The Biggest ROI of My Career

How $275 became the smartest professional investment I ever made

Most who have been in the business long enough have encountered one of those situations when a client bought a stock so long ago, at such a low price, that the “% gain” that shows on the statement when you review their legacy portfolio makes you do a double take. The math of the gain “can’t be right,” because it is some absurd four or five digit % that just strikes you as surreal. But it happens a lot, usually because the math of compounding just sort of does that with 30-year+ holding periods, and that gets magnified with those extraordinary performers.

I have such a situation in my portfolio, too, only the one I refer to doesn’t show on my statement. I could argue I have compounded this investment over 60% per year when I do the calculation on the $250 a year I used to pay Nick Murray, the $275 I paid for some period of years in between, and then the $350 he charges now – and put that up against the value I believe it has created in my business and on my own balance sheet. I don’t say it hyperbolically and I don’t say it to flatter Nick … I say it because for an annual cost that is about equal to two weeks of my dry cleaning bill, I believe Nick’s annual newsletter has been a higher % return for me than those who bought Microsoft stock after Black Monday in 1987. And I am being literal in the math here.

Now, my actual “outlays” could be calculated with more than the $250-300 of annual newsletter cost, as I have attended every single annual symposium in NYC he has ever done (though he took a few years off post-COVID), and I have viewed those events as equally meaningful in the value they have given me. But I do not say this to tout Nick’s newsletter, or even to tout the annual October day-long event (though I consider both to be beyond indispensable in my life and career, and in the life and career of any advisor who wants to experience the flourishing this business represents). I say all this to tee up with as much deserved drama and flair why it is that I have benefitted so much from Nick – to the point where I quite literally credit an enormous amount of the success I have been blessed with in this business to him and his work product – indeed, to the love he has poured into his post-practice career. This edition of B2Bahnsen is not a commercial for Nick – it is my own testimony of some lessons learned that changed my life, and I believe can change yours.

So the caveat first. Of all the people I have ever respected at a deep and impactful level – whether they were mentors in my life, or scholars or people of great achievement in history – there is not a single one I agree with on every thing they have ever said. My late father was the smartest man I ever met, but he got a couple things wrong (ok, or I did). Larry Kudlow is one of my best friends and heroes, but he’s off on one or two things. Even John Calvin, Alexander Hamilton, Ronald Reagan, William Buckley, Milton Friedman, and Abraham Kuyper managed to be off on some things – and that’s okay. Nick would disagree with me on a few things I believe about investing and practice management (not much), and I do disagree with him every now and then (not much). That this caveat has to be said is an unfortunate by-product of our age – that anything less than sycophantic tribalistic fawning is misconstrued, or put better, widespread appreciation for one’s work and impact is assumed to be sycophantic tribalistic fawning. If you find something I say somewhere not compatible with something Nick says somewhere, it’s because two reasonable men might disagree on a few things. Whoa! But it does not change the underlying point that Nick’s contributions have been vital to my development as a finance professional, and ultimately to the fulfillment I have found in this business. Let me share why.

Many advisors who have benefitted from the work of Nick Murray could give different answers to what they consider his “unique value proposition” to be. I have no doubt the various answers that would circulate out there will all be true for the people giving them. For me, I believe that Nick’s constant, unwavering, extraordinary reiteration of these three things represents the source of the massive return on investment I have received from his work:

1. Your satisfaction in this career is directly correlated to the quality of clients you choose to work with, and you have FULL control over how that will go for you

2. Your sole focus in all you do should be on inputs, not outcomes

3. Our concern is to be trusted, which is really to say that our primary concern is to be trustworthy

Nick has other areas of focus in his advisory and consultative efforts. He has provided some extraordinary resources over the years. His love of his own family (from long-time spouse and life partner to his children, his in-laws, and his grandchildren), is inspiring. He values history. He is a true optimist and understands the source of human progress to be the God-given capacity of human beings. He has various expressions of an underlying investment philosophy I often enjoy hearing. All of these things, and many more, add to the value of the subscription and relationship. But I believe the three things I itemized above have been religiously reinforced by Mr. Murray since my rookie year in the business, done so artfully and persuasively, and have resulted in a business and personal result beyond any expectation an honest person could have had.

