The firm I would have wanted for my friend

For years, a friend of mine kept asking me the same question. Should I sell my company? And every time, I told him the same thing. Not yet.

You're not ready. Then one day, over lunch, he asked me again. And this time, something was different.

It wasn't the money. It was him. He was ready.

This is A Considerate Retirement. I'm Josh Mangoubi. Today I want to tell you how my firm started.

Because it wasn't a plan. It was that lunch, and what came after. Here's the idea I want you to carry out of this one.

Retirement is not really a financial event. It's a human one. The money is the easy part.

The person is the hard part. And almost everyone gets that backwards. Let me back up, because I did not grow up planning to manage anyone's money.

I grew up in a computer store. My dad ran one of the first computer shops in the country, back when an Apple was something you still had to explain to people. And I remember a man coming in one Saturday, set on buying the most expensive machine we sold.

My dad spent the better part of an hour talking him out of it. The expensive one was more than he needed. Next year's model would be faster and cost less anyway.

The man left having spent less than he walked in planning to. And he came back for years. That was the family business.

We didn't sell people what they asked for. We tried to figure out the problem they actually had, and solve that one. And we put them before ourselves.

I didn't have a word for it then. Years later I learned the industry's word for that last part. Fiduciary.

But I'd learned the thing itself long before I learned the name. But here's what I didn't expect about my own career. I didn't become anyone's advisor for a long time.

First, I spent the better part of two decades managing big money. Pensions, endowments, family offices, the retirement savings of people I would never meet. My two partners had already made their names before we started.

One had been named Morningstar's Fund Manager of the Year. The other had been CEO of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and of Wells Fargo Nikko, one of the largest institutional money managers in the world. The work itself was quieter than most people imagine.

It was me, alone in an office, reading financial statements line by line. Taking companies apart to figure out what they were really worth, and where the risk was hiding. I was good at it.

And I figured it was what I'd do for the rest of my life. I tell you that for one reason. When my career finally did change, it didn't change because of a number.

It changed because of a person. So. Back to my friend, at that lunch.

He was ready, and I could see it. He tried to sell the company himself, and couldn't make it happen. So I found him a buyer.

I could have bought it myself, but I figured I could get him a better deal from someone else. So I did. He retired.

And then he asked me to manage his money. I said no. He asked again.

Eventually I said yes. That was the moment I understood something that twenty years of managing money had never taught me. Selling his company wasn't the hard part.

Being ready to become someone new, that was the hard part. The spreadsheet is easy. The person is not.

And then, a few years later, he found out that a cancer he thought he'd beaten two decades earlier had come back. He had about six months. We spent part of that time on the least glamorous work there is.

Him, talking it through with me and his estate attorney. Making sure his affairs were in order. Making sure what he'd built would go where he wanted it, with as little as possible lost to taxes and confusion.

And when he was gone, the work didn't end. It moved to his wife. On the hardest day of her life.

That's when whatever I had been doing stopped being about investments. It grew, one person at a time, because people I cared about kept asking. And the thing they needed most was almost never a hot investment.

It was someone who would understand their life first, and build the money around it. In that order. That's what Considerate Capital is.

And the name is not decoration. Let me tell you where I really learned what it means. Years ago, when I was in business school, a group of us from the University of Chicago went out to Omaha to spend a day with Warren Buffett.

After a couple of hours of questions, over lunch, he told us about a friend of his. A woman who had survived the camps in Europe. She said she was slow to trust anyone new.

Because the question she asked herself about a new person was a simple one. Would they hide me? And Buffett said that is how he had come to measure his own life. Not by the money.

By how many people would hide him. I have thought about that a lot since. And somewhere along the way it quietly became my own measure too.

The people I work with are not trying to win at money. They are trying to take care of the people they would hide. And to be taken care of, in return.

My job is to make the money quietly serve that, and then step out of the way. So, your Considerate Step this week is a quiet one. Get out a blank sheet of paper.

And write down the names of the people you love and would do anything for. Then ask yourself one honest question. Is your money actually arranged to take care of those names? Not to grow the biggest number.

To take care of the people on that page. And if your answer is, I'm not sure, that is not a failure. That's just the next conversation.

So, back to my friend, at that lunch, ready to sell. He wasn't really asking me about a valuation. He was asking whether he was ready to close one chapter and open another.

And he was. The money just had to catch up to the decision he'd already made in his heart. The one big idea I hope you carry out of here is this.

The money was never the point. It's only ever in service of the people you love. Get that order right, and a surprising amount of the rest gets simpler.

That's the work I do now. The work I think I was pointed toward the whole time, without ever knowing it. Helping people make the few decisions that shape the rest of their lives.

And feel steady while they do it. I'm Josh Mangoubi. This week, write down the names.

And ask whether the money is arranged around them. I'll see you next time.