All-University Recipients
Alumna of the Year Award
RHONA E. VOGEL, BUS AD '76
Brookfield, Wis.
Rhona was one of just a handful of female accounting students in her class. Today, she’s CEO of Vogel Consulting Group, the independent multi-family office she founded more than 20 years ago. Rhona advises high net worth families, providing expert investment, tax, estate planning and business consulting advice.
For her self-motivated rise to the top of her profession and ongoing commitment to serving her alma mater, she has been named Marquette University’s 2014 Alumna of the Year.
Rhona is a member of Marquette’s Board of Trustees, as well as a member of the College of Business Administration’s alumni leadership board.
“Marquette is an organization that focuses on giving, and giving back, and instills that in everybody,” she says. “Whether they’re a business school grad or a law school grad or virtually anywhere on campus, it’s part of the fabric of the university.”
Rhona is driven by her desire to help clients reach their goals.
“Many of our families have deep philanthropic commitments, they have real visions of making the world a better place and really wanting to accomplish particular goals and objectives, both from a business standpoint and from a philanthropic standpoint,” she says. “It’s exciting, it’s interesting, it’s challenging to be a part of that process.”
After interning with the Internal Revenue Service as a student, an experience that gave her a unique appreciation for an oft-maligned agency — “I don’t always agree with their position, but they truly believe in what they’re doing,” she says — Rhona went to Arthur Andersen, where she became one of the firm’s first female tax partners in 1987. Rhona later saw an unfulfilled need in the industry. So she founded her own business in 1993, offering integrated family office services.
“When I graduated from Marquette, there were 60-something accounting grads in my group and I think there were six women,” she says. “So it was a very different environment than it is today, and I’m very pleased to see that it’s changed as much as it has.”
And although the bottom line is important, Rhona strives to run her business according to principles she came to appreciate at Marquette.
“I am focused on operating everything I do in an ethical, positive way, looking at the other person’s perspective,” she says. “The world doesn’t revolve around us or our own individual needs. It’s a much bigger place. It’s not about us.”
