Road to Duke
Jon Goodman arrived at Duke in the fall of 1986 as a member of the freshman basketball class that, by available documentation, was the largest Mike Krzyzewski would carry at the school for the next three decades. Per a Duke Chronicle story in 2017 on the walk-on signing of Mike Buckmire, Duke had not carried eight freshmen on its men's basketball roster since 1986-87 — Jon Goodman's freshman year. The class was crowded. Tommy Amaker was a senior playing his final season as the All-American point guard. Danny Ferry was a sophomore moving toward the All-American status he would earn two years later. Quin Snyder was a sophomore guard. Billy King was a junior wing. The team had just lost the 1986 national championship game to Louisville the previous April and was about to launch what would become a string of five consecutive Final Four appearances starting the next year. Coach K's program in October 1986 was at the cusp of becoming the elite recruiting machine it became.
Jon Goodman was 5'10". The available public record does not document where he grew up, where he played his high school basketball, or how he ended up on Coach K's freshman roster — whether as a recruited deep-bench guard or as a walk-on. What the record does say is that he played in ten games as a freshman during the 1986-87 regular season, averaged two minutes a game, attempted seven field goals across the entire year and made one of them, shot 80% from the free throw line on five attempts, and turned the ball over seven times in his twenty total minutes of college basketball — a turnover every three minutes of game time, which is what happens to a freshman in mop-up minutes in the ACC. He scored six total points across his entire college basketball career. He is on the roster of one of the deepest single freshman classes Mike Krzyzewski ever carried at Duke.
At Duke
Duke's 1986-87 season was the season that proved Krzyzewski's program could win without Johnny Dawkins, Mark Alarie, Jay Bilas, David Henderson, and Weldon Williams — the five seniors who had carried the previous year's team to within three points of the national championship and had then graduated en masse. The 1986-87 team was, per the historians who have written about it most carefully, the team that demonstrated for the first time the consistency of the program Krzyzewski was building. Tommy Amaker became the inaugural National Defensive Player of the Year. The team went 24-9, won the ACC regular-season at 9-5, beat Texas in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, and lost in the Sweet Sixteen 88-82 to a Bob Knight Indiana team that would go on to win the national championship two weeks later in New Orleans.
Jon Goodman's contribution to that team, as the box score reflects it, was the work of a deep-bench freshman: ten games of game-day uniform availability, two-minute stretches of garbage time at the end of decided games, an 80% mark from the free throw line on his five attempts that suggested the foul-line shooting was the part of his game that translated cleanly to the moment. He attempted three three-pointers during the year. He made none. The 1986-87 season was the first year the NCAA had introduced the three-point line; Goodman, like every player in the country, was learning how to shoot from a line that had not existed in his entire high school career.
He was not on the basketball roster the following season. The 1987-88 Duke team that began the program's run of five consecutive Final Four appearances was a younger team with new freshmen — Clay Buckley, Joe Cook, and others — and the eight-freshman class of 1986-87 had thinned out by attrition through the standard mechanisms of college basketball: some players found playing time elsewhere, some redshirted, some moved on from the sport entirely. Jon Goodman is one of the names in that thinning. He left the basketball roster after his freshman year. He stayed, however, a Duke student. He would graduate from Duke University with the Class of 1990, alongside Crawford Palmer's class and Robert Brickey's class and the players who had come in the year after him, and he would carry the experience of one season as a Coach K freshman with him for the rest of a life that would, in time, take him a long way from Cameron Indoor Stadium.
After Duke
The shape of Jon Goodman's life after his one season on the Duke basketball roster is the shape of a Duke student who finished his undergraduate degree, went to graduate school, and built a career. After Duke, Goodman earned an MBA at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He went on to earn a graduate certificate in Writing at Stanford University, and a certificate in Private Wealth Management at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He worked his way through the financial industry — LPL Financial, Independent Financial Partners — and in 2001, a decade after his Duke graduation, he founded his own independent investment advisory firm.
JCG Advisory Partners is headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, a town of about fifty thousand people in the Gallatin Valley of southwestern Montana. The firm specializes in private wealth advisory for high-net-worth individuals, families, and foundations across the Intermountain West. Goodman is, per his firm's official bio and the Investments & Wealth Institute records, Montana's first and only Certified Private Wealth Advisor — the CPWA designation issued by the Investments & Wealth Institute that recognizes the highest level of credentialing for advisors who serve high-net-worth clients. He holds a Series 66 license. He has earned the CPWA certificate at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is, in the Investments & Wealth Institute's terms, the lone Montana resident certified at that level.
Goodman has also done what a number of successful financial advisors do once their advisory practice is mature: he has built a piece of software for the rest of the world. He is the founder of millionaireME, a personal finance app designed, in his firm's words, to help people from all walks of life reduce debt, build emergency savings, and invest toward both short- and long-term financial goals. The mission of millionaireME, in its public framing, is to take the financial coaching that JCG Advisory Partners provides to high-net-worth clients and translate it into a mobile tool for anyone who wants to build financial security on a regular salary. The app's name — millionaireME — captures the framing: the millionaire is not the high-net-worth client in someone else's office, but the user themself.
Where Is He Now
Jon Goodman lives in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife Ceci, in a household that has produced five children and two grandchildren and whose calendar is, by his firm's own public bio, organized around exploring the great outdoors together. He writes a regular firm newsletter — "Advice for the [Good] Life" — that mixes commentary on bond yields and tax policy and personal finance with the kind of voice you would expect from a wealth advisor who once earned a Stanford writing certificate. He has been profiled by the financial industry trade press as Montana's first and only Certified Private Wealth Advisor. He is, by every measurable metric, one of the most successful Duke 1990 classmates whose name will never appear on the box score of a Duke basketball game in any meaningful way.
The Brotherhood, when properly understood, runs through every Cameron freshman who ever pulled on a Duke jersey — including the ones who pulled it on for ten games of a single freshman year, who scored six total points, who finished their Duke degree as a regular undergraduate the next three years, and who built lives that would, decades later, have nothing whatsoever to do with whether they had ever made the second-tier all-conference team in college. Jon Goodman's twenty minutes of Duke basketball, spread across ten games of his freshman year on a 24-9 team that won the ACC regular season and reached the Sweet Sixteen under a senior point guard who became the inaugural National Defensive Player of the Year, taught him things that an MBA at Georgetown and a writing certificate at Stanford and a private wealth management certificate at Booth could not have taught him by themselves. He learned what it looked like to be on the deepest single freshman class Mike Krzyzewski ever carried. He learned what it looked like to be one of the bench bodies whose practice work, however limited, contributed to the next nine months of a basketball program that would, the very next season, begin five consecutive Final Four appearances. He went to graduate school, founded a firm in Montana, raised a family in the Gallatin Valley, and built a personal finance app whose name has the word millionaire in it not because of who the user is now but because of who the user is becoming. The Brotherhood, as Jon Goodman has lived it, is not the highlight reel. It is the patient four-decade build.