Our career paths to Pilot Wealth Management have been broad but today we are advisors. We help clients, especially business owners and entrepreneurs work through the most challenging times in their businesses, transitions, and the next phases of their lives.
What truly sets Pilot apart from other advisors and managers is we understand entrepreneurs and their laborious and emotion-filled path. Each of us understands the loneliness, fear, and uncertainty that comes with starting and running a company. We have started, grown, and sold companies and felt those same fears along the way. Not knowing if we’ll make payroll, hire the right people, if the phone will ring again, or if our family’s livelihood will be secure.
It’s why we believe entrepreneurs are the ultimate contrarians. While many people are working jobs and receiving steady, consistent pay in a comfortable environment, entrepreneurs turn away from a normal career to build their own. They start with no product, no customers, little to no money, no employees, and no sales; only a vision. They fight the economy’s natural gravity to create something from nothing. To do that and succeed takes incredible courage, humility, problem solving, and sometimes a little luck. Because of this, we harbor a deep admiration for entrepreneurs.
Through our own entrepreneurship journey, there came times of uncertainty and fear when we didn’t know what to do. Looking for help felt pointless. Who could understand our business as well as we did? Who would know what I’m going through? Finding an advisor who truly understood us and our businesses was a constant challenge. Today, we believe we are that advisor.
We believe going through the hardships of entrepreneurship has given us perspective and allows us to have true understanding of entrepreneurs. In an effort to be of greater service to our clients and business owners who aren’t clients, we are going to be writing more. This will take several forms, in-depth articles and a newsletter, but together be called the Pilot’s Log.
We are diving deep on specific topics around strategy, transitions, exits, retirement, valuation, and much more. The goal is to share helpful information to business owners allowing them to make smart decisions, but also bringing awareness that they are not alone.
With the Pilot’s Log newsletter, we will be writing about thoughts, ideas, topics, and themes we’ve come across recently, in addition to sharing links to interesting articles, podcasts, blogs, and interviews. We are constantly coming across fascinating resources but haven’t been able to consistently share them with clients and friends until now.
Our aim is to write the Pilot’s Log newsletter every other week with our brief thoughts on various topics and a few important links we’ve found. Deep, more technical dives will be published monthly as a blog. We want to share frequently, but not so often that our writing loses meaning or significance.
In addition to being helpful to clients and others, writing out our thoughts on various topics can help us refine our thinking and organize our minds. When we write our quarterly letters and articles, we are forced to convey complex ideas into words in a simple manner. Our job is to be learning machines, and writing can accelerate that learning in a way reading alone cannot.
We are excited to begin and we hope our writing helps our families at Pilot Wealth and those beyond.
Pilot Notes
Permanent Equity wrote a fantastic article called Why You Can’t Sell Your Business, the number one reason being you as the seller have unrealistic expectations.
Jason Zweig writes that Ben Graham would say Look in the Mirror and focus on what you as an investor should do, regardless of what’s happening in the market.
Coronavirus has been top of mind for a few weeks now and there has been no shortage of articles to choose from. Here are a few of our favorites that offer well reasoned analysis.
Sequoia Capital, a very successful venture capital firm, issued an statement warning companies about the economic fallout from the coronavirus and what to do about it.
Samir Patel, fund manager of Askeladden Capital, wrote a very in-depth update to clients and others about the virus and used examples of companies in their portfolio that could withstand these harsher economic conditions.
Morgan Housel from the Collaborative Fund, another successful venture capital firm, wrote a few ideas to keep in mind during this crisis.
Dan McMurtrie, otherwise known as @SuperMugatu on Twitter and portfolio manager of Tyro Partners, wrote an excellent series of Tweets in response to coronavirus sentiment.
David Perell wrote down a few principles he is using to build his company.
More Morgan Housel, this time 100 Little Ideas for going through life.
Is Fortnite better for your kids than most think?
If you know anyone who might enjoy reading our thoughts around business owners and interesting resources we come across, feel free to forward this along to them so we can keep them in the loop as well.
Additionally, if you come across an interesting article, interview, podcast, or Tweet, please send it over to us. We are always buyers of quality information.