090: Answering Your Biggest Questions About WealthOps

00:00 - 39:53 | Christopher Nelson: I think I, like many other people, had this vision that when I went through my first IPO, it was going to be all champagne bottles and parties and everything was going to be easy. The reality is there wasn't. Sudden wealth syndrome set in. I was feeling anxious, overwhelmed, and isolated. But the reality is I found a way out through building a framework of how to get my money to work for me. And that's what it's doing today. So I'm excited in this episode to share with you a lot of the lessons learned, a lot of the feelings, the emotions, the ups and downs of how I went from a money maker to being a money manager. Hope you enjoyed this. Welcome back to Managing Tech Millions. I'm your host, Christopher Nelson. And this week, we're going to dig deeper into WealthOps because after last week, I have to admit, I was flooded with questions. Some of them came in through email, there were texts, there were phone calls. What is WealthOps? How did you come up with this idea? And so I want to dig deeper. I want to be able to share with you the experiences that happened to me that helped create WealthOps, which is something that I want to give back to you, that I want to give back to the community. Most of us think that when we come into wealth, from there, it's going to solve all of our problems. And the ultimate answer to that is it's not. It's true what Biggie says, more money, more problems. Because you go from being somebody who's so focused on building something that when you get to the pinnacle and you finally have it, the skill set to steward it is something completely different. I want to pull back the curtains. I want to talk through the genesis of Wealth Ops with you. Some of the moments and then the emotional experiences that I had that really got me thinking about how I needed to do things differently to get a different result. And then some of the discoveries that I had along the way. The thing that I think is important for you to take away from this is that when we're on our personal wealth journey, it's important that we ask ourselves and we ask others different questions. And so my big takeaway for you that I want you to get out of this episode is listen to the way that I thought about things and the questions that I started asking so that you, by the end, you can be thinking about what are the questions that you want to ask yourself on this journey? Where do you want to go? And then also to think more about this framework of WealthOpps and understand if that's something that could work for you as well. So let's dig in and let's get to question number one. Question number one is what was the genesis of WealthOpps? When did you first get the idea that you needed a framework or even this whole concept of managing your portfolio as a business? The precise moment where I knew that I needed to figure it out on my own and develop something new happened in 2012. It was a couple months after the IPO when there was an email in my inbox from Morgan Stanley that said they had some wealth managers that wanted to come out and talk to me about working together after the IPO. Now, it's important that you understand that I had been working on my own stock portfolio since the late 90s. When I was in college, I was studying The Motley Fool and part of their program that taught a lot about stock picking, understanding stocks, and I was very passionate about the stock market. I had a portfolio. So I was thinking that these wealth managers were going to take me to the next level. I was very interested in getting exposure to private equity, real estate, even private equity funds, ownership in businesses and things that I knew were out there, but I had no exposure to. And so at that meeting, when they started presenting to me, As the meeting went on, I started to get more and more disappointed and frustrated because what I realized is that they were presenting to me what a fast food wealth manager would, which is a 70% allocation to gross stocks, 20% to bonds, and 10% to cash. It was something that I thought somebody who had lower than millions of dollars net worth would have. So the point, the line that I crossed was that these financial services companies were not going to serve me, that I was now sort of in some level of awkward teenage years, or my size didn't fit them. And I realized that I was on my own. And so that led me to the first important question that I asked myself, which was, who did I want to learn from? Where did I want to get my education? And this is, I think, really important that you ask yourself this is when you're on your financial journey, where do you want to get your lessons? Now, I do believe that when you talk to a lot of other people, there are books in resources that give you an underlying foundation. Like you think about Benjamin Graham, the intelligent investor. I think that is a phenomenal book that teaches about stock investing that you can really rely on that information, but then. When you're thinking about the personal journey of people managing their wealth, who do you want to learn from? And I'd heard, you know, whispers and new people, what does he do for a living? Well, he manages his own portfolio now. You know, he had an exit and now he manages his own portfolio. And it became clear to me at that point in time, walking out of that meeting with Morgan Stanley, I knew that I wanted to find astronauts. I wanted to find people that were doing it themselves, that were being successful, meaning that they were growing and maintaining their portfolio so that I could emulate something like them. And my commitment to myself was I want to then write down this framework. So it's something that I can teach my kids. because