- CEO Story: Jeff’s passion to help his clients, not to repeat the mistakes in the past especially in 2009 when the stock market was on a roller coaster, motivated him to build his company to preserve and protect the money of his clients when the stock market is down.
- Business Service: Investment Advising. Managing their client’s portfolio, investment advice, retirement planning, retirement planning services, and consulting services. He makes sure that his clients have the 3Ps, plan, investment process, and investment progress.
- Secret Sauce: Created a propriety investment process – recognizing historically what transpires when major declines are likely on how the pattern unfolds.
- CEO Hack: Learned trend channels by Richard Russel – looking at the marketplace from an entirely different perspective while doing his research.
- CEO Nugget: Hire an investment professional who understands trends in the stock market. Whatever goes up eventually goes down. Everybody should prepare for the next downturn if they don’t want to lose their financial wealth.
- CEO Defined: The Chief Envision Officer – somebody who’s always anticipating what happens next, so you can be strategic in your decisions. Be proactive. Somebody who is not uncomfortable diverging from the crowd at times.
Website: www.bluelineinvesting.com
LinkedIn: bluelineinvestingjefflink
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Transcription
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00:25 – Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.
00:45 – Gresham Harkless
Hello, Hello, Hello, this is Gretch from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jeff's link to Guardian Wealth Advisors, LLC. Jeff, super excited to have you on the show.
00:55 – Jeff Link
So great to be here, Gresham. Thanks for having me.
00:57 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, super excited. And what I wanted to do before we jumped into hearing all the awesome things that Jeff's doing is to read a little bit more about him. Jeff is an investment advisor, representative at Guardian Wealth Advisors, LLC, and the founder of the Blue Line investing process. With 25 years of experience, Jeff has been a proponent of risk-managed investing with firms like Smith Barney, Leg Mason, and still full Nicholas. Today, Jeff helps investors who are within 20 years of retirement grow and protect their wealth in a risk-managed and tax-efficient way in 2020.
During the middle of the pandemic, Jeff published his first book, protecting the Pig, How Stock Market Trends Reveal the Way to Grow and Preserve Your Wealth. Jeff, super excited to have you on the show and hear about all the awesome things you're doing. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
[restrict paid=”true”]
01:43 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Well, let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I like to call your CEO story. Sure.
01:51 – Jeff Link
So my story starts back in the mid to late 1990s when I became a licensed investment professional. And at that time, I was pretty much like a lot of other investment professionals. I was kind of a jack of all trades rather than a master of one. Over the next decade or so, the way I worked with my clients, unfortunately, was we rode the stock market roller coaster. We rode the stock market up to the top in 2000. We then rode the roller coaster down into 2003 in the low.
We then rode it back up in 2007, and we rode it back down into 2009. It was about that time that I realized something had to change, this didn't make any sense. I was very fortunate that the majority of my clients were not retiring in that period. But I realized that when this happens again in the future, and it will because history is cyclical, what would happen if this happened at that time? And I couldn't do anything differently. So I got to this point where I decided that since stock markets go up far, they rise far off more often than they decline.
It only made sense to go ahead and focus on how to do my best to preserve and protect money when the markets go down and when that stock market trend goes down. So that's really why my business exists today. It's to do everything I can to make sure that my clients and myself don't repeat the experiences of the past. Because I remember how awful I felt at the bottom of 2009 and I don't want myself, or if I can help it, my clients to experience that again in the future.
03:19 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. Well, I appreciate you sharing that and I think that you speak into what I like to call the human aspect of life and a business and all those aspects in between because I think so many times the big fear can be like, okay, what if I didn't protect my investments enough when that time, but I don't have as much time as maybe I did before. So I love, like in true entrepreneurial form, you didn't decide, well, you know, that's just how it is. You sound like you came up with an idea solution to that problem. So I love that you've been able to.
