new headquarters for DeWaay Capital Management in Clive, masons painstakingly handcrafted interior accent columns using tons of stone from the Black Hills, a feature not typically found in Iowa structures. In a similar fashion, Don DeWaay is meticulously building a Midwest-based wealth management powerhouse that’s attracting investment professionals and clients from throughout the country.

The company, founded by DeWaay 20 years ago, specializes in offering sophisticated investment opportunities not usually provided by larger firms, such as energy start-up ventures or complex real estate partnerships. Using a philosophy of gathering professional advice for its clients under one roof, the firm has increased its business by approximately 80 percent in the past 12 months, DeWaay said.

“Our business has just been exploding to the upside in recent years,” said DeWaay, who is also known regionally for his syndicated radio program, “The Profit Zone.” “As that happened, we needed to respond to that. Frankly, we would have been a lot further ahead if we had had this building two or three years ago.”

On Thursday, exactly two years after breaking ground, DeWaay officials expect about 500 guests to visit the new headquarters at 13001 University Ave. for a ribbon-cutting ceremony and grand-opening celebration.

The 103,000-square-foot building, which includes a state-of-the-art conference center seating up to 200 people, is the first of five planned structures that will make up Commerce Park by DeWaay. Construction began this spring on a retail plaza, as well as on a 16,800-square-foot office building to house professional firms that will affiliate with DeWaay to offer clients a one-stop financial center.

DeWaay Capital is negotiating with a local certified public accounting firm as well as a large law firm to possibly occupy that second office building, which is expected to be completed this fall, said Karlton Kleis, the firm’s chief financial officer.

“If we get a law firm that wants to take all or part of that building, we’ll do that,” he said. “If not, we can switch very easily to an executive concourse space that will allow us to put more strategic partners there.” A third office building, which will contain 24,000 square feet, is also planned. DeWaay is also courting an insurance underwriter and an investment banking group to move to the office park.

Within its headquarters building, the firm houses an estate planning attorney and an insurance representative to provide services for DeWaay clients as needed. Internally, DeWaay also recently formed a third-party administrator company that has begun offering small employers 401(k) retirement plans and other group benefit products.

Prior to DeWaay Capital’s move to the new building in March, its headquarters was located in 7,000 square feet of leased office space on Grand Avenue in West Des Moines.

“Obviously, that was a physical barrier to us recruiting the people we needed,” DeWaay said. “So we patiently waited for this property to be finished. We did a broad evaluation of our systems to try to tailor it to the growth of this firm, which has just been astounding.”

From a staff of fewer than 25 just three years ago, DeWaay Capital’s work force has grown to approximately 65 people.

“We’ve been hiring people at a torrid pace, and we still have quite a bit of hiring to do to manage the growth of the firm,” DeWaay said. Two years ago, the Iowa Department of Economic Development awarded the firm a $900,000 incentive package that’s contingent upon DeWaay Capital creating at least 45 new jobs over a three-year period.

DeWaay has also launched his own broker-dealer organization, DeWaay Financial Network, which employs seven people. The new company recently entered a contract with its first group of independent contractors, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based firm that DeWaay said is one of the largest independent investment advisory firms in the country.

As consolidation in the financial brokerage industry continues, there are many top investment representatives who will be attracted to the innovative products his firm can offer clients, DeWaay said.

“We’re going to be very selective in choosing producers for the broker-dealer,” he said. “If somebody doesn’t make at least $1 million a year in individual practice revenue, we’re not going to be interested in them. In short, we’re picking the cream of the crop.”

Working with a consulting group, the firm did a top-down analysis of its systems prior to the move to develop the most efficient workspaces possible. One result of that process was to design a “client prep room” in which clients can view videos detailing investment products.

“The goal is that they can formulate questions to ask a relationship manager before they go in to talk to Don,” Kleis said. The second-floor office that DeWaay will use to visit with clients or business associates resembles a large, comfortable living room, with a fireplace, leather sofas and two flat-screen televisions mounted on the wall. Outside the glass-walled office is a large balcony for private receptions.

Overall, DeWaay Capital’s vision is to take the philosophies used by the country’s most sophisticated wealth management firms and make them accessible to people ranging from “single-digit millionaires to mid-double-digit multimillionaires,” DeWaay said.

“The rest of our industry is so commoditized,” he said. “These investors are deserving of that level of sophistication, and they never get it. They get very off-the-rack approaches to investing, very uninspiring stuff.”

Because of its approach with clients, “I would say easily 90 percent of our growth has been organic,” DeWaay said. “We have clients with a missionary zeal who tell the rest of the world about what we do; they will just drag people to us, saying, ‘You have to talk to these people.’ And of course, once they get exposure to us and understand the difference between us and other firms, we turn them into raging fans, too.”