My New Office….
I started my Community College teaching career last week. From my website and my background, you may have guess that I’m a big fan of financial literacy. This quarter, I’m teaching Business 104 – a business math class. We cover accounting, time value of money, taxes and a lot of other practical topics. As cool as trigonometry is, it’s just not going to be that useful in your day to day life, unless you’re putting rockets into space or something like that. Meanwhile, we, as a country, ignore teaching kids concepts like compound interest, payroll taxes, or why our country being $35 trillion in debt might not be a good thing.
Students come from all different backgrounds. Some are getting the basics out of the way to move onto bigger universities (something I probably should have considered myself). One is retired from the army, wanting to follow in the footsteps of his entrepreneurial parents. One is a pretty skilled auto mechanic with his own business trying to generate some more knowledge about working ON his business vs. working IN it.
A huge parallel to this class and my business is the idea of helping people with their blind spots – the things they didn’t now they didn’t know. And truthfully, I’m not trying to teach mastery here. My objective is to get them to an understanding. The key to be successful in business isn’t necessarily to know everything. It’s to know enough to recognize what questions to ask, and when to ask for real serious help when you need it. When I was an advisor, I didn’t do people’s taxes, but I could recognize when a good accountant should come in and deal with an issue. I could see problems with a client’s estate plan from a mile away, but it was an attorney (with me as an advocate for the client) that would solve the issue and pave the way for an easier time later. In my own business, I want to educate owners on their business problems, their financial results and their exit strategies, and help them understand what questions to ask and to see for themselves where the issues lie. Then, we corral a team of experts when they’re ready to pull the trigger on a plan.
My students aren’t business owners, or wealthy investors. They are normal people just trying to give themselves an opportunity. They work hard and really try. They are engaged and interested in the material. They ask for help, and they all have dreams. They, for the most part, don’t take anything for granted. As much as I enjoyed my career, and love helping successful business owners with their own ventures, it’s given me a lot of joy, humility and fulfillment to help this next generation to further their own aspirations.
When I retired from my advisory practice a lot of people asked what I was going to do with myself. It was still up in the air at that time but I knew it was going to revolve around education, and helping this next generation with financial literacy. My class of eight isn’t quite what I’d call a critical mass, but maybe that’s how I’ll do it – tip the scale toward a more universal working knowledge of the things that I think matter, one hard working student at a time.