{"id":1300,"date":"2015-02-26T01:06:39","date_gmt":"2015-02-26T06:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1300"},"modified":"2018-12-24T01:05:08","modified_gmt":"2018-12-24T06:05:08","slug":"notes-on-the-investor-education-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1300","title":{"rendered":"Notes on the Investor Education Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s buried in the blogroll on the sidebar, but for a few years now I’ve offered consultation services for personal finance\/investing matters over at Robertson Investment Services<\/a>. I mention this now because of this recent article pointing that out<\/a>, yet people landing here might not see that little wee link and be confused as to how I made it into that list. So hello and welcome — that is a thing that I do.<\/p>\n

Deciding what to call my particular services was a bit of a challenge — I’m not a licensed salesperson or CFP, and I don’t really do a whole lot of detailed planning. “Coaching” kind of fits, but I have not aimed to get recurring coaching clients — I’ve specialized in a niche of helping people become <\/em>do-it-yourself investors. Most of my clients just need one or two sessions to bounce some ideas off someone who’s well-read on the subject, trouble-shoot some nitty-gritty issues, and get over the hurdles of brokerage systems and spreadsheets to fly on their own. Given that I started as I was finishing my doctorate and had a long series of conversations on the meaning of that (to teach<\/em><\/a>), I settled on “educator” and named the business accordingly1<\/sup>. <\/p>\n

After working with a few clients over the years I thought I had figured out some of the most common issues and barriers, and set out to address those in the Value of Simple<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I was conversing with Ellen Roseman<\/a> about it back in November, and said that I had hopefully made myself obsolete with the book — with only a few exceptions, most of my clients’ concerns have focused on the material in there. Ellen had a great response: “In my view, you never get obsolete if you offer a valuable service people don’t get elsewhere<\/em>.” I figured I could help more people with a book hitting a wide audience than sitting down with people one at a time — I actually expected client flow to stop after the book came out as it could answer so many of these common issues; instead I’ve had more <\/em>queries (the rest of you probably saw that coming). <\/p>\n

I don’t push the service much — as you may be able to tell by the link being buried below the fold on the sidebar. Somehow enough clients find me to keep me reasonably busy. Of course, I actually have a day job and a family, so an investor education side business that keeps me reasonably busy is not nearly as bustling as for someone who does it full time. <\/p>\n

Update<\/b>: A few years after this post, I launched an online course teaching people how to invest<\/a>, and have gotten a lot closer to making myself obsolete as an investment educator\/coach.<\/p>\n


\n1. “Portfolio Doctor” was an awfully tempting runner-up.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s buried in the blogroll on the sidebar, but for a few years now I’ve offered consultation services for personal finance\/investing matters over at Robertson Investment Services. I mention this now because of this recent article pointing that out, yet people landing here might not see that little wee link and be confused as to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1300"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2151,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300\/revisions\/2151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}