not having come from money, I had this idea that when I made it, when I finally got to the point where I made the money, that I was gonna be able to build something that I was gonna be able to pass on to my kids and potentially their kids. So that was truly the genesis, that point of creation where I realized there's a failed system. And what I've come to understand since then is that in the financial services industry, if you have $1 million to I'd say $25 million net worth, you have to do a lot of figuring it out on your own. You could probably go and put a portion of your portfolio with a traditional wealth manager, but if you want to get into private equity or you want to do venture capital investing, you're probably going to have to do that yourself. And I know I'm speaking in generalizations. I'm sure there's some small shops, but there's not something that's openly available. Like you have to go do a lot of research, but this is why. Wealth Ops, this framework that I've created, is a way to think about your business, is a way to think about you as a CEO and growing and building it, where you're asking yourselves the questions of how do you know what you know, where do you learn and get your information, and then how do you find other people doing the things that you want to do and be able to you know, partner with them, meaning that you can walk alongside them and understand what they're doing. So that was the genesis of WealthThoughts. Let's get to question number two. So question number two goes a little bit deeper into that experience than question number one, and I'm laughing, but people really want to know what frustrated me the most about this experience with these, what I call fast food wealth managers, you may call traditional wealth managers. What frustrated me the most in that particular conversation I think was the fact that they wanted to take control of my money without giving me in return what I deemed as something of higher or more important value. So let's go deeper. They were advocating at the end of the meeting, they said, we want to give us 50%. When you get to this first window, self half of it, give it to us and we're going to take care of it. And so then as I dug in and I said, well, what does that mean? Here's a portfolio that I manage in my performance. What can you do? And can you get me into alternative investments? Two things happened right then. Number one is they started negating, they started talking about alternative investments in terms of a lot of risk and not a lot of reward or too risky. It's like they didn't even talk about the reward. They just kept talking about the risk. And then they kept telling me that they were going to put me into different vehicles that had different fees that cost more than what I was investing in today. They didn't really articulate to me the value. I didn't see that they were giving me any education. And I was very frustrated with what I would consider a lack of transparency. And the more that I dug into the business model, I think I really struggled with the asset center management business model, especially if they're going to be demanding, you know, 1% or even more in some cases. If they're not incented when the stock market goes down. Like when your investments aren't doing well and they still continue to get paid, what's their incentive? Just to deliver bad news that you know everywhere else, right? They're not incented to make moves and do the upside. And their entire business model, like how do they make more money? Getting more money assets under management. So the majority of the time, what you'll find in a lot of these companies is that they make money by going and getting new clients, and they're going to be spending time working with new clients and doing planning. But the true investment that they're doing is very similar to what you could get out of. And I think there's been a lot of data out there that says, you know, index investing or very simple, straightforward, disciplined investing will get you the same result. So that's, I think, the lack of transparency and also the lack of education. I think, You know, myself now having spent the last 12 years researching, investing inside of private equity, I understand what it is. I understand what it isn't. I've, you know, uh, seen some of the pitfalls, some of the challenges I've seen, some of the successes. And I think that it's important to have that in your portfolio. I think that everybody should go out and look today. I saw an article last year in 2024 talking about the fact that more and more large companies are going private and that private equity is starting to eat the public market. So what does that tell me as an investor that if I want exposure to different asset classes or if I want exposure to different types of investments, I have to get into private equity myself. They're not gonna help me. and they weren't able to raise their hand and go, we can't do that. This is a great investment. The other thing I've learned is, as I've been in my private equity business, and as I put together mobile home park funds, I would have guys that were wealth managers, even though they don't offer it to their clients, they're investing themselves. So I feel like there's just something wrong with that. And I just really want to work with people that are incredibly transparent through and through. And so that's my personal preference. So what does that mean for you? Ask questions, ask, like, like, get curious. Like what, why are so many people and I know I have episode 20 on my podcast that gives an overview of what is private equity, what are alternative investments, understand what that is. And why do people have that in their portfolio? Why do people have it? And I've shown on the newsletter