Who are we to get in the way of your peace and calm? Your choices are yours. Don’t let anybody “should” all over you!
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mark leibman
The Hats We Wear
How do we get from where we are to where we’d like to be? Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how we’ll close the gaps. The good thing about the big stuff is that we can only get them done one step at a time. We might wear many hats in life, but along the way… we can only wear one hat at a time. 🙏
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Focusing on What Went Right
We can put a lot of energy into studying the tape, rolling back through our missteps and mistakes. But what about what went right? What do we have going for us?
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The Best of Both Worlds: Learning from the Past, Building for the Future
This time of year often invites some reflection. We’ve said goodbye to 2024 and are welcoming 2025. We’re thinking about beginnings, endings, and transitions.
In Roman mythology, Janus is the god of these things. He had two faces, one looking forward and another looking back. His purview included doors, archways, and gates.
It feels natural at this time to take stock of where we’ve been—and think about the best way forward. That’s what we’re doing at 228 Main.
When Mark founded this enterprise decades ago, it was just him at a kitchen table. In 2000, he moved the business to the digs at 228 Main Street in beautiful downtown Louisville. He knew that he was on to something, that he could keep building something special on a simple but powerful foundation: if he took care of his clients, their business would take care of him.
And the work kept growing. In those intermediate years, he hired staff to help him manage. Among their ranks were family and friends who provided administrative and service support.
Since 2020, the staff has continued to transform. Today, the team is both more specialized and more interwoven. The three of us “next-gen” advisors are co-owners with Mark, with three portions of 24.9% of the shares to his 25.3% portion.
Now we’re in transition, preparing for the decades ahead. There are six of us total on the LFS team, each one still growing and learning. But it takes all of us to make sure our three key activities can happen: 1) We talk with you to sort out what you are trying to do in life. 2) We research investment opportunities. 3) We manage your portfolios.
As we do these things, we’re planning a structure for the enterprise that is collaborative and collegial, where every generation and every teammate puts their gifts on the table for the benefit of all: the wisdom of experience, the energy of youth, and all the diversity of talents and interests we bring.
Many of you know from company lore—and your friendships with Mark—that he intends to work to age 92. (It’s a whole thing for him, a vision that he gleaned from some important mentors early in life. Ask him sometime.) We can’t know the future. And some of us may actually have more years ahead of us in this line of work than there are behind us.
But it’s fair to say that we are all indeed in this for the long haul. So how do we make this thing more sustainable?
We’re all committed to some important things: continuing to build on our strengths and what’s working and staying open to the future and all the opportunities ahead. We learn and grow from both perspectives.
Like the Roman god Janus, we’re looking back and we’re looking forward. Working with the foundation of our history and the road ahead—that’s the superpower of this team.
Want to talk about this or anything else? Call or write, anytime.
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Play the audio version of this post below:
Best of Both Worlds – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services
This text is available at https://www.228Main.com/.
Actions Speak Louder?
In business, it is popular to claim that one is “client-centered,” that the focus is on the clients. Well, we should hope that any service would be client-centered!
So what exactly does that mean to us?
I’ve often said that our only business objective is to grow your buckets. When you do well, we do well. We talk about that a lot, along with the importance of the long view.
So a few years back, when your individual successes began to add up to success for our firm, our costs began to go down. With the savings, we reduced the fees for our loyal clients.
We put in a discount for those with five years’ tenure, and another for fifteen years.
We reviewed these discounts recently, and they spread across the more than 50% of portfolios that have been with us more than fifteen years and the 25% more that have notched at least five years.
It is gratifying to enjoy such loyalty! And it’s also a celebration of the long time horizon that effective investing requires. The effects of compounding have a much greater impact over the long term, too—maybe you’ve noticed?
Many of you have heard me say I plan to work to age 92. But is it work, to talk all day with people I like about stuff I am interested in? It does not seem that way to me. It is an honor to have worked with so many of you for so many years. And it gets easier for me, the bigger and more capable our team here at 228 Main.
Some companies spend their time and money and energy chasing prospective customers. We’re doing very well by striving to grow the ones we already have—and we think that makes things more pleasant for you, too.
Those dollars in fee savings could not be going to nicer folks, in my view. Thank you all, for everything.
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Play the audio version of this post below:
Actions Speak Louder? – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services
This text is available at https://www.228Main.com/.
Thirty Years—and Counting
50 years ago, I was finishing my first semester of college at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
40 years ago, I became registered to work with investment products.
