We want to thank Bob Kretschman, in particular, for helping us create content and develop article ideas over the past several months. It could not have been possible without the help of his Kretcom Communications. Many readers have spoken with Bob in interviews and I have personally come to appreciate his sense of humor and business perspective, in addition to his ability to put May-Investments “on the map” in the local media community.
The eMag was designed to be a ten-article monthly publication incorporating timely and interesting articles of local interest to our target audience, folks enjoying and beginning to plan for their retirement. Our strongest readership, however, has always been the articles that detail what is happening in portfolios. What I hadn’t anticipated, however, was that by tying ourselves to a monthly publication schedule, the timeliness of what we write would be impacted as well. In the past, we’ve been free to write about portfolio changes shortly after they occur, and market events as they unfold.
Just as you read a newspaper for one purpose, and a monthly magazine for something else, our most widely read articles were about time-sensitive issues more appropriate to a blog or newspaper, than to a monthly reader.
Another goal of the eMag was to incorporate information about broader financial planning topics, taking advantage of the expertise that Barbara Traylor Smith (President of Retirement Outfitters) has in Income Planning and insurance, and the experience that Kim Last (Kimberley A. Last Financial Services, Inc.) has in Long-term Care planning and many other topics. Unfortunately, because they own their own companies and have their own compliance people to satisfy, it was never really possible to integrate our information dissemination and education efforts.
While it’s easy for us to “play in the same sandbox” in order to provide clients with better and more comprehensive financial services, we were never able to convince the bureaucrats that “doing a better job for clients” was, in fact, an industry “best practice.” Too bad.
Fortunately, the short experiment with our eMag did teach us a lot about formatting and publishing, in addition to what we learned about misguided and inflexible regulatory insanity. We can continue to use parts of the eMag format to get the message out about upcoming workshops and seminars, and we will continue to include links to outside articles of interest, as well as our own internally generated posts.
Most importantly, our keys goals of being cooperative with clients’ full team of advisors, and fully transparent about the portfolio management process, still rule the day. Let us know your thoughts so we can continue to improve the May-Investments communications strategies.
Douglas B. May, CFA, is President of May-Investments, LLC and author of Investment Heresies .
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