For California’s ultra-high-net-worth families, Derek Myron and Centura Wealth Advisory have moved well past traditional wealth management. While most advisors are still talking about portfolio allocation, Derek’s team is engineering tax outcomes, and the numbers are striking.
A client earning $2 million in California income faces roughly $900,000 in taxes. Centura often brings forth material reduction to those amounts. That’s not asset management, that’s a completely different value proposition.
Their approach reveals how sophisticated planning actually works at scale, for example:
- Index replication that systematically harvests losses improving after tax return while maintaining identical market exposure.
- A leveraged hedging strategy that lets clients manufacture capital losses while maintaining the same net investment position.
- Tangible property regulations, used properly, can convert improvements from depreciation into immediate one-time deductions, sometimes unlocking substantial write offs.
Derek also gets into how RIAs like Centura think about allocating into real estate, where private market investments fit within a UHNW portfolio, how they vet operators and opportunities, and why real estate remains a core tool in the tax planning conversation.
Since founding Centura in 2014, Derek and his team of 62 professionals have grown to $1.4 billion in assets under management, with plans to quadruple that over the next five years.
Build the org chart first, then see if your people fit it. Derek’s approach to organizational design starts by mapping every role without thinking about who currently fills it, then assessing whether each person genuinely gets it, wants it, and has the capacity for it. Most founders do this backwards.
The conversation also gets into how Centura found its core values by identifying top performers, cataloguing the adjectives that described them, then ranking everyone on the executive team against those same traits. It’s a process worth stealing.
What stands out most about Derek is the quiet confidence paired with genuine humility. He’s not claiming to be the smartest guy in the room. He’s just laser-focused on solving real problems for UHNW clients while building a firm where his team can actually grow. His advice for entrepreneurs: stay humble, get mentors who’ve done it, and find your tribe – a peer group that functions like a real board of directors.
