How Philip Taylor built FinCon, the leading conference for personal finance creators

You can’t open up YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram without encountering an influencer who gives advice on how to make and save money.

Today, the personal finance content niche is absolutely ginormous. You can’t open up YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram without encountering an influencer who gives advice on how to make and save money.

Today’s guest Philip Taylor anticipated this content explosion all the way back in 2011. That’s when he launched FinCon, a conference specifically designed for personal finance content creators. That first year he attracted around 250 attendees, but over the next decade it grew into the largest conference in this niche, with over 3,000 tickets sold.

In our interview, Philip walked us through how he got into the personal finance space, his strategy for growing the conference, and his ambitions for launching similar conferences in other niche categories.

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Transcript

Hey, Phil, thanks for joining us.

Simon, it's great to be here. Big fan of your newsletter and these podcasts you produce, and so it's an honor to be on with you.

Glad to hear it. So we're here to talk about lots of cool stuff you've done as a media entrepreneur, both in the finance blogging space, but then also in the event space. But to start with, I want to just get an idea of your background. So your background in finance originally was that you were a certified public accountant, right?

That's right. Yep. My father's a CPA and I couldn't avoid it somehow. So I did pretty good on my first accounting exam and then it was all downhill from there. Just kidding. I enjoyed about a 10 year career in finance directly.

Yeah. And what were kind of like some of your early jobs in finance?

So I started out with the big four accounting firm, KPMG. I worked my way through regional firms, small firms, worked for my dad's firm a bit. I enjoyed public accounting a little bit, but I was like, yeah, I'm not sure this is for me right now. So I tried corporate finance on the internal audit side.

So I did auditing, but basically for one company. That was more of like a nine to five role, which I appreciated. And it also allowed me to travel a bit, which was pretty cool. So that was kind of where I hung my hat the last six or seven years of my career. And then about, I'd say, two thirds of the way into that is when I sort of started side hustling into blogging and other endeavors.

Yeah. So you started, I think, a blog in 2007 or so. What was kind of the motivation behind that? Like, were you reading blogs at the time? Were you reading personal finance blogs? Did they exist back then?

They did exist since about 03, 04. So I was reading several blogs, and they were just inspiring me to get out there and share my own story. So that was the genesis of it. When you consume for so long, eventually it's like, okay, well, I have my own thing to start sharing.

And so that's kind of where I found myself in 07. Had some more free time at work after the job and on Saturdays. Didn't really have a kid yet, so it just felt like it was a cool thing to experiment with. I had done a little bit of online marketing in college with our band, and so I was comfortable with websites and blogger.com or blogspot.com early on. So I kind of dabbled with the technology, and being sort of an internet guy. And then my passion for personal finance kind of collided with that.

And when you say a passion for personal finance, that's different from traditional finance. You think of finance like the Bloombergs and Wall Street Journals, and then there's personal finance. What's the difference between personal finance and what a lot of us think of when we think of finance content?

Yeah. Yeah. It definitely wasn't like your CNBC market street stuff. I mean, it was definitely like, you know, getting out of debt, getting ahead for retirement savings and basically putting myself in a position where, you know, I can fast track to financial independence. I guess it was partially driven by dissatisfaction with my career and sort of looking for a way out a little bit.

I was looking at these people on the internet who talked about things like maxing out your retirement savings, not carrying any consumer debt at all. I was listening to a little bit of Dave Ramsey at the time too. That message resonated with me.

And yeah, it was definitely within the personal finance space. So even my accounting degree and my CPA license didn’t really prepare me for everything in terms of managing my money because I was spending more than I was earning. I had consumer debt hanging around and it just wasn't going anywhere financially. I wasn't able to out earn my ignorance on the personal finance side. I needed to kind of learn it and sort of hack myself a little bit and use some of these strategies and tools to move myself in a more positive direction financially.

Yeah. And I remember years ago I interviewed the guy who started the Penny Hoarder. His name was Kyle Taylor. And like his initial version of the Penny Hoarder was just him blogging about – I think he had a massive amount of like college debt or something like that. And it was just him, just a personal blog about all the different side hustles and little tricks he was trying and then just writing about that. And that's how he built it up. Was that kind of what you were doing? Like, were you writing it from a very personal point of view?

Yeah, very personal point of view. That's why I go by PT to this day is because that was my sort of acronym I would go by so I could be anonymous and share these things like the exact amount of debt that I had, the exact amount I was trying to save, my salary. I was sharing these things to be instructive for other people. you know, who were kind of going on a similar journey. And so I felt like that transparency, even though I was anonymous, was helpful for the reader, but it was also helping to hold me accountable to where I wanted to go. 

So, yeah, it was a true blog, a web log in that sense, in that I was marking these moments and moving myself from sort of point A to point B going on this transition. So there was a huge accountability factor to the whole thing. And I really attribute... you know, me jumping into doing the blog, similar to the way someone would count calories; I was using this to sort of track my progress and it helped to kind of hold me to that standard and keep moving forward and gamified it, I guess, to a degree.

And was it called Part-Time Money from the very beginning?

The initial run of it was, I believe, Primetime Money. It was a nickname for me in high school – we all liked Deion Sanders Primetime. I was PT, and so they all called me Primetime occasionally. I just started with Primetime Money, but I went with the short URL of just ptmoney.com because I guess I knew enough to  keep the URL short. Through the years, it's iterated. People just started calling me PT, PT Money. And so I just shortened it to PT Money for a while. And then I would say over the last five years, I made the transition to Part-Time money. I like that because I sort of landed at a place where all my topics eventually started landing on entrepreneurship, real estate, side hustling, things you could sort of do outside of your traditional employment to kind of further yourself moving forward. It mirrored my story of becoming a blogger on the side. And so that's kind of the name that sort of stuck long term with the blog.