of Managing Tech Millions, I've posted a number of times the portfolio of the Tiger 21, where they have 25% is in public equities. Another 25% will be in private equity sort of businesses, another 25% in real estate. And then you have another 25% that's in hedge funds or commodities and cash and other things, and maybe even venture capital investments. So when you see the ultra wealthy, very, very diversified, and then you see, you know, what they're serving to the middle class again, you know, they're not talking honestly about like what, and they may not even be educated themselves about what the truly the ultra wealthy are doing. They're just trying to serve you a business model that, you know, may work, that may work for some people. And that's what they prefer. So that was question number two. Let me move on. Here's a quick break. If this is really hitting home with you, if you are asking yourselves questions and you want to be able to get a thoughtful framework inside of your inbox every single week, if you want notifications on the new podcasts that drop, every single Tuesday. And if you want to follow Wealth Ops and how I'm managing my personal portfolio, go to managingtechmillions.com, sign up for our newsletter, because that's what you're going to get in your inbox weekly. I think more important than anything else, if you really want to learn, why don't you learn by watching over your shoulder? That's what you can get at a Managing Tech Millions newsletter that comes out every Tuesday. And also stay tuned to the podcast, subscribe on YouTube, or follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, Apple, Spotify, et cetera. Thanks. So question number three. Why and how did I start thinking of my portfolio like a business? This is one of the things that I talk about that I get a lot of questions because we haven't been taught this, right? You have personal finance, you have a personal portfolio, Why is this concept that you think of it like a business and why and how? So the why came from when we did start harvesting some of the stock and bringing the money into our personal accounts. And we wanted to then, you know, our step was let's divest, let's take money out of the stock, get it to cash as tax efficiently as possible, then we'll invest. Well, we brought it into our personal accounts and yeah, then you start having money and you say, wait, we haven't, you know, taken ourselves on a vacation or maybe we need to upgrade a vehicle. And you start going through all these what if statements, And all of a sudden, wants become needs. And this money just starts bleeding away. And my wife and I, my wife Regine and I, who both are incredibly intentional people, we want to really be thoughtful about things. That's part of both of our personal mantras. We realized that by keeping it personal, it was bleeding into our lifestyle. So we knew that we wanted to start separating it out. So that was the first, like, why did we start thinking about a business if we started thinking like, let's separate it, let's make, let's put this money aside, because we really want our equity to go into building this investment machine that makes money for us while we sleep, right? It's really, you know, Robert Kiyosaki, right? The book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, quadrant four, how do we get our money to work for us? Well, let's stop, you know, turning wants into needs and let's set it aside. Let's set it apart. The other thing that I do, like in this whole asking questions, you always want to ask, what do the people who have that next level of wealth that I want, that I aspire to, What do they have or what do they do? And so I have always been studying ultra wealthy. The cutoff is around $25 to $30 million, but these are the people that are able to participate in multifamily offices, or they've truly built a business around their wealth. As I started to study them I talked to one of my good friends who is a chief investment officer for a private family office, one family. I started to understand that they organize their wealth into a business because of two things or three things actually. So number one is when it's optimized as a business, you're going to get more benefit from it because it's much more tax efficient. You can also bring resources to it to help it scale sort of like services, tax services, estate services, et cetera. And then the third thing is, if you're like, you're treating it with intention. Like it becomes intentional, right? When it's your personal finance, you know, now I know there's a movement with family boardrooms and other things to create family mission and visions, but that's not always true. But if you're creating a business, you want to have a mission and vision for that business, or it's generally speaking, not going to be successful. So. It was really this understanding that that's what the ultra wealthy did. And the reality is to do that ourselves, it's not that hard. It wasn't that hard to go spin up an LLC, move the assets there. Oh, wow. All of a sudden we have some non-deductible expenses we can make deductible. We can start moving over our investment education. We can get our computers that we use to do this on. We can get other things, right? We started seeing this and the more that we saw, the more we participated, we realized there's a lot of benefit in that. But again, the question to you is, you know, asking yourself, like, what, how do you want your money to perform? And then also thinking about how you want to, I think one of the big drivers for us is, how do we want this to go to our children? Right? We have three sons. Do we want to then carve up and everybody gets a pile of money with, you know, the United States little to no financial education, and then they