03:45 – Jeff Link
To do that, correct? Yep. I think everyone needs to learn from the past and say, if I don't want to repeat the experiences of the past, if they were negative, then what can we learn from them? The positive ones we all want to relive over and over and over again. So I think for everyone, no matter what line of work they're in, what industry they're in, what they do, learning from our mistakes is the best way to learn.
04:07 – Gresham Harkless
Yes, absolutely. What did they say? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. So why not change the game and change this process and the strategy, as I know you've been able to do for your clients and all the awesome things that you're doing? So I wanted to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more about how you're working with those clients, what that process looks like. Can you take us through how you serve your clients and what that looks like? Yeah.
04:27 – Jeff Link
So first let me just say that as you mentioned during the intro, my parent company is Guardian Wealth Advisors, LLC and they are what's called a, we are what's called a registered investment advisor or in the industry, an RIA for short. And so Rias are fiduciaries. We have to do what's best for our clients and we're held to a higher standard than some of the other investment professionals in the industry. And so the main services we offer are investment advisory.
So we'll work with clients in terms of managing their portfolios, investing money, and providing advice. We'll do retirement planning and we also offer retirement plan services and consulting services. For me specifically, most of my clients, when I work with them, I subscribe to what I call the three P's. The first is making sure my clients have a plan. The second one is making sure they follow an investment process. And then the third one is making sure that they have a way to monitor their investment progress.
05:19 – Gresham Harkless
Three P's, just because it allows that opportunity to make sure that you are staying true to the plan, the process, and all of those things so that you can get to that ultimate success. Whether it sounds like there are good times or less than good times, which we sometimes experience.
05:31 – Jeff Link
Yeah, I would agree.
05:33 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I want us to ask you now for what I like to call your secret sauce. This could be for yourself individually, the business, or a combination of both. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?
05:42 – Jeff Link
Yeah, I would say that what makes me unique is my proprietary investment process and I call it blue-line investing. I created it as a result of what I mentioned to you a moment ago. After going through the stock market roller coaster for ten years, I realized this just doesn't, this isn't something I want to do if I can help it in the future. So I went ahead and I went back and I started researching and studying the stock market going back over 95 years. And I went back as far as early 1900. And I was looking for the periods, I wanted to isolate the periods in time where there were major declines.
So we're not talking about 5 and 10% corrections, we're not even talking about 15% corrections. We're talking about what I call in my book trend corrections. And this is where you suffer two horrible things. You lose money and you lose time. So those are the environments that negatively impact all investors in the same way. It's bad for everybody. So I went through it. I wanted to look for those individual isolated moments where, hey, let's look and see if there are some commonalities or with the indicators that I use and the indicators I use are available to every investor out there through a lot of different common software programs.
I wanted to look and say when these bad periods happened, did they all line up? Were the indicators all in a certain formation? That would give us a greater probability to say, hey, if we see this again in the future, we may not have a crystal ball for what's coming in the future, but we should be able to say when this happened in the past, problems ensued. And so that's what my process was built upon, was looking for all the characteristics and the indicators that when they line up in a certain way, we should all be paying attention. Because what happens with most investors is they'll buy the highs and they'll sell the lows because of emotional reactions rather than being proactive.
For us to go ahead and try to limit the major investment losses, we have to be looking forward, not backward. We have to be proactive, not reactive. For me, that was basically what this process is all about. It is recognizing historically what transpires when these major declines are likely. How does the pattern unfold? I wrote about it in chapter six of my book and showed in the past 50 years, 45, 50 years, how the last three major stock market tops in the United States all followed the same pattern. So that's outlined in chapter six in my book.
08:07 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I love that you've been able to kind of distill that information and that knowledge down, that resource down for people within your book, and of course, all the work that you're doing as well. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
08:25 – Jeff Link
Yeah, for me, it's going to be very pertinent to me. For me, it was learning about trends and specifically trend channels in the financial markets. You know, I first learned I didn't know anything, any of this stuff when I first came into the business, because when I first became licensed, the original company that I did that through was Legg Mason. And the majority of the work I did through them and the training I received was about product knowledge, not market knowledge. And so that's what a lot of investors need to understand when they hire an investment professional.
