This operation at 228Main.com has not been a one-man band in many, many years. We’re working on making this enterprise more durable, more sustainable—to better serve you for the years and decades to come.
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Clients, looking back over these decades together, the word “collaboration” is what comes to mind for me. I have worked with some of your households for years, and I am most proud of what you and we have created together. Successful investing requires effective attitudes and intentional actions with money. You, the best clients in the world, have been stellar partners in this regard. It has truly been a team effort.
But I’m realizing that “collaboration” will have even more meaning for our work in the years and decades ahead. The success we’ve enjoyed together has resulted in an enterprise that is now beyond my ability to run by myself (and not that I would want to—to my estimation, the gang and I seem to be having a pretty good time together!).
Greg Leibman became an integral part of the effort a long time ago; Caitie Leibman and Billy Garver bring us perspectives and skills we formerly lacked and now rely on.
Two of our core activities are investment research and portfolio management. With the increasing wealth you’ve brought to us, these activities are more important than ever. Our capacity to do them depends on the team we’ve assembled. It’s a collaboration that’s become vital to our daily work.
Even as we conduct our work as a team, however, I remain the regulatory head: as an Investment Advisor Representative of LPL Financial, I am the business structure. The others, on paper, are technically assistants working under my direction.
This regulatory structure is a vestige of the days when this was a one-person operation, and it no longer aligns with what we’re trying to do here. So, for the rest of the year, we plan to work toward restructuring our firm as a Registered Investment Advisor: this arrangement should more clearly reflect how we can best serve you in the years and decades ahead.
Friends, you know about my intention to work to age 92, and that is still the case. But I also believe that part of my responsibility to you is to help shape an enterprise that can outlast me. The mortality rate remains 100%, so sustainability is the watchword here.
A team format—four officers, working collaboratively—gives this entity some of the durability it deserves. Fortunately, LPL Financial has developed plans and processes for this exact scenario, which is not unique to us. I’ve not lost my sense of gratitude for what LPL Financial has meant to my family and me; your funds will continue to be custodied with them. Account numbers and history and online access and statements and all that will remain essentially unchanged.
There will be just a bit of paperwork to transition each account. Details will follow as we learn more.
It will take the balance of this year for us to continue this work and implement the new structure. Clients, we will be in touch with more detail about this journey as it unfolds—and we are excited to get things more aligned with the big picture.
Please email us or call with questions or comments. Thank you all again, for everything.
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The team at 228Main.com is growing! You might get to see a new face or hear a new voice, courtesy of our partners at LPL. Let me introduce our latest client services teammate.
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One of the blessings of our enterprise is the way it grows, by word of mouth. One friend helps another by introducing them to us, or putting them on our email newsletter list, or forwarding a blog post. When we focus on growing your buckets and meeting your needs, our needs get met.
Growth brings challenges, of course. We have staffed up from time to time in recent years to continue taking care of the business. Now we are embarking on a new and more flexible arrangement. A few benefits to our latest expansion:
With that in mind, we want to welcome the newest member of our team. Whitney Engle comes to us by way of LPL Financial’s Administrative Solutions program. She is a full-time LPL employee, well-versed in all the systems and processes. She now works with us from afar, though the distance is no obstacle. Phones and email help bring us together; it’s one thing I learned with all of you in the last chapter of life.
I believe the core activities of our enterprise are investment research, portfolio management, and talking to you. But nothing happens until the details are handled, and they are crucial. So Whitney is joining a client services team—along with Patsy Havenridge and Larry Wiederspan—that plays a vital role.
We’re grateful for Larry’s long service; hard to believe it goes back eight years! And Patsy, four years in, has been a joy to have in the shop. With Whitney’s help, we are better equipped than ever to take care of business.
Whitney will assist us with paperwork and logistics: it’s the work we may need to create new accounts, monitor requests, interface with mutual fund companies, guide us through home office processes, and help with a variety of other tasks.
When she’s not hard at work, Whitney tells us she enjoys spending time with her two boys, taking care of a menagerie of animals at home, and cruising the country roads on a skateboard.