have their own sudden wealth syndrome. Or do we want to create a business that we're running, and then we show them how to run that business, and then they run that business. And then they can, depending on how they benefit in the business, they can get compensation from it. And because of the fact that they are one of our sons, they will get one or two benefits that aren't entitlements. We wanna make sure that it goes to people that are contributing to our community, to our business. They can get some benefits from that, sure. But this was all part of our thinking of how do we really take this wealth and treat it as something set apart so it can provide benefit to us? And then also, how do we pass that on to the next generation? Some of that stuff takes some reflection. Some of that stuff can be heavy. But the reality is, many of us in tech are making the kind of wealth that we can do those things if we make the choices. You know, this is one of the reasons that we chose to do that as well. So that was why and how we started thinking of our portfolio as a business. Let's move on to number four. So the next question was, you know, from a couple of people, they asked me, why do I think tech professionals struggle with wealth management and what are some of the things that they struggle with? So having been in the education space and then also the private equity space for, You know, seven, eight years now, you know, working with other technology employees. One of the things that I've come to discover is that technology employees are incredibly smart. We have to study, you know, usually advanced mathematics, computer science, or even if you are in, you know, marketing or you're in human resources, technology employees, if you're going to trade your time and talent for equity, that is because these companies are recruiting incredibly talented people. Tech professionals are smart. And then they also don't have deep financial education. This creates an interesting problem because what they realize is they start asking questions into the financial services industry and they see some of the same things that I saw as well. Okay, well, wait, I'm actually being offered services for the middle class. It's not a portfolio that really suits my needs. But they also don't have the time to go find and do the education. And so what they do is they end up making, because of that, because they're smart, and they also don't have deep financial education, they start making some bad choices. Number one is they get overexposed into a single stock position. They've been working for a great company for many, many years. I know this has happened to Google employees, Nvidia employees, Amazon employees. And then they build up these huge positions in a single company that, number one, are riding the ups and downs of that company. Number two, because it's not diversified, they probably still have significant capital gains that they're going to need to pay against it. And then it's also not working in the way that they want it to. So they're in these tech growth stocks, but they really want income because they want to be financially free or they want to be able to work less and maybe do some consulting. And so essentially they become trapped by these overexposed positions. They don't know how to get out of it. The other thing is they just get paralyzed by analysis where they keep wanting to do something they're studying, but they haven't started putting anything into effect. So maybe they actually have a really large cash position. And the third thing of being smart and then also the lack of financial education is they start pushing in big into venture capital and they believe, oh, because I made my money in tech, I can actually go and place bets on other tech stocks. And I've heard two or three disheartening stories of where people took a lot of money that they'd made you know, in a single company, put that on some venture capital bets. And all of them didn't go anywhere because those are incredibly high risk, high reward investments. And now they are starting over again. So that's, I mean, to me, when I think of, you know, what struggle is, is when you are smart, but you don't have, you know, a core foundational education in finance, it can be hard. I also think that many just don't have a playbook and they don't know who to trust. Right? They don't trust the financial advisors and they don't have a playbook, meaning, again, there's not a consolidated, you know, education for people in this two to $20 million network of how do you actually run your portfolio as a business? What are some of the steps that you need to do to architect it, build it? And then how do you actually run it? What does that even look like? You know, what are some incremental steps to start getting into private equity, all those things. And so this is one of the reasons that, you know, I developed WealthOps was to give technology professionals, right, something that is very, very straightforward and approachable in a way that they can think about starting their business, building it. And then also how do they continually improve themselves and improve their investments by sort of thinking through this cycle that's very similar to DevOps, which I think many of us in tech are familiar with. So that was question number four. Question number five is, as I stated in, I think it was the first episode that came out in 2025, that I'm starting the WealthOps Collective, which is a group coaching where I'm gonna be managing a set of people through managing their portfolio alongside mine to the WealthOps methodology. So why group coaching? I think group coaching is incredibly powerful when people are able to look over their shoulder and watching somebody else who's developed expertise do something