Reflections on Three Years as Mana
On July 10th we’re celebrating our third birthday as a financial advisory! It’s hard to believe that it’s been three years since we quit our corporate jobs and left Wall Street to pursue our vision of empowering people to shift their attitudes about money while living into their greatest dreams of freedom. It has been an absolute wild ride and, for this week’s blog post, we thought we’d reflect on some of the greatest lessons we’ve learned on our journey.
Ever since we first became friends in 2006, Stephanie and I knew we were going to start a company together. Yes, this is the actual interaction we had on the newly launched “The Facebook” back when we were in college together at Bucknell University. Twelve years later, we actually started that company.
Several of our Mana clients are currently navigating the corporate exodus that we went through in 2018. If you’re one of these clients or if you’re someone with aspirations to someday launch a company you’ve been dreaming about, these first three lessons are for you.
If there was one thing we wished we’d known before we launched our firm, it would have been the advice we give to our entrepreneur clients today: save two years worth of monthly expenses before you launch your company. Why? You are going to pour all of your energy into getting your company off the ground. Getting the company running is probably going to cost more than you’ve forecasted. The last thing you want to deal with is stress around how you’re going to pay your personal bills on time. As our business hit it’s first full year of operation we were growing rapidly, but not rapidly enough to pay ourselves. We were oh so grateful for the cushions we each had put away, but both of us wished we’d have put away even more, as we both felt the stress of having to grow - or else face another few months of not getting paid - by the end of our first year.
We continued to grow steadily through our second year, at which point we were faced with making a decision every successful entrepreneur is faced with: “Is now the time to hire?” Hiring your first employee can make or break your young business, and we knew it….which is why we had so many conversations with our business coach about it. Through the process of hiring we learned a few important things:
Hire before you feel you need to hire. We made it a point to review and reflect on our numbers every month and, by mid-2020, we knew we’d absolutely need to hire a full time employee to help alleviate the workload while Cristina was out on maternity leave. Because we knew our numbers, we made the decision to make our first full time hire two months before we’d actually need to hire, which gave us the opportunity to train her as much as we could before Cristina took time off.
Define the new job with as much detail as possible. When you’re a team of two, it’s relatively easy to divide and conquer the jobs that need to be done. As we thought about how we wanted our business to grow in the future, we had to spend time thinking about what tasks we would have to delegate to employees. Now six months into our roles as managers, we can safely say that the success of our employees was directly tied to our ability to outline their responsibilities at the outset.
Construct an interview process that tests for the skills you’re looking to hire. When we posted our job description to job boards, we received almost 200 resumes. Way too many for a team of two to review. Luckily for us, one of our fellow fee-only financial planners tipped us off to the best practice of testing for the skills we were looking to hire. For us, that meant including directions within the job posting to read through the entire post. At the bottom of the post, we instructed applicants to record a short video of themselves sharing why they’d be an ideal candidate for the role. Number of applicants = 200. Number of applicants who followed complete instructions = 18. A much more manageable pool to choose from.
When we look back on our first three years as a business, we both agree that mentorship was a key driver of our success. Three of our mentors had an acute impact on the way we ran our business because they were also investors in our business. As both our mentors and investors, they encouraged us to come up with the key metrics we’d use to track our progress each month. It was these metrics that formed the framework of our investor updates, to celebrate our successes, and to evaluate the setbacks. These metrics helped us make decisions quickly and move forward with confidence. The metrics we arrived at were super valuable; but even more valuable was the experience and wisdom that was shared with us. To the three of you, we are forever grateful!
We’ve learned a lot in three years of running a business, but when we look back on the time we spent building Mana, the most important lessons we’ve learned about money and life have come from our clients themselves.
When we launched Mana, we knew that money was tied to a whole lot of feelings, which can make people’s relationship to money complicated...super complicated. We’ve learned that the stories about money - both explicitly stated or absorbed through shared experience - we were exposed to in childhood have a meaningful impact on our present-day beliefs and attitudes about money. We’ve learned that these money scripts can evolve with a commitment to transformation through consistent work. Everyday, we learn something new about how individuals can harness their mana and take the reins on designing their lives.
Every Mana client goes through our Mana visioning meetings before they receive a financial life plan. Even though we both came from Wall Street backgrounds, we’ve found that the meeting that unlocks the most for clients is the Life Design meeting. This is the one meeting in which we purposefully don’t talk about the numbers. In the Life Design meeting we couple George Kinder’s 3 Questions with a mindfulness-based approach through deep listening and visualization, to create an image of a life so compelling that a client can’t help but move towards it. When we look back on the last three years, the most rewarding moments are the pictures and emails we receive from clients living out those dreams.
Before we started our own financial planning firm, we only knew how the industry did financial planning for clients. They’d gather data, crunch numbers through a software program, and hand clients 50+ pages of a ‘financial plan’ the client would have no ability to comprehend. This traditional financial planning process was geared to assuring retirees that they wouldn’t run out of assets before they passed. In our honest opinion, the traditional way completely missed the point.
So, what is the point?
We’ve learned that our clients (typically between the ages of 30-50) care about short term and long term planning. It’s not enough to hand them cash flow projections of the next thirty years and assure them that if they spend x amount each year, they won’t run out of money. Our clients work for and own stock in companies that go public, they sell all or parts of their business, they change jobs (and negotiate amazing salaries!). There’s a whole lot more to financial planning for our client demographic, so we’ve structured our financial planning process to address their evolving needs. It wasn’t easy, and the process is never fully evolved, but we’re confident that we’re headed in a direction that provides much more utility than the old school way of doing things.
Three years in and it’s been one wild ride. Was it worth it? Absolutely.
We’ve learned a ton of skills. We now know what it takes to build a business. We’ve grown from zero clients to eighty-four clients as of the time of this writing in early July 2021.
Most importantly, we’ve gained our freedom. We have the freedom to choose to work with clients we are excited to work with, and the freedom to design our schedules in a way that best suits the lives we want to live. We are honored to be where we are today and we’re looking forward to seeing where the next three years takes us!
Stephanie Bucko and Cristina Livadary are fee-only financial planners based in Los Angeles, California. Stephanie is the Chief Investment Officer and Cristina is the Chief Executive Officer at Mana Financial Life Design (FLD). Mana FLD provides comprehensive financial planning and investment management services to help clients grow and protect their wealth throughout life’s journey. Mana FLD specializes in advising ambitious professionals who seek financial knowledge and want to implement creative budgeting, savings, proactive planning and powerful investment strategies. As fee-only fiduciaries and independent financial advisors, Stephanie and Cristina never receive commission of any kind. Stephanie and Cristina are legally bound by their certifications to provide unbiased and trustworthy financial advice.