We learn a lot and are taught a lot about how to sell products but a lot of people don't understand what makes the markets rise or decline. What do trends look like? Things of that nature. So in late 2008, around that time, I started learning about trend channels through the late Richard Russell. He was the founder of Dow Theory Letters, and the blessing of that for me was in terms of reading his subscription service. And then that caused me to look into other information and do other research as well. It helped me to look at the marketplace from an entirely different perspective that I'd never considered before.
09:29- Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you sharing that so much. And I think so many times whenever you're an expert or you spend some time within your specific vertical, or whatever your excellence is, or your gift or your ability, you start to realize that once you drill down more and more and more, while others on the outside might consider it to be like a crapshooter, to consider it to be a game or something along those lines, if you start to understand, and I don't want to say the rules of the game, I feel like that's the wrong phrase, but you start to get accrue that knowledge and that information.
It, to me, doesn't guarantee success, it sounds like, but it seems like it puts you closer and closer to that certainty that you ultimately want to have, especially with something related to finances. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. You might have already touched on this, but this is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client, or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.
10:17 – Jeff Link
Yeah. So I would say for every business owner that's listening to this podcast or every executive, I would say, don't be a Mallory. And as you already mentioned, last year I wrote my first book. I hope you can see that, okay? Called Protecting the Pig, how stock market trends reveal the way to grow and preserve your wealth. And obviously, the pig is a piggy bank, and so that represents your financial wealth. So that's why I would encourage everybody right now, this is the time to prepare. This is the time to be saying, what don't I know? We know that whatever the adage is, whatever goes up eventually comes down.
That's something that I think people should be thinking about. That's what they should be realizing, that if you have wealth that you don't want to watch yourself lose up to half of it or more in the next downturn, this is the time to be educating yourself and making sure that the advisor you're working with is the right one and that whatever process and philosophy you're using, they're the right ones, and you realize what can happen from where we are now sometime in the future, in the years ahead.
11:13 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. I appreciate you so much for sharing that and especially even that parallel of we study as you said, the trends within our industries. We know that this is maybe a better time to do business. We get more clients during this time. We're paying attention to those trends, but sometimes we forget about that in other aspects when we get outside of our lane, I guess you can say. So I appreciate you so much for sharing that and reminding us of how important it is and that it can be done.
So I think sometimes that awareness around having, you know, a professional like yourself or having that knowledge and information to understand these trends and study the trends and know what could set you up for success as much as possible is something that's possible. And we can't do it in our industry, but of course in our finances as well. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEO's on the show. So, Jeff, what does being a CEO mean to you?
11:59 – Jeff Link
Jeff, to me, being a CEO, I look at this, being a chief envision officer, and a chief envision officer is simply somebody who thinks differently, somebody who's always anticipating what's going to come next. So you can be strategic in your decisions. Again, like I said earlier, be proactive. And it's somebody who's not uncomfortable, maybe diverging from the crowd at times. Those, I think, are characteristics and traits that a CEO has to have because if not, they're just going to follow everyone else with whatever the trend is.
And as I said, that would have been me back in, you know, the late 1990s, early two thousand. You ride the stock market roller coaster up, and then you ride it down and you ride it up and you ride it down. And that's really not what people want. People want to make strategic decisions, and you need somebody who's more of a visionary, in my opinion, to see where things are going rather than doing things the way that they've always been done.
12:49 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. And I know when you were speaking about finance, you used the word emotion, and I love that you mentioned that a little bit earlier. And I feel like that came to mind when you were speaking about the vision, because we were talking about trends, talking about doing your homework, due diligence, making sure you're setting yourself up for success, and understanding that a lot of times when times are less than ideal, that's when those emotions kick in and really will test you as a leader, as a CEO, as a visionary, whatever title we might give ourselves to understand and to know that you are staying true to that vision and you were prepared as strategically as possible for those times that will eventually happen.
