Craig is President of Agate Financial Services and though owning his business for over 10 years, has been a LPL Financial Advisor with LPL Financial since November 2017. 

Craig is a family man, married to his wife Clarissa Ellis-Prudhomme since 1982, and has helped raise two adult children, Cameron and Chenie, in the Sandstone area of East Central Minnesota.  As a family, they have travelled across the world and love visiting nature and wildlife areas, as well as studying history and meeting the local inhabitants.

Craig received his bachelor’s degree in biology with a concentration in Outdoor Education from Northland College in Wisconsin. His formal education led him to a 26-year position as a Naturalist and Associate Director at the Audubon Center of the North Woods (Sandstone, MN). Craig enjoyed helping students and teachers determine their goals and helping them devise a plan to pursue those goals. During this time, Craig also achieved his master’s of Education degree from the University of Minnesota – Duluth.

A downturn in college enrollment meant cuts to the college programs at the center and Craig’s position.  Looking for a new career that would build off his people and goals-planning skills and passions, Craig was offered a position to take over the Investment Centers office in Moose Lake.  It was his years of experience with deep and long term educational experiences and relationships that helped him transition easily into a second career as a Financial Advisor. Now he educates his clients on life planning and helps them pull together the appropriate financial tools to make their futures a reality.

Craig is most passionate about helping clients identify their most important values and goals in life. He collects the financial “facts” in a Life Planning Guide that help him bring together a plan.  Only then does he consider the best financial products to support the plan. When these products are aligned with a plan that is built off of financial facts, the client increases the probability of success.  After that, it is the regular meetings that help Craig steer the clients to course corrections as financial storms happen and goals change.  The most important challenge is keeping the client focused and accountable to their plan in a complex world of distractions and volatile economic news.  (See more detail on this in Help Us Help You tab)

Always committed to continueing education. He attends regular meetings to learn about new and changing financial products he can bring to bear for his clients.

Craig is very involved in his community, having served on the Sandstone Community Ed advisory board, the Banning State Park citizen advisory board, the Grindstone Lake Lakeshore Association, and more recently, on the boards of the Kiwanis Club of Moose Lake and the Moose Lake Area Chamber of Commerce. 

An avid outdoorsman, Craig enjoys any outdoor activity that gives him exercise while he explores:  backpacking, camping, sailing, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, nature photography, and birdwatching. Craig is also interested in land management and restoration, and with his wife has worked to restore native forest types, wild prairie and wetlands on lands they have managed are now looking to create a lively nature preserve on their new property.