Twenty-five Years and Counting!

Forward-looking. Forward-thinking.

That’s how I view the work I do for clients. My role is to help identify opportunities and challenges, as well as anticipate what they will need to successfully reach their personal goals.

In my role as a trusted advisor and confidant, I am often their main accountability partner. One of the duties as I see it is to force them to take a step back from life and reflect on what they’ve accomplished so far. For high achieving, hardworking people that can be tough to just stop for a few minutes and reflect on all the good -and sometimes the bad- that has happened along the way. And then express gratitude for those experiences, milestones, and achievements.

October 13th is always a day of reflection and gratitude for me. God gave me the opportunity to become a financial advisor. Why do I say that? My story is too circuitous to be anything but guided by divine intervention. The people and events -both good and bad- that transpired helped shape me as a person and propelled me into a career I couldn’t have dreamed of all on my own. And while I’d been inconsistent in my ability to recognize when He was trying to help me over the years, this time I was actually listening. I had been asking for His help and guidance with furthering a career I loved, but I was struggling to see my future and was unsure of how to get out of the toxic circumstances I found myself in at the time. And boy did He deliver!

My reflections on my career this year was heavily sprinkled with irony. My wife, Ann, and I were driving home from Chicago on October 13. She had just achieved a personal milestone of finishing her very first marathon the day before. Despite her great personal achievement, she reminded me of my own milestone of hitting the twenty-five year mark as a business owner and as an independent financial advisor.

The irony for me is tied to successive days involving the term “marathon.” Marathon was the description a seasoned advisor once gave me related to the career path of a financial advisor. He was talking to me as an intern, recently turned financial advisor. I was about two weeks into wondering what I’d gotten myself into and how on earth I’d be able to make enough money to pay off my student loans. But while his name escapes me to this day, the message he delivered that day did not, “Craig this business is a marathon… not a sprint. You’ve got to treat people well and look out for them. Look out for their families. The rest will take care of itself. If you start focusing too much on what you are making and lose focus on helping solve their financial problems, you are going to have problems yourself. Don’t be the guy who takes short cuts to make a sale. The real money is helping people over the long term. If you’ll be loyal to them at the start of the race, they’ll carry you all the way to the finish line.“

It’s been almost 30 years since I heard that pep talk which he probably gave to dozens and dozens of new advisors during his career. As someone in their sixties who had seen and done it all he could speak with some conviction and authority. But he was the right messenger. And I was just smart enough in my early twenties to listen and heed that advice. Advice that has served me very well especially when God intervened again and sent me down the path to independence. I’m very grateful to God and to my wife. Both believed in me and cheered me on all the way to today. I hope they will continue to be in my corner as I can hardly wait to see what the next 25 years will bring! I’m looking forward. I’m thinking forward.