THE PERSON BEHIND DIXON DAVIS
The planner you'll actually be working with.
I'm Mark Lotocky, the CPA and CFP behind Dixon Davis. If you're going to trust someone with the biggest financial decisions of your life, you deserve to know what drives the person on the other side of the table. Here's the short version.
I decided early who I didn't want to be
The summer before university, I sat down with a recruiter at a bank, which to my teenage self was the very height of financial wisdom. He told me I couldn't start without a year of school behind me, then added, cheerfully, that it didn't really matter: I was "a charming young guy" who could "convince all the old ladies out of their money."
Nearly everything I've built since traces back to that one decision. (A few years later, a rep at a financial firm explained that my first month would be cold-calling strangers to drum up commissions. Same answer: not for me.)
That night, I switched my major. I wanted to empower people, not sell to them.
Why I left accounting to look forward
I earned my CPA and spent years at accounting firms around Victoria. The work paid well and it challenged me, but it always faced backward: last year's return, the missing three dollars, the past.
Then one afternoon a successful business owner walked out of our meeting room in tears, quietly took her coat off the rack, and left without a word. She had just learned she owed more than $400,000 in tax, with nothing in the bank to cover it. She sold her house, closed her business, and moved off the island. Her life was upended by planning that simply never happened.
I asked one of the partners whether we could do more: actually look ahead for people, and help them avoid exactly this. The answer was, "We're accountants. We don't do that kind of thing."
I wasn't there much longer. If nobody's job was to look forward for people, I decided I would make it mine.
What that means for you
Everything about how I work traces back to those two moments:
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Nothing to sell you. No products, no commissions. You pay a flat fee for honest advice, and the advice answers to you.
Always looking forward. A chartered accountant's rigor, pointed at the decisions ahead of you rather than the receipts behind you.
On your side. The entire point is to empower you, never to profit at your expense.
The credentials, briefly
A CPA and a CFP: a chartered accountant and a certified financial planner in one person. That combination matters more than it sounds, because a good retirement is, underneath it all, a tax problem. Having the person who builds your plan also be the person who understands the tax is the closest thing there is to a final checkmark.
Proud of our Legacy
Dixon Davis has helped Victorians plan since 1988. I trained under the founders, Howard Dixon and Lenore Davis, before taking the practice on and carrying it forward to the same standard they set. Their names are still the name over the door.
The long version
This is the short of it. The full story, from a bookshelf of '90s finance classics and a well-worn copy of The Wealthy Barber, through a couple of detours I didn't expect, to why I plan the way I do, lives on my Substack. (Coming soon.)