About Me

My career and entrepreneurial journey include a variety of related roles from coding to product management, to sales engineering, executive team leadership, and corporate finance. But my true and enduring passions – and those to which I’ve returned in this new phase of life – are coding, deep analytical work and modelling (of things like web traffic, sales trends, optimal product pricing, and of course financial statement-oriented revenue, profit, unit economics), and most notably in the present context, personal finance. My Comp Eng degree is from SFU and I coded professionally for several years post-grad into my early-mid 20s. My first career sidestep was a shift to product management. I steered the ship in that lane for over a decade, sticking to tech telecom and software. Shortly before I got married and became a first-time dad -- around about my 30th birthday -- I finished the 3-year marathon required to secure the CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) designation. That presaged my 2nd and much more revolutionary transition into software-focused investment banking (the CFA designation is the gold standard in banking, and so I had to pay some form of dues in lieu of historical career experience to legitimise the transition). I founded a firm called Garibaldi Capital Advisors with a partner and we realised moderate success over the course of a dozen or so M&A and capital raising advisory mandates executed over 5 years of collaboration. I had to learn the business from scratch and was not shocked to learn the necessary in-the-trenches skills had almost no overlap with the more academic teachings of the CFA curriculum.

My interest in transaction advisory and investment banking eventually bled over into the management of family assets (mine, and my parents and my brother’s in trust), which also aligned better with the original CFA education and its focus on institutional and intergenerational asset management. I got out of boutique investment banking as it was a poor fit for several reasons, obvious in retrospect, and kept the dollars flowing with contract CFO gigs (which were closer to executive team coaching engagements / fractional CRO / COO / integrator).

I wrapped up my most recent CFO gig two years ago and have been coding tools for managing family assets since. I discovered a parallel passion for enabling do-it-yourself investors and launched the site verifiedbeta.com as something of a ‘trial balloon’ to begin my pro-bono contribution to the community. I’ve now developed half a dozen complementary in-house asset management tools and eat my own dog food continuously. I contemplate releasing some or all of these publicly in the same spirit as – or as an extension of – verifiedbeta. Meanwhile, I’ve come to realise that hands-on planning and problem solving for high net worth sophisticated family office clients might be a path to revitalise my career as part of a ‘second act’. My primary motivation in engaging with a few closer friends and associates is to try this on for size; to learn whether the nature of the work is consistent with what I might enjoy on a sustained basis for the next couple of decades. I’m particularly focused on determining whether the one-on-one work is a fit, or if  I should bring my skills to the world through something more scalable and less intimate.

Ideal Trial Client

You’re in the wealth accumulation phase of your life. As an entrepreneur, you’re an independent earner and recognize that your lifetime financial security rests primarily in your own hands. You are open to discussing the lifestyle you’d like to live, the education you’d like to help fund for your kids, the associated living expenses and burn rate, desire to own a home or rent, any legacy giving goals (kids, charity), and approximately when you’d like to stop working on a full-time basis. The quarter century that stretches from your mid-30s to your retirement in your late fifties lies at the heart of your prospective financial security. Life will throw curve balls. Establishing a supportive framework that sizes core financial goals and the required savings, investment engine, and tax planning dramatically increases the probability of lifelong success.

Scope and Process

Discovery

  • Current income

    • Active employment / dividend business income

    • Spousal income current and projected through child rearing years, then thereafter (return to part- or full-time work)

  • Current Assets

    • Home / investment real estate

    • Investment portfolio in open, RRSP, TFSA

  • Anticipated Inheritance(s), if any

  • Current Debt(s) / liabilities

    • Mortgage

    • Credit Card(s)

    • Lines of credit, secured and unsecured

  • Business

    • Next 3Y high-level income projections and comp to you;

    • Your fully-diluted ownership (net of any options and phantom equity);

    • Current approx. sale value

    • Any long term debt (should also be summarised on balance sheet)

  • Expenses

    • Prior 12 months spending

      • Simply add up total credit card spending plus cash outlays; don’t worry about any detail

      • Break out and list any non-recurring (not annual) one-time expenses over $1k

Draft Plan

Plan will model the next 25Y of spending / saving / wealth accumulation. Level of detail will be refined until vision is clear. Will contemplate required saving rate, expected rate of investment returns, large one-time outlays, kids’ education, etc.

Presentation and Refinement

Correspond and iterate as required to until you feel we have a plan that is concrete enough to both act on in the immediate and which offers a long-term direction and target.

Implementation

Recommended starting self-directed brokerage accounts, ETF products, monthly savings transfers, corporate holdings company tax structuring will be detailed.

Ongoing Maintenance

Monthly instructions to be provided, with a particular focus on rebalancing.

Deliverables

  • The 25Y Plan

  • Implementation Guidelines

  • Maintenance Guide