I have developed a peculiar aversion to headlines like “How I Built a Billion-Dollar Advisory Firm.”
There seems to be an endless number of them.
I understand why. Growth is easy to measure. Assets under management. Revenue. Employees. Offices. Acquisitions. These are useful numbers, and I’ve spent much of my career paying attention to them.
I’ve also spent a fair amount of time comparing myself to the people who write those articles.
Some have built much larger firms. Some started later and got there faster. Others seem to have followed a much straighter path.
I sometimes wonder whether I took a wrong turn somewhere.
I’ve rebuilt my business several times. Rebuilding is expensive. Financially, certainly, but also in time and energy. There were periods when it would have been far easier to stay put and keep adding to what I already had.
I didn’t.
And here is the part those headlines never mention.
Each time, the business I was leaving was working. Not failing. Working. Clients were being served. Revenue was fine. From the outside, there was nothing to fix.
But something wasn’t right, and I couldn’t name it.
It showed up as resistance. Not a crisis. The old way simply took more energy. Decisions that once felt obvious got harder. Things I had tolerated for years started to bother me. The way I was working had drifted from the reason I started, and I had no clear idea how to fix it, because on paper there was no problem.
That may be the most uncomfortable place to stand in business. Failure at least gives you permission to change. Success that no longer fits gives you nothing but a feeling.
There is a scene in Jerry Maguire that captures it. I revisited it recently.
Jerry is a successful sports agent at a large agency. He’s making money, representing important athletes, and doing everything the business rewards. Then one night he can’t sleep. He sits up and writes a mission statement. Fewer clients. More attention. More care.
His colleagues applaud.
Then he gets fired.
You probably remember the line about fewer clients and less money. What I remember is that he couldn’t stop himself. Something had been bothering him for a long time, and that night he wrote it down. He didn’t have a plan. He only knew he couldn’t keep working the old way.
I know that feeling.
For a long time my instinct was to push harder. Work longer. Add a person. Build another system. Set a bigger goal. But more effort applied to the wrong structure doesn’t produce a better business. It produces a more tired owner.
Eventually I had to ask a simpler question.
What is all this for?
When I answered it honestly, I found I was usually trying to solve a problem that wasn’t primarily financial.
I wanted more freedom in how I worked.
I wanted time to spend with clients.
I wanted to do work I was proud of, alongside people I respected.
None of those things appears on an industry ranking.
That’s the trouble with keeping score. Comparison is seductive because the score is always available. Someone has more assets. Someone earned more. Someone sold for a larger multiple. Another milestone is always around the corner, and someone has already reached it.
Contribution is harder to measure.
Did I help someone make a decision that materially improved their life?
Did we find a possibility they hadn’t considered?
Did a complicated problem get the attention it deserved?
Those are different measures. And they don’t make headlines.
I still have ambition. I want the firm to grow, to be financially strong, and to serve clients for many years. Financial strength is what buys the independence to do good work.
But the numbers need to serve something.
I suspect the same is true for most of the people I work with.
We all keep some kind of scorecard. Net worth. Portfolio returns. A retirement date. Those numbers matter, and I spend my days helping people build and protect them.
But on their own, they are a poor measure of a life.
And if you’ve ever felt that same resistance, a life that looks fine on paper and still doesn’t quite fit, the answer probably isn’t a bigger number.
Last month I asked how you want to allocate your wealth. That was a question about capital.
This month I’d ask a larger one.
What do you want your life to have contributed?
The questions I ask of my own work may be a place to start. Who did you help? What did you make possible for someone else? What got better because you were there?
I don’t think anyone answers that in one sitting. I’m still working on my own.
But it might be worth carrying with you this month, especially when the people who make up so much of that answer are gathered around the same table.
Cheers!
David
