Financial planners tend to toil quietly in the background, but all that changed for suburban Cleveland planner Rich Lowrie when Republican presidential contender Herman Cain identified him as his economic advisor during a televised debate. Cain credited Lowrie with helping to shape his suddenly famous 9-9-9 tax proposal that has helped vault Cain to the top of the polls.

In an extensive and exclusive interview, Lowrie, a managing director of wealth management for Wells Fargo Financial Advisors in the affluent town of Pepper Pike, Ohio, responded to critics who questioned Cain for not choosing an academic as his senior economic advisor.

“You don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to explain simple economic truths to people,” says Lowrie, 47, who holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Case Western Reserve University. “Not surprisingly to us, the American people understand economics a lot better than Washington gives them credit for.”

Wells Fargo's Rich Lowrie

Or, as Cain has put it, “Rich has more common sense than many who call themselves economists.”

To the charge the 9-9-9 plan will hit the poorest Americans hardest, Lowrie says many of the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid would be exempted. He says the Cain campaign plans to unveil new details of its plan in Detroit on Friday.

Lowrie’s prominence in the campaign may mark a historic moment in the roughly 40-year-old profession of financial planning. Now-retired financial planner Jack Gargan served briefly as chairman of Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the 1980s. But aside from him, none of the leaders of the Financial Planning Association, nor any of the other longtime planners contacted this week, could think of another planner who’s helped shape a national debate.

Lowrie doesn’t have much time to wonder whether he should be on the hot seat. It’s all he can do to keep his campaign work and his advising practice separate, as requested by Wells Fargo. For that reason, he declined to answer even the most basic queries about his business, questions to which most other planners respond readily.

For his part, Lowrie claims no interest in the spotlight. His work as a behind-the-scenes conservative activist dates back seven or eight years. That work has roots in a still-earlier decision he made in the early ’90s to refocus his business to carve out substantial time for new pursuits, from national politics to helping underprivileged kids in Cleveland.

A lightning bolt

“When my oldest daughter Rachel was about 2 and my youngest daughter Ryann was still on the way, I thought to myself, ‘OK, in five more minutes, I can put her down and then dig into those research reports,” recalls Lowrie, who’s now divorced. (His daughters are now 13 and 11.) He caught the thought before acting on it. “It was almost like God sent one of those lightning bolts down and it hit me and that was the turning point. I thought I’ve got to get out of this transactional approach to business and build something with more value for my clients.”

In short order, Lowrie signed up with a business coach who offered a three-year program designed to free clients from the time-sucking daily minutiae of operating a business.

As part of the program, the coach asked Lowrie to envision his death and how he wanted to be remembered. At this time, the demise of his political hero remained fresh in his mind. In 2004, when Ronald Reagan lay in state in Washington, mourners came to view the body at all hours. After a long day at the office, Lowrie drove through the night to the Capitol to pay his respects. At about 4 a.m., he and a friend had their turn to see Reagan’s body. They then drove home, and Lowrie returned to work later that morning.

After the three years of working with the business coach, Lowrie learned how to focus on building client relationships, leaving the day-to-day operations of his practice to others and spending one or even several days every week away from the office.