The issue of the quality of clients we work with is not a statement about their asset level, their revenues, or their growth potential – it is a statement about the trust they have in you, their willingness to follow your advice, and the general positivity your relationship with them creates. I learned from Nick that my joy in this business was directly related to the relationship quality I had with clients. If I came home at night with the burden of unpleasant, disagreeable, untrusting, misaligned clients, I would be coming home unhappy. If, on the other hand, I refused to work with such people, and had enough confidence in my own ability to replace bad clients, or never take them to begin with, I would come home at night with my cup filled, not depleted. This has been the story of my career. I do not seek to terminate client relationships, but I do not hesitate to do so when I deem it necessary. This was a lesson I learned from Nick, and it is a lesson all advisors must learn eventually. Some learn it later than others and take years off their life (quantitatively or qualitatively) because they believe the lie that they “need” a certain client. Every single advisor needs something all right, and it is to NOT have abuse, toxicity, distrust, or misalignment around them. Nick said once that you “do not have to work with any client you don’t like, or any client who doesn’t like you.”

Words to live by.

The “inputs not outcomes” focus is equally profound, and it goes far beyond client relationships, prospect results, and any other measurable component of our business. This theme has been taken from Nick’s work and applied to the way we have built our advisor group and our entire company at TBG. Put differently, we obsess over inputs and plead with our team to not worry about outcomes whatsoever. Before I learned this lesson more thoroughly in my own personal sobriety (many years ago) I fully took to heart in the advisory profession what Nick had taught me – that I cannot control the market, but I can control my own adherence to a cogent investment philosophy; that I cannot control how a prospect reads a proposal, but I can control the wisdom of the advice I give; that I cannot control how something I say will be perceived, but I can control the passion, wisdom, and coherence with which I say it. The amount of time human beings spend (not just advisors, but all of humanity) on things that they have no control over is stupefying. This practice mantra of focusing on our inputs and carrying not a whit about the outcome is pure gold.

Finally, Nick’s unending focus on trust and trustworthiness versus sales and persuasion is career-changing stuff in our business. We lay out the unvarnished truth, we do it with the authenticity and passion that is supposed to accompany truth-telling and conviction, and we leave it there. This dovetails with #2 (inputs not outcomes) and not worrying about clients who need us to “persuade them” dovetails with #1, sort of. There is overlap across all three of these on the Venn diagram but they are distinct from each other, too. We spent a whole year with our team saying that “trust comes from telling the truth, not from what people want to hear.” While the message of #1 and #2 above play into my love of #3, the real differentiator here is the moral duty this point summons. We do not deserve to be trusted when our moral compass is so broken that we tell people what they want to hear. When we tell someone the truth (I don’t know what the market will do this year; I don’t know if my portfolio will beat the market this year; I don’t care a flying rip about the last two questions; etc.) – and then lose the business – we are better off for it. We have banked the cosmic coins for truth-telling, we have maintained our souls, we have avoided a client who will torment us later, and we have earned the trust of the next guy (or gal). Can you see why Nick’s repetition of this changed my life???

I need to wrap this post up now and if I wrote exhaustively on the Nick Murray influence on me it would take a book. I will never spend all the money I have made because of this $275 investment. But you know what is better about my mega-return on Nick than buying MSFT for $0.19 cents a share? Nick’s advice also provides return to the personal side of our well-being. Our balance sheet and business growth are important, and I loathe self-righteous smugness too much to say they aren’t. But unlike a 100-bagger investment, the value proposition of the Nick Murray investment spoke to the truly human dimension of my life – my ability to not bring toxic clients home with me, to not spend dinner with my family obsessing over whether or not a prospect would say yes, to go to bed in peace that I did the right things that day – and to surrender the rest. My entire life’s balance sheet benefitted from this advice – personal, emotional, physical, relational, spiritual, and yes, professional. I am sorry, but I can’t help but feel overwhelming gratitude.

From reading New Financial Advisor 25 years ago to all the newsletters and day-long NY symposiums since, I am indebted to Nick Murray in countless ways. And I hope you are, too. Nick says he doesn’t understand why I am doing this B2Bahnsen newsletter. Well, if he could understand what he had done for me, he would understand why I want to give a little myself. That’s all there is to it.

For those interested, my time with Nick discussing all sorts of things (on video) is here

Check out www.tbgdividendgrowth.com if interested in hearing more about our core dividend portfolio in ETF form

Check out for my Capital Record podcast in defense of free enterprise