Abacoa & Alton Neighbors - December 2025

COVER FEATURE W hen you talk to Jeremy Wilmes, Financial Advisor and founder of Endeavour Wealth Management & Protection, one thing is immediately clear: he doesn’t see finance as numbers on a page, he sees it as people, families, and communities — and the responsibility that comes with helping them secure their futures. “I define leadership as transformational,” Wilmes said. “For me, it’s about inspiring people to be excited about what they’re doing. If you can get people excited about the process and the results, you don’t have to browbeat them. They’ll drag you there, kicking and screaming.” Wilmes’s journey to founding Endeavour has been anything but linear. In fact, his foray into finance came almost by accident. “In the late ’90s, I answered a job board posting at Portland State University for a stockbroker,” he recalled. “It was commission-only, dialing for dollars. We all had that Wall Street image of sitting in a suit and making millions, but what you didn’t see was five hours of cold-calling people who’d hang up on you.” He even tried leaving the industry, more than once, but life kept bringing him back. After a series of acquisitions led to a layoff in 2004, Wilmes moved to Hawaii for what he thought would be a sabbatical. Instead, it became the start of something transformative. “Through the tow-in surfing and big wave connections on Maui, First Hawaiian Bank found out I had all my licenses and brought me in to run their wealth advisory division on Maui,” he shared. “That’s when things took off for me.” It was there that Wilmes developed his expertise in estate and financial planning, working closely with families to preserve intergenerational wealth. “We were doing a lot of premium finance through the work of Kako‘o Oiwi — using leverage to purchase life insurance in trusts to pay estate taxes on Hawaiian lands so families could keep them in Hawaiian hands,” he explained. “Otherwise, those properties would have to be liquidated. That got national attention.” Jeremy Wilmes FOUNDER/PRESIDENT - ENDEAVOUR WEALTH MANAGEMENT & PROTECTION – By Dan Hauser – – Photos by Neil Cohen Photography and Jeremy Wilmes – PROFILES OF LEADERSHIP 8 A B A C O A & A LT O N N E I G H B O R S | D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 5