13:22 – Jeff Link
So those are the those are the that's the whole point of why we don't want to be emotional. We want to follow a process. And again, I'll just say that in my personal research, what I have discovered for myself is markets are just not as random as people believe. Again, this does not mean that you have a crystal ball, doesn't mean you can avoid everything. But at the end of the day, it's very helpful to know what to look for so that you can try to avoid making those emotional decisions that can consume you.
13:47 – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. The name of the game is definitely to set yourself up as best as possible for success. So I love that you have armed people with so much insight and knowledge. And of course, you're taking some time out with us today. And what I wanted to do now was pass the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best they can get a hold of you, get a copy of your book, find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.
14:08 – Jeff Link
Yeah, sure. So what I would just say is one thing that I do that goes along with the book, it's more helpful if people actually buy and read the book, they'll get more out of it on my website, which I post every month. At the end of the month, what I call the primary trend update. So basically what I do is I take the information I provide in the book about trends and I basically show what the s and P 500 is doing at the end of every month. It's like a little snapshot. So twelve times a year I put out an article that shows people where we are. I provide over time. That's a little bit challenging for people like me.
But if somebody were to pick up a copy of the book and read the book, feel free to subscribe to that. Even if you don't read, don't buy the book. You can subscribe to it for free anyway. So you can go to that and subscribe at www.bluelineinvesting.com forward Slash blog. So you can subscribe or unsubscribe at any time. You want that information just I don't do anything with it. I don't sell it. It's just literally there for your benefit. The book itself, even you can get it almost through any online retailer you'd like. But Amazon has slashed the price, albeit against my desire, to less than $6 right now.
So for $6 you basically can get up to 24 years, 25 years, almost worth of investment experience and knowledge, and you can read it in a few hours. So I would highly encourage everyone to pick up that book. It's priced at a point where you can't afford not to buy it. But if anyone has any interest in, has questions, or wants to reach out to me, the best way to do that would be either calling me at 833-258-2583 or sending an email to info lewlineinvesting.com dot awesome, awesome, awesome.
15:53 – Gresham Harkless
Well, thank you so much again, Jeff. We will have the links and information in the show notes and we often forget that the people that are most successful are those that are reading because there's so much knowledge and information that you can kind of learn from reading, listening to podcasts in so many different ways. So I appreciate you so much in creating, you know, some of those resources and information for people again to be set up for success. Appreciate you, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
16:14 – Jeff Link
Thank you, Gresham, and you as well.
16:17- Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
00:25 - Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.
00:45 - Gresham Harkless
Hello, Hello, Hello, this is Gretch from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jeff's link to Guardian Wealth Advisors, LLC. Jeff, super excited to have you on the show.
00:55 - Jeff Link
So great to be here, Gresham. Thanks for having me.
00:57 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, super excited. And what I wanted to do before we jumped into hearing all the awesome things that Jeff's doing is to read a little bit more about him. Jeff is an investment advisor, representative at Guardian Wealth Advisors, LLC, and the founder of the Blue Line investing process. With 25 years of experience, Jeff has been a proponent of risk-managed investing with firms like Smith Barney, Leg Mason, and still full Nicholas. Today, Jeff helps investors who are within 20 years of retirement grow and protect their wealth in a risk-managed and tax-efficient way in 2020.
During the middle of the pandemic, Jeff published his first book, protecting the Pig, How Stock Market Trends Reveal the Way to grow and Preserve Your Wealth. Jeff, super excited to have you on the show and hear about all the awesome things you're doing. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
01:43 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Well, let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I like to call your CEO story. Sure.
01:51 - Jeff Link
So my story starts back in the mid to late 1990s when I became a licensed investment professional. And at that time, I was pretty much like a lot of other investment professionals. I was kind of a jack of all trades rather than a master of one. Over the next decade or so, the way I worked with my clients, unfortunately, was we rode the stock market roller coaster. We rode the stock market up to the top in 2000. We then rode the roller coaster down into 2003 in the low.
