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MAKING CENTS OUT OF THE NEWS
Blog #01
(January 7th, 2010)
A FINANCIAL PLANNING CAREER MARKED BY COMMUNICATIONS
By Tom McAllister, CFP®
It's a temptation just too difficult to resist - I must begin the new decade (and my 2010 blog series) with some personal reminiscing. It occurs to me that a dominant theme in my professional life has been communication, going all the way back to my rookie year as a stockbroker, when Merrill Lynch put me on a local radio station in Indianapolis to offer the weekday stock market reports. I can still recall my excitement when, one day in August of 1962, the volume of shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange hit a grand total of 1.9 million (around 1/1000th of the 2 billion share daily volume common today).
A year or so later, Merrill made a deal with our local independent television station, WTTV, for me to do a short daily market report for the 9PM Nightly News, a program widely watched by our clients. A crew consisting of a sound man, light man, and video man came to our office just to tape Tom McAllister at his desk! Needless to say, my six children and their friends got a big kick out of Dad being on TV every weekday night. The show continued for six years up until my departure from Merrill in 1969 to manage the Indiana operations for Robert Baird and Company.
Baird took advantage of my broadcast experience and arranged for me to do a "Baird Business Report on Indy's most popular "good music" music station. In 1975, after I left Baird, the name was changed to "The McAllister Report On Business and The Business of Life." (A year later the station switched to a country/westerns format, and it was generally agreed my report was no longer a good fit. The station has been #1 in listenership in Indianapolis ever since.)
By then, though, I had begun my newsletter, originally titled "Tom Talks Turkey" and later changed to "One Man's Opinions". Once issued six to eight times a year, "One Man's Opinions" continues today as a quarterly publication.
Eighteen months ago, my communications broadened into the New Media arena, as my financial planning blog series began. The blogs have been well-received by friends, prospects, and clients. Later this year, I plan to set up a measuring system to track online "hits" to my website.
In my blogs, I plan to continue offering updates on the economy and on the investment markets, as well as my own thoughts and opinions. Along with my public lectures on the cruise ships, and my newsletters, I consider my online communications to be a "payback" of sorts (perhaps even a "paying forward" effort), in recognition of how very blessed I have been to have enjoyed such a long, satisfying and successful, and hopefully ongoing career in financial planning.
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