I can't quite believe I missed this, but yesterday, 23rd July marked five years from when I first put this site fully live and told the world about it. Since then it has become a large part of my life, although it remains very much a sideline to my day-job as Managing Director of Jacksons Wealth in Penzance.
I set up the site with the simple aim of putting out the message that personal finance was simple enough for anyone to understand, and that understanding leads to empowerment. So many people do not engage with their finances because of a lack of understanding, fear of getting it wrong, or for lots of other reasons, and I wanted to be a small part of addressing that problem. This also played into my desire to achieve some sort of bigger legacy, rather than the numerically limited job I can do one-on-one for my clients at Jacksons.
This thinking coincided with my reading Crush It, a book by the legend that is Gary Vaynerchuk, which encouraged me to believe that I could get the message out there using the magic of social media. Gary did it with wine, why couldn't I do it with personal finance?
So I bought a Flipcam, set it up on Penzance prom and talked to it for 2 minutes and 16 seconds. Quality improved quite a bit over the years, and to date, the videos, all 295 of them, have been viewed 108,670 times. Not in GaryVee's league, but not too shabby.
I made the switch to podcasting in November 2012, but only began releasing shows weekly in May 2013. There are now 119 sessions of the podcast live and as a medium it has opened up doors for me that I never anticipated. The podcast has been downloaded 323,819 times since I began, which tells you something about the relative merits of audio over video perhaps.
Almost all of the videos and podcast sessions are still here (with the exception of the handful of live video shows I did, which were wiped from the Livestream servers some time ago). Search for a subject and you'll likely find several videos and a couple of podcast sessions covering it. For those getting started with their personal finances, the insightfully named Getting Started page offers some initial advice.
I get emails, iTunes reviews and YouTube comments regularly from folk thanking me for my time in producing the content, which is lovely. What really gets me excited though is when people tell me they have made changes and taken action, and are feeling empowered and excited as a result. Information is useful, education is powerful, but taking action is the whole point.
An unintended consequence of my work here is that MeaningfulMoney has become a major source of new client enquiries to Jacksons. Many of my listeners and viewers have become clients, and I am very grateful to you all for your trust in someone whose voice you heard in your ears or whose chunky frame you watched on YouTube before you decided to get in touch!
Some brief thank-yous to end. Thanks to Richard Allum and Ben Crockford for encouraging me after I showed them the early videos before going live.
I am eternally grateful to Seven Investment Management who have sponsored this site for four years now, which has enabled me to upgrade equipment and to spread the word more widely than I could otherwise have done.
Thanks to Gareth Thompson and the guys at CodePotato for being quick to respond to panicked emails when I break something on the site.
Thank you to my colleagues at Jacksons Wealth for indulging my sideline for these past five years and for helping me build a practice we can all believe in.
Tons of love and gratitude to Joanne, Ellie & Kate, my three beautiful ladies, for releasing me to have time behind my Macbook to build this site.
And finally thanks to you, the visitors, viewers and listeners to my content over the last five years. It amazes me still that anyone would want to listen to a dodgy northern accent each week, but thousands of you do, and I am humbled.
Soli Deo Gloria.
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