We then rode it back up in 2007, and we rode it all the way back down into 2009. It was about that time that I realized something had to change, this didn't make any sense. I was very fortunate that the majority of my clients were not retiring in that period of time. But I realized that when this happens again in the future, and it will because history is cyclical, what would happen if this happened at that time? And I couldn't do anything differently. So I got to this point where I decided that since stock markets go up far, they rise far off more often than they decline.
It only made sense to go ahead and actually focus on how to do my best to preserve and protect money when the markets go down and when that stock market trend goes down. So that's really why my business exists today. It's to do everything I can to make sure that my clients and myself don't repeat the experiences of the past. Because I remember how awful I felt at the bottom of 2009 and I definitely don't want myself, or if I can help it, my clients to experience that again in the future.
03:19 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate you sharing that and I think that you speak into what I like to call the human aspect of life and definitely a business and all those aspects in between, because I think so many times the big fear can be like, okay, what if I didn't protect my investments enough when that time, but I don't have as much time as maybe I did before. So I love, like in true entrepreneurial form, you didn't decide, well, you know, that's just how it is. You sound like you came up with an idea solution to that problem. So I love that you've been able to.
03:45 - Jeff Link
To do that, correct? Yep. I think everyone needs to learn from the past and say, if I don't want to repeat the experiences of the past, if they were negative, then what can we learn from them? Obviously the positive ones we all want to relive over and over and over again. So I think for everyone, no matter what line of work they're in, what industry they're in, what they do, learning from our mistakes is the best way to learn.
04:07 - Gresham Harkless
Yes, absolutely. What did they say? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. So why not change the game and change this process and the strategy, as I know you've been able to do for your clients and all the awesome things that you're doing? So I wanted to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more about how you're working with those clients, what that process looks like. Can you take us through how you serve your clients and what that looks like? Yeah.
04:27 - Jeff Link
So first let me just say that as you mentioned during the intro, my parent company is Guardian Wealth Advisors, LLC and they are what's called a, we are what's called a registered investment advisor or in the industry, an RIA for short. And so Rias are fiduciaries. We have to do what's best for our clients and we're held to a higher standard than some of the other investment professionals in the industry. And so the main services we offer are investment advisory.
So we'll work with clients in terms of managing their portfolios, investing money, and providing advice. We'll do retirement planning and we also offer retirement plan services and consulting services. For me specifically, most of my clients, when I work with them, I subscribe to what I call the three P's. The first is making sure my clients have a plan. The second one is making sure they follow an investment process. And then the third one is making sure that they actually have a way to monitor their investment progress.
05:19 - Gresham Harkless
Three P's, just because it allows that opportunity to make sure that you are staying true to the plan, the process, and all of those things so that you can get to that ultimate success. Whether it sounds like there are good times or less than good times, which we sometimes experience.
05:31 - Jeff Link
Yeah, I would agree.
05:33 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I want us to ask you now for what I like to call your secret sauce. This could be for yourself individually, the business, or a combination of both. But what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?
05:42 - Jeff Link
Yeah, I would say that what makes me completely unique is my proprietary investment process and I call it blue-line investing. I created it as a result of what I mentioned to you a moment ago. After going through the stock market roller coaster for ten years, I realized this just doesn't, this isn't something I want to do if I can help it in the future. So I went ahead and I went back and I started researching and studying the stock market going back over 95 years. And I actually went back as far as early 1900. And I was looking for the periods, I wanted to isolate the periods in time where there were major declines.
So we're not talking about 5 and 10% corrections, we're not even talking about 15% corrections. We're talking about what I call in my book trend corrections. And this is where you suffer two horrible things. You lose money and you lose time. So those are the environments that negatively impact all investors in the same way. It's bad for everybody. So I went through it. I basically wanted to look for those individual isolated moments where, hey, let's look and see if there are some commonalities or with the indicators that I use and the indicators I use are available to every investor out there through a lot of different common software programs.
