On the Occasion of Our 5th Birthday
By AJ Ayers, Co-founder
Statistically, most businesses fail within the first five years, so today, on our 5th birthday, I want to celebrate BKFi’s ability not just to survive but thrive. Just five years ago today, Shane and I had just wrapped our first exhausting tax season together as business partners. We hadn’t managed to murder each other and were still gingerly testing the waters of partnership. There were extremely early mornings, very late nights, and lots of tax returns filed from bedroom offices and kitchen tables. BKFi had been conceived the previous summer over sweaty beers in a Brooklyn bar, but a letter (or was it an email? Had to have been an email) received on April 20, 2018, would truly change our lives forever. That letter was a notice from New York State that our application to give investment advice was approved, and we were ready to launch the firm as a Registered Investment Advisor. And launch we did, at a shindig in my little one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, where we stood on the couch and thanked our friends and very first clients for trusting us with their money.
Those very first clients are celebrating their fifth year with us as well. They’ve switched jobs a few dozen times, they’ve had babies, lost beloved family members, bought homes, bought second homes, experienced hundreds of liquidity events, and started businesses of their own. And we’ve been there to guide and advise through every decision. Our particular breed of financial planning is different from most because BKFi’s planners are not just adept investors, or tax experts, or retirement analysis wizards, they are emotionally intelligent humans who spend the time to get to know our clients, establish trust and act as a guide through decisions as small as deciding between an FSA or HSA health plan or as large as pulling money out of savings for a third round of IVF. I’m picking on healthcare because it’s one of those things that isn’t in the financial planning textbooks but touches ALL of our clients’ lives.
A financial planner at BKFi is so much more than someone who looks after your investments or makes sure your tax return is filed accurately, it’s someone who knows their clients’ lives intimately and spends time to find out what makes them tick.
It takes chutzpah to start a business. It takes courage to run a business. But it takes patience, humility, perseverance, and a really great therapist or business coach (or both) to make a business endure. And endure is what we have done.
2022 was not a good year for the US stock market. A war in Europe, inflation, and baffling economic policy took a sledgehammer to the public markets and many young investors learned for the first time that portfolios of stocks do not just go up forever. In related news, it was not a good year for the IPO market – in fact, it was the worst year in three decades in terms of new companies making their debut on a public exchange. It was rough luck for a young firm like ours trying to establish itself amongst the very stiff and stodgy competition. We had planted a flag in the sand to say “we are the equity compensation experts, no one will be a better partner you before, during, and after your company’s IPO.” After dozens of successful IPOs in 2021, there were less than zero for our clients in 2022. None of the nearly one hundred private companies our clients work at went public in 2022. So all that equity compensation that we are so well-positioned to help navigate was frozen, like a prehistoric fly in amber. But trying economic times are where financial planners get to shine. It’s where we truly differentiate ourselves. When the job cuts came to tech, where many of our clients work, we did what we could. We helped negotiate severance packages, explained COBRA till we were blue in the face, we shored up emergency funds, made layoff budgets, hosted webinars, harvested portfolio losses to offset the future gains from liquidity events potentially decades away. It was a hard year for a young-ish firm but we came out the other side with an incredible team of financial planners, tax managers, and a whip-smart operations team to set us up for the highs and lows of 2023.
Over the past five years, we’ve experienced roughly 100% growth year over year. And growth like that is not without its growing pains. But the good and great are what stand out. We won awards and were recognized for the meteoric growth we’ve experienced, even as market forces worked against us. It’s cool to be recognized as the 563 fastest-growing company on the Inc 5000 or the 59th fastest-growing company by the Financial Times.
We revised our core values to better reflect the type of people we are and the type of people we want to attract to the BKFi rocketship. Our core values that will hopefully guide us through the next five years and beyond are: Poised Excellence, Get Shit Done, It’s Cool to be Kind, Team First and Improve Self, Improve Process, Improve Others, and No BS Candor. These are the values that help us make decisions and help us find the best individuals to join our growing team.
Speaking of our team, in 2022 we added a leadership team to help Shane and I make decisions and guide the firm in the right direction.
We have John Owens, our director of financial planning. By my estimations, John is one of the greatest financial planners in the country – his attention to detail and technical knowledge is unparalleled. But John is also easy to talk to, warm, and sometimes makes ok, but mostly terrible dad jokes. He’s the type of leader that will do anything for his team and will take that extra two hours to help someone else solve a problem. He is a true team player and we couldn’t ask for a better thought leader as we continue to grow and expand our offerings.
On the operations front, Emily Purdon joined us at the tail end of last year as our Director of Operations and immediately righted the ship. I believe we formed the core values in Emily’s image. She is poised excellence in every way. She gets shit done like nobody’s business, and she provides a much-needed calm and cool head during tough times and passionate discussions about the future of the firm.
Dan Beyer, our Director of Tax, took on 500 tax returns like it was just another basketball game, a sport of which he is fond of. I almost murdered Dan when he jammed his finger playing basketball at our LA retreat; it’s not easy to navigate a spreadsheet with a broken index finger. Dan embodies our core value of “It’s cool to be kind” like no other. He is always looking out for his team and is sensitive to the needs of the entire organization at all times. He can see around corners in a way that has helped Shane and me lead this firm in the right direction.
Will Cavanaugh, our longest-serving employee, has watched the firm grow from a scrappy two-person operation to a full-fledged rocketship. Will leads our accounting team and keeps the numbers in the right columns. Will’s expertise and general awesomeness as a human is felt by everyone at the firm.
What I’ve learned in five years at BKFi: working with great people who you trust is what matters. Whether that’s a colleague or someone you’ve hired to help sort out a tax problem, you need great people in your corner who share your core values.
I’ve also noticed that clients that sift through the hundreds of options out there when it comes to financial advising to find BKFi are a very special group of people. Yes, they care about growing their wealth and paying less in taxes, and we’re really great at helping with those things. But ultimately, our clients care about their impact on the world, about leaving it a better place than where they found it, and about doing something meaningful with the time they have on this earth. And I’m very down with that.
So if BKFi is the meaningful thing that I’m doing with my time on earth, I am very content with that. The last five years have been a roller coaster and I’m so grateful to every employee, business coach, client, friend, podcast listener, and BKFi stan out there who has made this thing what it is.
We’re at cruising altitude (sorry, I can’t help myself, I’m writing this from an airplane) and plan on remaining above the clouds for many more years.
-AJ Ayers
April 20, 2023