Good morning, happy Monday & happy Labor Day!
You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
C. S. Lewis, author
This month marks the start of my 25th year in the financial services industry. With today being Labor Day I thought it might be fun to do a quick recap of my career and provide some groundwork for some upcoming Monday morning memos.
When I was 18 years old, I was working at Dairy Queen, attending Polk Community College, and praying that God would show me my next career path. A week or so later a bank manager came through the DQ drive thru and said I provided excellent customer service and she would like me to come interview with her at the bank … talk about a quick answer to prayer 😊. (I’m still close friends with the Dairy Queen owners … not sure they love the solicitation of their employees through the drive thru, but so the story goes 😉.)
Well, I showed up to the interview at the bank in a short sleeve dress shirt, a tie that my parents had to help me figure out how to tie and the closest thing I had to dress shoes and did my best to present myself confidently as I could. As the saying goes, the rest is history.
I started as a teller at First Union National Bank (now Wells Fargo) on September 9, 1998. I was paying my own way through college with that job at around $8/hour and purchased a home for $23,000 the next year (I think my mortgage payment was like $278/month). By my senior year of college I was a licensed Financial Specialist at the ripe age of 21. I worked at the bank for nearly 10 years (ages 18-28) and then partnered with Northwestern Mutual for nearly 13 years (ages 28-41). I am now about a year and half into being the owner of Intentional Wealth which has been a blessing beyond belief. As I was look back on my career thus far I am so grateful and have learned so much. One of my life’s objectives is to never stop growing, never stop learning. There are so many lessons that I have learned along this nearly quarter of a century of a career, and I know there is still so much more to learn. To me, that’s exceptionally exciting 😊.
In my multi-decade career I have watched clients do amazing things, and I have watched clients do disastrous things. I’ve witnessed incredible accomplishments, and heartbreaking defeats. In my office there have been tears of joy and tears of grief. I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly. One of the advantages my line of work provides is I am able to learn lessons through other people’s action. As a 20 something year old I could observe a successful 65-year-old and learn what made him/her successful. Likewise, there were lots of lessons to learn from people who stumbled, lessons of what not to do.
I was discussing retirement with my wife recently and she started laughing. She stated something along the lines of “you will never retire … if you were home all day long without something to do you would drive me crazy.” She is right, as usual. I love what do, this is more of a passion than a career. Lord willing, I’m about at the 1/3rd mark of my career. As Marc Anthony stated, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” That’s me 😊.
In the weeks to come I will seek to impart some of the lessons I have learned during my journey thus far. Every week in the months of September and October my intention is to use these Monday morning memos to share one major lesson I have learned.
None of these lessons will be rocket science or brain surgery, but rather simple observations that have impacted me and I hope you will find impactful as well.
Hope you have a wonderful Labor Day and I look forward to continuing to work with you to help you accomplish your financial goals.