Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in financial services but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Jonathan DeYoe, Founder and CEO of Mindful Money, located in Berkeley, CA, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

I am in the business of educating people about money, inspiring them to build wealth, and coaching them through financial planning and investing questions. Our customers are those who don't meet traditional advisory minimums. They realize the importance of financial education and want support for retirement income planning and investing. They understand that no one can predict the future and are seeking a trusted process to manage their investments through any market environment. Aside from not meeting traditional account minimums, they may simply not want to pay the traditional 1% advisory fee that most advisors charge.

Tell us about yourself

I am a Lutheran Seminarian turned Buddhist Academic turned financial advisor and educator. I was raised with very little and told I would have to work harder than anyone else if I was going to be successful. For my entire career, I have been helping people who have money build more wealth, pay fewer taxes, and structure the legacy they will leave their families and community. Since my brother died in 2021, I merged my wealth management company into a larger entity to provide those services. I have turned my focus towards helping those with less wealth and less access to advice get better support. This was a goal that my brother and I shared that I would now pursue without him.

We live in a largely financialized world. Success is seen largely in financial terms. This hurts our ability to enjoy our lives. Further, the financial world is market-focused and performance-driven. The focus on markets and performance, however, is hurting outcomes for families. We offer a counter-cultural, goal-focused, and planning-driven process that offers improved outcomes for families - at a substantially reduced cost.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

For the last 5 years of our financial planning practice, over 95% of our new clients were referred to us by our existing clients. Nothing in the world tells us that we are doing the right thing for people like those people introducing us to their friends and family. Merging with EP Wealth gave our clients access to greater services and enabled me to focus on the education and coaching that I love.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

The most difficult thing I encountered in my 25 years of running my financial planning practice was the need to juggle so many different balls all the time. As the owner of a business, the proverbial "buck stops here" for every decision, every challenge, and every issue. Before I merged my practice into EP to focus on Mindful Money, I was facing the integration of our technology stack (not my expertise), hiring and managing 8 people (not my expertise), creating compensation structures to support and inspire the growth of my team (not my expertise), while serving and supporting clients in making better decisions (my expertise and the thing I love to do). As a business owner, you can't "focus" on the things you want to focus on - you must handle it all (or it will handle you, and the business will fail).

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Hire a chief of staff as soon as humanly possible. This person should be taking things off of your plate immediately and should enable you to reach far beyond what you could do without them.
  2. Embrace technology intelligently. So much technology is "neat" but not required. Technology should enable you to do better work for your clients/customers, or it should not be utilized. If it doesn't make your end client better off, let it go.
  3. You have to measure. You have to know what metrics are important to your business, and you have to take the pulse of those measurements regularly. First, you need to know what is important; then, you have to measure it religiously.

This SHOULD go without saying, but the most important thing anyone in any business can do is WOW THEIR CUSTOMERS. Everything comes down to providing an experience for the end user that is better than your industry peers. In something like financial planning, our goal was to transform our client's relationship with money. We did things like financial planning and investing, but our clients experience these as "less stress and anxiety around money," "more confidence about their futures," and "more understanding about the things that could go wrong and what we plan to do WHEN surprises occur." Everything is in service to a better client experience.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://mindful.money/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MindfulMoneyPlan
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindfulmoneyplan/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MindfulMoney_Ed
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathandeyoe/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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