Investors Like…Me?
By "Bob", a Maevlo investor
While we are an investing company, being a Family/Life company as well means that it matters who our investors are. There are few things we enjoy more than sitting down with them for a good chat about what matters most in our lives. We recently had the pleasure of sitting down with one of our long-running investors and good friends. We won't share names as he likes to fly under the radar, but the wisdom he shared on investing and, more importantly, what life's all about, is just too good to keep to ourselves. If this stuff resonates with you or someone you know, pass it along, get in touch, join us. Until then, we'll let "Bob" share his wisdom with us all.
An Early Start & Good Guidance
When friends with similar amounts of gray hair as I've got, and who are only just now trying to figure out how they're going to fund their retirements, ask me what to do, I've got no useful advice. I can't conjure up decades of conservative investing for them, and that's really the secret sauce in my book when it comes to long-lasting wealth building.
Investing started for me when I was young and I've got other people to thank for that. In 3rd grade, my uncle gave me a share of Haliburton and taught me to go look up their ticker in the Wall Street Journal. I was fascinated by it and tracked it daily. Gradually I watched it go from 1 share to 2 to 6 as the stock grew and split. This planted a seed and I loved watching it grow, from just one little share. I'm grateful for my uncle giving it to me.
When I was 14 no one would give me a job so I went and painted 4 houses that summer. I went to the paint store, marched up to the counter and asked them for a credit account. Amazingly, they gave it to me! I became a little mascot for them that summer, and I'm sure there were a few chuckles at my expense, but I made $1100 painting houses. I spent $80 on a new bike (of course) but then bought stocks with the rest. My father, a CPA by trade, had also shared his fascination with the stock market and suggested companies to look at. I picked a few: first was a little aviation outfit flying planes out of Love Field Dallas called Southwest Airlines. The second was a company called Microwaves Communications Incorporated (a radio and early cell phone innovation company).
If I could be either lucky or good I'd take both. Well, I certainly was lucky on those purchases and, as I continued to grow, I tried to get good at it too. This is where the value of having a good mentor shone through. Dad and I spent hours talking about the market and companies. He taught me how to read quarterly reports. "Watch out, if they're more than yea thick, they're hiding something" he'd always say. And I'm grateful to say that all of that work and learning paid my way through college.
Saving The Nickels
I always had a natural bent towards saving. It may just be an inherited temperament thing, but I liked saving the nickels and watching account balances grow more than I liked buying stuff. I believe that if you're saving some nickels, no matter how few, then that means you've got some spare nickels. If you've got spare nickels, you've got to make decisions about them, and that makes you an investor. So while many happy decades of my life were spent on the cutting edge of mechanical engineering, I was always an investor.
I took investing seriously and have really enjoyed it, investing in all sorts of things over the years, but you may safely call me a conservative investor. I've lived by Warren Buffet's philosophy of investing in things I can understand, things that sense to me. As he famously said (a long time ago), "I don't understand Microsoft but I do understand Coca-Cola". I'm always looking for regular base hits and if one goes out of the park, that's nice, but if I strike out, I've always got more outs to fall back on. It allows me to sleep at night.
The Keys to Success
Some might call me successful, but that's a word worth spending time on. Yes, I've grown the nickels into dollars – many dollars – but as I've walked this path, I've learned that you have to go deeper. You have to ask, success in whose eyes? Are more spare nickels the only measure of a successful life? What are those nickels for? Whose are they, really? For me, the definition of success has moved away from thinking about saving nickels and towards stewarding them, away from profit and returns towards concepts like surplus and abundance.
If the Almighty Dollar is god, there isn't anywhere to go beyond profits begetting more profits, that's all they can be for. But if dollars come from an Almighty God, which I believe they do, well, things start to look different. First of all, they're all His in the first place and so I'm not an owner, I'm just a steward. They are in my care for a finite time and need to be used in the King's service (that's what a steward does). When I have profit, I think of it as a surplus….extra….more than enough.…abundance. I could either pat myself on the back or acknowledge the giver who is a generous God and a God of abundance who wants to bless. If that's what this king is like, then my stewardship has to take that shape too! So with abundance, I try to ask, where is this needed in God's kingdom? We are all given our hands, the time we have, and the surplus we all have (if we don't borrow our way to oblivion!). The opportunities for giving are so profound, so many people are doing good work that needs support and I've been given so much surplus, just for those purposes.
Kindred Spirits
One of the joys of walking the investing path in this way, what keeps it fruitful, and life-giving, is finding people who share this vision for investing and journeying together with them. In everything, I focus most on relationships with people who have a mind for investing in God's kingdom, who value relationships over returns, and who see it all from a more eternal perspective. Of course, this blog is for Matthew and his team at Maevlo, but I probably don't need to say too much about why I'm invested with him. Suffice it to say, I was looking to take advantage of what seemed to me to be pretty low energy prices (if you've heard Matthew say "Buy straw hats in the winter", he got that one from me). When I was introduced to him, I quickly picked up on his obvious care for everything I've said above. Jumping into Maevlo was an easy choice to make.