that they want to do and be able to ask questions around that is invaluable. I then think when other people, other smart, engaged people are asking questions too, that then accelerates learning. So I think one plus one equals three. I get to see somebody doing what I want to do. And I see and understand what success looks like. I'm asking questions. I'm getting thought of partners that are doing the same thing. And then everybody is encouraging each other. Everybody is making sure that people are getting outside of their comfort zone and staying safe and doing things together. So this was a big reason why I thought group coaching is a great fit for a WealthOps focused community where we're managing our portfolios together. So this is where I am going to be managing my portfolio. So this is where you'll get the inside view, where you get to see the numbers, you get to see the investments, you get to see the good, the bad, the ugly, and the super successful. What are some of the things that are working and why, and what's different from what's happening in the stock market to what's happening in private equity? And I have participated in group coaching myself. I think it's a very, very valuable tool. And ultimately, I think that investing is a team sport, that the more that we work together, the more that we can make each other better and harden each other. More than anything, I love surrounding myself with super smart people that are investing in different types of companies and different types of investments and helping each other learn together as we go. Somebody asked a very interesting question. I thought it was very insightful. It's like, you know, what are some of the principles that you need to adapt if you want to be effective at Wealth Ops or, you know, the way that I also read it is like managing your portfolio as a business. I think some of the principles are very similar to running any type of business. You need to have focus. You want to be focused on your business, the health of the business, the goals of the business. You want to be disciplined and you need to dedicate time. Focus, discipline, and time are what you really need. When I think about some of the principles that help us in tech, they apply the same, which is continuous learning. How do I do things differently to get a different result? That's critical. I know in hyper growth companies, the things that got me here will keep me here, so I have to keep learning to keep moving in a new direction. And it's continuous improvement. So if I'm learning and I'm getting lessons learned, I then need to fold that in the next year. And that's really part of, in WealthOps, the learn and the optimize steps in this cycle that we go through is so essential. But I think it's really, you know, let's keep it easy. And this is the whole thing if you want to keep it simple, but if you are focused, disciplined, and you dedicate time to your portfolio as a business, you're continuously learning and you're continuously improving. You're going to get a really solid result because most people, I think their portfolio struggle because they outsource it. And they're just looking for, you know, sort of like the, you know, minimum viable product, like what, what is just going to get me a result. But when you are very intentional, you take ownership and you're looking to optimize all the different corners of it. And you're very focused and disciplined and investing time in it. You're going to be surprised at the result that you're going to get. Question number seven. What was the surprising strategy that you learned from the ultra wealthy? I'd say that the strategy, I think it was more of a concept that what I learned is, I learned really the big difference, the way the ultra wealthy view their portfolio versus the way that middle class and fast food wealth managers are sort of giving us this view of our portfolio. And sometimes it's not even just fast food wealth managers. It could also be even some of these fire movements and other things where the portfolio is viewed as a storehouse. where I want to go to get a bunch of acorns, I'm putting the acorns in there. And you know, I can actually go in and trade up and get higher value acorns. But I really have this storehouse that I want to build up. And then I want to draw down the storehouse. And when the storehouse is almost close to empty, meaning like, you know, when I'm about ready to pass on from this world, then I take what's left and I give the rest of the acorns to my kids, my family, whoever I want to donate to, and then I move forward. But then my barn is empty and it's over. Versus the ultra wealthy, they see their portfolio as an orchard where they're going around and they're planting trees. They're planting hardwood trees that they see being there for hundreds of years, and they see that they're hard work. They want it to be a legacy. They want it to be something that is making an impact, not just for this generation, but for multiple generations. And they're doing that very intentionally. So they grow different trees that have different fruits. Those different fruits provide different nutrients that help the orchard and the people that tend the orchard carry on for multiple generations. And it's this whole concept of the orchard versus the storehouse that was like this big aha moment for me that Number one, you want to set, the ultra wealthy set their intention on legacy. And number two, they're not afraid of building something that is more robust because they know that if they build it and they cultivate it and they grow it, that it can last for, you know, hundreds of years beyond them. I thought that was really surprising. And, you know, what I took away with this is even though, so this is the ultra wealthy, I'm