I wanted to look and say when these bad periods happened, did they all line up? Were the indicators all in a certain formation? That would give us a greater probability to say, hey, if we see this again in the future, we may not have a crystal ball for what's coming in the future, but we should be able to say when this happened in the past, problems ensued. And so that's what my process was built upon, was looking for all the characteristics and the indicators that when they line up in a certain way, we should all be paying attention. Because what happens with most investors is they'll basically buy the highs and they'll sell the lows because of emotional reactions rather than being proactive.
In order for us to go ahead and try to limit the major investment losses, we have to be looking forward, not backward. We have to be proactive, not reactive. For me, that was basically what this process is all about. It is recognizing historically what transpires when these major declines are likely. How does the pattern unfold? I actually wrote about it in chapter six of my book and showed in the past 50 years, 45, 50 years, how the last three major stock market tops in the United States all followed the same pattern. So that's outlined in chapter six in my book.
08:07 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I love that you've been able to kind of distill that information and that knowledge down, that resource down for people within your book, and of course, all the work that you're doing as well. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
08:25 - Jeff Link
Yeah, for me, it's going to be very pertinent to me. For me, it was learning about trends and specifically trend channels in the financial markets. You know, I first learned I didn't know anything, any of this stuff when I first came into the business, because when I first became licensed, the original company that I did that through was Legg Mason. And really the majority of the work I did through them and the training I received was about product knowledge, not market knowledge. And so that's what a lot of investors need to understand when you hire an investment professional.
We learn a lot and are taught a lot about how to sell products but a lot of people don't understand what makes the markets rise or decline. What do trends look like? Things of that nature. So in late 2008, around that time, I started learning about trend channels through the late Richard Russell. He was the founder of Dow Theory Letters, and the blessing of that for me was in terms of reading his subscription service. And then that basically caused me to look into other information and do other research as well. It helped me to look at the marketplace from an entirely different perspective that I'd never considered before.
09:29- Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you sharing that so much. And I think so many times whenever you're an expert or you spend some time within your specific vertical, or whatever your excellence is, or your gift or your ability, you start to realize that once you drill down more and more and more, while others on the outside might consider it to be like a crapshooter, to consider it to be a game or something along those lines, if you start to understand, and I don't want to say the rules of the game, I feel like that's the wrong phrase, but you start to get accrue that knowledge and that information.
It, to me, doesn't guarantee success, it sounds like, but it seems like it puts you closer and closer to that certainty that you ultimately want to have, especially with something related to finances. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. You might have already touched on this, but this is a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client, or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.
10:17 - Jeff Link
Yeah. So I would say for every business owner that's listening to this podcast or every executive, I would say, don't be a Mallory. And as you already mentioned, last year I wrote my first book. I hope you can see that, okay? Called Protecting the Pig, how stock market trends reveal the way to grow and preserve your wealth. And obviously the pig is a piggy bank, and so that represents your financial wealth. So that's why I would encourage everybody right now, this is the time to prepare. This is the time to be saying, what don't I know? We know that whatever the old adage is, whatever goes up eventually comes down.
That's something that I think people should be thinking about. That's what they should be realizing, that if you have wealth that you don't want to watch yourself lose up to half of it or more in the next downturn, this is the time to be educating yourself and making sure that the advisor you're working with is the right one and that whatever process and philosophy you're using, they're the right ones, and you realize what can happen from where we are now sometime in the future, in the years ahead.
11:13 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah. I appreciate you so much for sharing that and especially even that parallel of we study as you said, the trends within our industries. We know that this is maybe a better time to do business. We get more clients during this time. We're paying attention to those trends, but sometimes we forget about that in other aspects when we get outside of our lane, I guess you can say. So I appreciate you so much for sharing that and reminding us of how important it is and that it can be done.