30 years ago, I affiliated with LPL Financial—December 1994.
That connection was the seed that sprouted into the business you see today, Leibman Financial Services at 228Main.com, online and on Main. We are an SEC-registered Investment Advisor, LPL still custodies client assets and provides services, and I remain a registered representative of LPL.
We might not be here today if not for two features of our relationship with LPL. The first is the spirit of independence, the freedom to build our business to fit our vision—not theirs.
The second is the unwavering support through the years for the voice of the advisor in digital media.
For a while in the middle, the health of my high school sweetheart became an existential crisis. I needed the business for the health insurance and resources to keep her alive. But her care required so much of my time that I could not communicate one-on-one with our clients, as I had before, in the volumes needed to maintain relationships.
That LPL Financial supported our voice in 21st century communications made all the difference. Email newsletters, blog posts, videos, social media—with these, we could talk with all of our clients at once.
Cathy Livingston Leibman fought for years after diagnosis, saw children marry and grandbabies born, before she passed. And I learned, in the daily triage of life, how to focus on the essentials like never before.
The business thrived in the face of adversity, becoming too large for me to operate by myself. So we transformed the investment advisory work into an enterprise, collaboratively owned and managed by three next-gen family members and me. We are now better built for the decades ahead.
And I have more time than ever to talk with you.
We have choices in our affiliations. The choice I made thirty years ago has stood up, and I hope it always will. In a time when allegiances are bought and sold, and short-term profit drives a lot of business decision-making, playing the long game is a competitive advantage.
Clients, that’s how we work with you, that is how we conduct our own affairs, that is why we are marking this 30th anniversary.
Thank you all, for everything.
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Play the audio version of this post below:
30 Years—and Counting – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services
This text is available at https://www.228Main.com/.
Sorting Out Probabilities
Many domains in life require us to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. It’s possible to act even when the outlook requires a hearty dose of hope about better times ahead. Sometimes we can only see as far as the headlights reach—but you can make the whole trip that way. 🙏
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Compare and Despair?
By Caitie Leibman, Director of Communications
It’s said that comparison is the thief of joy. The grass is always greener, the Joneses are doing better, and no one else seems to have blemishes in their highlight reel.
This might feel like a modern problem, with how easy it is to fall into a cycle of “compare and despair” in this age of social media. But comparing ourselves to others is a very human tendency. Any strong group may feature some healthy competitiveness, for example.
But comparison becomes a problem when we forget to add some context back in. On LinkedIn, for example, we aren’t just seeing what our peers are up to on an average Tuesday: we’re also being fed content from the champions of every industry, as they chalk up lifetime achievements in real time!
What’s the antidote to the cycle of compare and despair? I sometimes daydream about deleting all my accounts, finding a nice quiet cave to hide in for a few months. (It’s not gonna happen, and it wouldn’t help anyway.)
Instead, we can just keep at it. That is, our version of “it.” Our work, our mission, bringing our attention back to whatever is happening in our lane. And research backs this approach.
“Keep your eyes on your own work,” psychologist Susan David reminds us in her book Emotional Agility. Maybe we heard this line a time or two in our school days, when teachers were on the lookout for cheating. While life is not a test, and there are no grades, this mantra might still do us some good.
Keeping our eyes on our own work might mean keeping ourselves at the center of our choices. When people give advice, it’s often in the form of, “Well, if I were you…” But they’re not you! You don’t need to know what others would do. They’re not in your shoes. You’re trying to find a way to figure out what you might do.
Comparison can spread doubt and add unhelpful pressure. We’re not trying to become that shiny person we saw on LinkedIn or even to become the friend with advice who is just trying to be helpful. That approach would be miserable. Susan David says this would lead us to become a “striving, lesser version of someone else.”
Instead, we can lean in to becoming even more of ourselves. This journey is not a race you can lose—because it’s not a race. Just keep your eyes on your own work. We’ll try to do the same.
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Play the audio version of this post below:
Compare and Despair? – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services
This text is available at https://www.228Main.com/.
Plenty To Be Thankful For
Won’t you join me? I’m getting in the spirit! A little personal reflection for this fine holiday week.
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Some Tricks for Treating Yourself
Our brains are so good at getting used to things that they will keep chasing new pleasures, new experiences, and the next thing to bring us a boost. But research shows there’s more bang for our buck by treating ourselves more frequently, in smaller doses—and our wallets might thank us.
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