The size Materhorn

At the recommendation of this guy Michael Kitces, who's a true guru for financial planners in the sense that he and his team have built the best continuing ed platform and have really thought about how to do our jobs right, year over year, I started listening to a book called Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. According to the book, Dan Sullivan is a hugely influential coaching guru for entrepreneurs -- and he certainly talks a mean game and his company charges a lot for seminars. Hardy publishes a lot of columns and books and stuff.

They talk an awful lot about size, getting big, "going 10x", etc. And I guess that given that they are catering to entrepreneurs, that should not be surprising.*

But that does beg the question: to what extent is size or scale the best measure of achievement and attainment? It's hard to get away from it in American society, though at least we don't live in Texas. So often people are looking at the size of your house, how much money you have, how big your muscles, penis, or breasts are, etc. We love bigness. And of course size and scale need not always be interpreted literally. People also focus on rising high within prestigious institutions, government, etc. Accolades.

But is this all the real deal? How important is it? I remember at the beginning of the lockdown when I read Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, how refreshing it was that a certain number of the people who were profiled in the book had come home from WWII and done modest things in small towns but were just all-around good community- and family-members, and how refreshing that was.

I suppose I must confess that I struggle with this personally because my own trajectory was altered somewhat coming out of the cannon. Had I gone off to Yale and focused on achievement and rising, I might have rocketed off like more of my classmates. I didn't. Part of it was substance abuse and mental illness related, but part of it also was just a sense that those people's values were kinda skewed. I was definitely a purist and still am. 

Yet I do see that there is a value to good that can be done in the world by people who build bigger platforms, that I see. The key thing would appear to be being centered around good values and focusing on scaling one's span of influence.

* In the book Sullivan waxes poetic about how the most important thing he has done and the thing he's most proud of is creating jobs, hundreds of them. He says he has large numbers of people who have been on his team for more than 20 years. I reasoned that, if that was the case, his firm's 401k should be really large, because people who have been working with a successful business should be making good money and saving a large chunk of it. So I looked up the 5500 (the Department of Labor annual filing on his 401k). In fact, there's not that much money in there. A little more than $2 million, with 33 participants or so.

Now, it's entirely possible and indeed even likely that an entrepreneurial enterprise like this is light on true W-2 employees and long on 1099 self-employed types. I get that. Even still, if you have 33 employees and you're paying them decently and they stick around for 5-7 years on average, your 401k should be bigger. If they're not sticking around that long, you're not really building a firm. If they're not saving enough, you're not giving them good counsel. Something smells odd.