talking, you know, the 25 million net worth and above is that we can execute the same principles, right? The math plays out, right? If you're able to build out an evergreen portfolio and really create your own orchard, this is something that you can have too. And so that was something that I wanted to fold into WealthOps and really wanted to execute on as well. Question eight, what excites me most about scaling WealthOps? So I came into this year and I've been getting a lot of questions, right? I changed the podcast from Tech Equity and Money Talk to Managing Tech Millions. And now I'm really focused on this framework and teaching other people. So what excites me about scaling it? The number one thing that excites me is helping other people get to financial independence, helping other technology professionals get to the point where their work is optional and they can focus on their mission. I have this deep rooted belief and I know it because I know and I'm surrounded by technology employees who really want to solve big hairy problems in this world. Whether it's people problems, whether it's systems problems, whether it's government problems, climate problems, they want to solve them. We're curious and we like to tinker. We like to fix things and build things, create open source projects, which is how I really see this. And so they, so my excitement in scaling this is getting to unlock other people's minds and understanding and seeing that, oh, I may not have that $25 million net worth, but I can actually go and build my own orchard. I can actually build something that's going to impact the next generation. Because maybe that financial freedom and that purpose may not impact this generation, but maybe it's the next generation. Maybe their kid, you know, doesn't have to worry about Uh, you know, money can get a great education and can then be a scientist that funds their own research. Right. I mean, I mean, when you think it through, when you start unlocking people from having to work for a paycheck, but they can actually have a, a, this entity that, you know, rewards contribution that rewards creation, who knows what they can do. So that's what really gets me excited. It also gets me excited to just create a community that's really focused on building healthy portfolio businesses together. I love talking about this stuff and I have a group of people that we've been doing this together informally for years. So when I think about formally doing this together, meeting on a regular basis, getting together live in-person meetups and doing different things, I just get really excited because the people who are in this, who really want to do this, they're super passionate about it and they come up with all sorts of great ideas. And I absolutely love that. So it's increased impact, foster innovation and build legacies. Those were the things that I wrote down here that I thought were really important, but that really gets me excited in scaling this. How do I define legacy and how does WealthOp support it? It's a really personal question. And I think for me, legacy is defined on how can I, you know, pass on my beliefs and my impact to the next generation and give them resources so that they can compound that effect. That's ultimately how I see the legacy, right, is this includes family involvement, like getting my kids educated and my sons so that they can understand how, you know, money really works and they can leverage and utilize that themselves. But then they can take this broader mission that may not be about helping enterprise, but maybe about helping people, you know, and helping, you know, basic needs and solving big problems where they don't need to, um, you know, they can bootstrap themselves. They can go and figure it out. But that's really what legacy is to me. And I think in this, my legacy and the legacy I want for WealthOpps is I want technology employees to be able to feel confident and have the education so that they can answer their biggest questions when it comes to working for tech equity and managing the money that comes with it. If I can help reduce people's stress in that period when things are stressful in other parts of their lives, but they feel confident about this and know, have a framework to move forward and make decisions. I think that would be an incredible legacy to leave behind. Well, those are all the questions that I have for today. And number one, thank you so much for sending those in. If you have any more questions, just when you subscribe to Managing Tech Millions, the newsletter, you can reply to any of those newsletters and it comes to me and I answer all the questions and I consolidate the questions and you can hear, answer those here, but I want to answer your questions. And I want everybody to stay tuned. We're going to, you know, as we continue on, we're going to be doing some podcasts on, you know, what are some of the asset classes and where I'm looking to invest and start deploying capital this year. I want to be focusing in the first half of this year on divestiture. What do you think about strategies? and getting input from other experts on how they think about divestiture as well and how we can put together a framework that you can utilize so that you can be planning your own. Also thinking about what's the best way and what are the best tax professionals that you need to work with that can also save you more of what you make. That's what's coming next. I'm super excited. My ask to you is if you like the podcast, you like the direction that we're taking, please leave us a review. You can do that on Apple, on Spotify. You can also do that on our website, but please leave us a review. That really helps get the message out there. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time.