Another friendly face joins the team, and we are glad to have access to a talent like Whitney through our partners at LPL. We’re looking forward to an arrangement that’s good for you and good for us. For the months and years ahead, staffing is key to helping us help you. So we’d like to offer a hearty welcome to Whitney!
Clients, when we need to chat about anything, be sure to reach out—anytime.
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We talk plenty around here about change, pain, and loss. They are a given in many activities, including owning a business, living, and having a human body.
Navigating pain, however, is easier when we’ve got some perspective about where we are. If we can understand more about the terrain, it’s clearer when we should be concerned versus when we should try to carry on.
Is this pain just “part of it”?
When a toddler is achy and crying during a growth spurt, parents have a chance to reflect that the screaming is just—to an extent—part of it. The kid doesn’t grow without some stretching and aching.
Is it “to-be-expected” pain?
Bending down to lace up new running shoes isn’t too bad. That first mile? Ouch. Some people feel the burn in their muscles and immediately interpret the signal as, “I guess I’m just not a runner.”
This is not a useful interpretation, given that the exercise is new terrain. Take some time to navigate it, and recalibrate: which pain and how much pain is to be expected for a new runner?
Is it acceptable?
This question is a little trickier. Only you know what you can stand or what you can choose to stand. We suspect you can handle quite a lot, but “tolerable” is relative.
Mean-spirited or toxic pain inflicted on our fellow humans? Not acceptable.
A growing pain? The pain of a shock? Maybe we’ve got a chance to understand it better—and respond rather than react.
Clients, we don’t know it all, but we’re happy to provide perspective where we can and try to understand where you are. Call or write.
If you’ve been following along, you know my intent to work to age 92 dates a long way back. Therefore, I wanted a practice that would last that long.
The more we thought about sustainability, the more we realized that mere survival to a certain point in time was not fair to you—nor a sound plan for us. So the goal became building an enterprise that could thrive for decades.
If we automate everything that works better when automated and get human understudies for all the remaining activities, the organization will be more durable. It will work more smoothly day to day, and it will be more likely to last for the years and decades ahead.
The next phase is falling into place. Caitie Leibman has joined the team full-time as Director of Communications. We foresee three main benefits:
These last several years we’ve used digital communications to stay close when personal circumstances turned time and geography into challenges. The digital presence we built proved to be far more valuable to you and to us than we dreamed; it makes sense for Caitie to become involved in the enterprise in this area first.
I’ll still be writing, of course. Caitie, with her degrees and experiences in writing and a firm grasp of the philosophy of our family firm, will be a major resource.
Clients, if you would like to talk about this, or anything else, please email us or call.
I spend most of my days working with you or for you on your investments and planning. A few days each year are spent at seminars and conferences, working to get better at working with you or for you.
It is great to find a new perspective or idea or tool that helps us with our work, especially delivered by an inspired and inspiring speaker. But sometimes things we see and hear are just not a good fit for our values and philosophies. The last seminar I attended had much that was helpful.
But the part that was not helpful was interesting. Reflecting on it, it had to do with a mismatch in philosophy.
One of the speakers was a consultant for a coaching outfit, one that works with financial advisors to help them grow their businesses. After the preliminaries, he began his presentation by asking attendees to visualize how much money they wanted to make, three years down the road, encouraging our ambitions. And then, write that number down in the notebook provided. Next, how many millions in client assets did we want, three years hence? Write that down.
Thinking about the future and setting goals is a familiar and valuable exercise. But it was what came next that made me think of The Gong Show.
(One of the first reality TV talent shows, The Gong Show featured amateur acts appearing before a panel of celebrity judges. A judge could end an audition by striking a loud gong.)
The next topic after the money exercise was about the importance of being client-focused. Before many words were said about how vital it is to be centered on clients, I heard the gong in my head and thought, “Too late. You already established that you are focused on money, not clients.”
We concluded long ago that the better off you are, the better off we are likely to be, down the road. So when I walk in the door of 228 Main each morning I think, “What can we do to grow the buckets?” Of course, that’s not the only thing. We also work on helping you use your resources in your real life, to spend well. It is all part of being better off. Our business objective is to improve your outcomes.