So I think sometimes that awareness around having, you know, a professional like yourself or having that knowledge and information in order to understand these trends and study the trends and know what could set you up for success as much as possible is something that's possible. And we can't do it in our industry, but of course in our finances as well. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEO's on the show. So, Jeff, what does being a CEO mean to you?
11:59 - Jeff Link
Jeff, to me, being a CEO, I look at this, being a chief envision officer, and a chief envision officer is simply somebody who thinks differently, somebody who's always anticipating what's going to come next. So you can be strategic in your decisions. Again, like I said earlier, be proactive. And it's somebody who's not uncomfortable, maybe diverging from the crowd at times. Those, I think, are characteristics and traits that a CEO has to have because if not, they're just going to follow everyone else with whatever the trend is.
And as I said, that would have been me back in, you know, the late 1990s, early two thousand. You ride the stock market roller coaster up, and then you ride it down and you ride it up and you ride it down. And that's really not what people want. People want to make strategic decisions, and you need somebody who's more of a visionary, in my opinion, to see where things are going rather than doing things the way that they've always been done.
12:49 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. And I know when you were speaking about finance, you used the word emotion, and I love that you mentioned that a little bit earlier. And I feel like that came to mind when you were speaking about the vision, because we were talking about trends, talking about doing your homework, due diligence, making sure you're setting yourself up for success, and understanding that a lot of times when times are less than ideal, that's when those emotions kick in and really will test you as a leader, as a CEO, as a visionary, whatever title we might give ourselves to understand and to know that you are staying true to that vision and you were prepared as strategically as possible for those times that will eventually happen.
13:22 - Jeff Link
So those are the those are the that's the whole point of why we don't want to be emotional. We want to follow a process. And again, I'll just say that in my personal research, what I have discovered for myself is markets are just not as random as people believe. Again, this does not mean that you have a crystal ball, doesn't mean you can avoid everything. But at the end of the day, it's very helpful to know what to look for so that you can try to avoid making those emotional decisions that can consume you.
13:47 - Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. The name of the game is definitely to set yourself up as best as possible for success. So I love that you have armed people with so much insight and knowledge. And of course, you're taking some time out with us today. And what I wanted to do now was pass the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best they can get a hold of you, get a copy of your book, find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.
14:08 - Jeff Link
Yeah, sure. So what I would just say is one thing that I do that goes along with the book, it's more helpful if people actually buy and read the book, they'll get more out of it on my website, which I post every month. At the end of the month, what I call the primary trend update. So basically what I do is I take the information I provide in the book about trends and I basically show what the s and P 500 is doing at the end of every month. It's like a little snapshot. So twelve times a year I put out an article that shows people where we are. I provide over time. That's a little bit challenging for people like me.
But if somebody were to pick up a copy of the book and read the book, feel free to subscribe to that. Even if you don't read, don't buy the book. You can subscribe to it for free anyway. So you can go to that and subscribe at www.bluelineinvesting.com forward Slash blog. So you can subscribe or unsubscribe at any time. You want that information just I don't do anything with it. I don't sell it. It's just literally there for your benefit. The book itself, even you can get it almost through any online retailer you'd like. But Amazon has slashed the price, albeit against my desire, to less than $6 right now.
So for $6 you basically can get up to 24 years, 25 years, almost worth of investment experience and knowledge, and you can read it in a few hours. So I would highly encourage everyone to pick up that book. It's priced at a point where you can't afford not to buy it. But if anyone has any interest in, has questions, or wants to reach out to me, the best way to do that would be either calling me at 833-258-2583 or sending an email to info lewlineinvesting.com dot awesome, awesome, awesome.
15:53 - Gresham Harkless
Well, thank you so much again, Jeff. We will have the links and information in the show notes and we often forget that the people that are most successful are those that are reading because there's so much knowledge and information that you can kind of learn from reading, listening to podcasts in so many different ways. So I appreciate you so much in creating, you know, some of those resources and information for people again to be set up for success. Appreciate you, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
16:14 - Jeff Link
Thank you, Gresham, and you as well.
16:17- Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
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