The better off you are, the better off we are likely to be. My income is a byproduct of how well or poorly we help you become better off. That fits the definition of client focus a lot more closely than having your results be a leftover effect of how much money I want to make.
There were other things in that seminar presentation that struck me as off, but if I had a gong I would not have heard them.
Clients, if you would like to talk about this or anything else, please email us or call.
The New Year is upon us. Like Opening Day of baseball season, the first day of school, or any other beginning, it is a good time for plans and planning.
We’ve been able to focus on strategic issues in recent weeks, ones that will shape our work for you in the years to come. The general theme? Build an enterprise that will serve you well, and be durable enough to outlive me.
While we work ON the business, of course, we also need to work IN the business, taking care of things for you. Fortunately, we know exactly what the stock market and the economy are going to do: go up and down, same as always. Time tested principles and strategies will always be the foundation of our work with you. They do not eliminate the ups and downs, but they improve the odds we will survive them and come out on the other side.
The items on our list are wide ranging. The more significant ones: finding and developing more good people to join the team, figuring out office space, determining whether we need to form our own Registered Investment Advisor, guiding the evolution of our offerings, and building a more robust financial planning process.
But enough about us. What about your strategic issues? If you want to talk about retirement, changing where you live, sorting out who should get what after you are gone, or simply where to invest for the long run, email us or call.
We experience life as a series of moments. The future approaches, then becomes the present for a moment, and passes into history.
The dawn of the third decade of the 21st century is upon us; the current decade is nearly history. The moments we had!
In the first days of 2010, my wife Cathy flew to Florida to furnish and outfit a newly purchased condo; I joined her after a couple weeks. We began our life as snowbirds, skipping some cold weather weeks in Nebraska. (Planning to work to age 92, we had to figure out how to have some fun along the way.)
Our Office Manager Greg Leibman agreed to help in the office here at 228 Main during my absence, January 2010. It did not take long for me to get a glimmer of the potential of that association for the business.
Our planning, disruptions, and adaptations led to surprising growth and development. We focused more tightly on investment advisory business, performed under the auspices of LPL Financial’s RIA (registered investment advisor). That side of the business now accounts for over 70% of assets, $70 million now. That structure elevates our desire to serve your best interests to a binding obligation upon us, the way we like it.
The family health challenges we worked with for most of the decade brought us to a revolution in communications, forced me to learn how to delegate effectively and figure out how to build a team to serve you. The lesson I learned from my life with Cathy, make the most of what you have, enabled us to keep things running so we had the health insurance and resources she needed in her illness.
We had more than full measures of pain and joy in the decade. That is what life is made of.
And now a new decade looms. We hope to be able to make an interesting report to you about it, ten years hence.
Clients, if you would like to talk about this or anything else, please email us or call.
We have been reading the work of the late Donald Clifton of the Gallup Organization recently. The idea of working from your strengths was central to his work. As we think about building the optimal kind of organization to help you make the most of your position, what kind of strengths do we need?
In collaborative work such as ours with you, a deep relationship of mutual trust is a most useful foundation. This is the hallmark of what Clifton calls the Relator strength, or theme. Rather than meet many strangers, hoping to find some that might do business, the Relator seeks close relationships with those they know. We invest our time in communicating with you and working on your business, not hunting strangers to turn into clients.
The Strategic strength enables people to sort through the clutter to find the best path forward, to see patterns where others see complexity. Thinking about your goals in the context of the investment universe, and whole range of financial planning tactics, this skill might be mandatory.
The Focus strength gives people the ability to concentrate on goals, set a course, and stay on track. That is a good description of what we are trying to do here at 228 Main. The Achiever strength helps get things done, stay productive, and work effectively.
In the dynamic world we live in, change is constant. Technology advances, the economy and markets go through their cycles, and tax law changes. The Learner strength is how people adapt and thrive as the world evolves.
One of the blessings of the challenges we’ve faced: we had to figure out how to delegate, how to depend on a team approach, how to work together to get you what you need. We are striving to build a diverse team where each member works from their strengths, happily and effectively, to take care of business for you.
Clients, if you would like to talk about this or anything else, please email us or call.
Content in this material is for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
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