And like, what's a hypothetical blog post? Like I opened this kind of special savings account and this is my experience?

Yeah, it's evolved through the years. I mean, I gave myself permission to write about a broad array of topics. And I sort of credit that with allowing me to stick with it for a long time early on. But yeah, what you mentioned, sort of how to get started with savings. Here's good checking accounts to chase to get higher interest rates. Here are side hustle ideas you could start. Here's how I personally started in real estate. I sort of shared my journey of becoming an accidental landlord. I also share my journey of starting FinCon and sort of getting into that business.

When I wrote an article about a particular topic, then I would write a series of articles around that same topic. Lik I once wrote an article, for instance, about how I turned my home into a rental property. Then I started thinking about all the questions people might have around that topic.

And so I wrote articles, you know, sort of helping that person in a complete sense – still adding my personal anecdotes, but it all riffs off that initial experience that I had.

And how long did it take you before you started looking at your analytics and seeing at least some sort of audience response?

Yeah, I would say it was about a year. So I started in 07. And then at the beginning of 08, I actually moved it to WordPress. And so I got more control over the site and just started basically treating it a little more professionally. And I would say that first four months of that year, I was interacting with a lot of other bloggers by that point. We were sharing ideas as to how to kind of grow what we were doing. And that four months really was instructive. And I think by April of 2008, so that would have been about a year since I started it, was when I got my first AdSense check from Google. It was like $120 or something. 

And then that was the golden age of AdSense where you could like embed the code, and then there would be these text ads. And most of the money – I think the clicks came from Google searches where they landed on your page, didn't find what they wanted, but the Google ad itself, the text ad gave them what they wanted. They would click on that and then you'd get like a little bit of payment.

Yeah, that's right. I’d write about, you know, how to get started savings, but then the savings account ad was right there. Perfect. It was a golden age where you sort of put another article into the tank, so to speak, and you feel it rise up, and it was a little bit of an easy button back then.

And was most of it just drive by Google traffic of people looking to solve particular issues? Did you feel like you had some kind of ongoing readership?

You know, I had a small ongoing readership, people who would email and comment. My comments were open back then. I had some interaction there, but to be honest with you, it was mostly Google search driven. At the time, it was a supply and demand issue. I mean, Google needed to serve up answers and the only people really answering them in this way were bloggers out there. As soon as we would put up another answer, Google would send people asking those questions to our pages. That was where the majority of it came. I realized I really enjoyed the interaction with the other bloggers more so than I necessarily did the end user. I started geeking out on the idea of being a blogger, and how to optimize that, what it takes to do, you know, to do it properly. And so that's what ultimately led me to FinCon. I was better at the networking and colleague side than I was at the end user side.

I was blogging back then. It was really hard to build a recurring audience because the blogs that did have a real audience, they were the ones who published like 20 times a day. And both you and I had full-time jobs back then. So there would be some weeks where we would blog a lot, and then some weeks where you wouldn't blog at all. And the main way that people became regular readers of blogs was by bookmarking the sites. And so if you didn't have content there every single day, then they didn't build like a habit out of it. It was just really hard to build a regular readership if you weren't posting at least once a day, if not like five times a day or something like that.

Yeah, I certainly agree with that. The most prolific and the most subscribed to ones were most active for sure. And I wasn't a natural writer. So it was really a challenge for me to be creating this content. I mean, it was lucky I had this passion, and I was also reading so many other blogs that it was easy for me to sort of take their ideas and riff off of them or add my own take. And so by being immersed in the community, you know, that's the only way I can sort of get it done.

But I mean, it was a struggle to get 400 words onto a blog post. And I kind of laugh at that now because the writing process is a lot easier for me. I learned a lot, but yeah, early on, it was a struggle to communicate my thoughts and ideas onto the blog.

And the blog, was it ever generating significant income itself or was it all just kind of side hustle money?

No, it was definitely significant. I would say in January of 2010, it reached to about two-thirds of my corporate salary. And that's when I started seriously considering jumping to do it full-time. 

And that was all through AdSense? 

By then I had also added on affiliate marketing and services. So I was also a freelance writer and editor. So I was doing some editing for some blogs that were run by banks. I was doing some freelance writing. But the affiliate marketing component was probably the biggest piece at that point, and it had the biggest trajectory.

And what were you recommending, like financial products or something like that?

Anything from a checking account, savings account, insurance brokerages. And then we started dabbling in cards, credit cards, rewards cards, travel cards. And that was where, just to be totally frank, I mean, that was where the big dollars were.

And is that like Amazon where you just go on and you just create an account and grab an affiliate fee? Or do you have to have relationships in order to do that? 

Back then it was a lot more open where you could do that, but the issuers, with credit, it's a highly regulated industry and so the issuers wanted to be careful with the messaging that was going out from blogs because they couldn't necessarily control it.

And so they started slow playing the relationships around that time, 2010, 2011. But you could still go through a network and get most of those relationships, especially then if you started showing progress, then you could start, you know, getting access to other programs like Chase and Amex,

but it was pretty easy to get into Discover, Capital One. I feel like those were fairly easy to get into early back in the day – literally just signing up, getting a link up on your site.

And you mentioned that you were kind of networking behind the scenes with other bloggers. Was it just like emailing with them?

Yeah, we had a forum, the money blogger forums or something like that. Jim Wang from Wallet Hacks had created a forum online where all of us bloggers could kind of talk shop and network.

And that was the beginning of, you know, this little industry that ultimately we started building. 

And so then how did that lead to the creation of FinCon? Because I imagine people are like, oh, you should throw an event. I'm very intimidated by the idea of an event because I feel like there's a lot of upfront capital investment involved and there's just so many moving parts. I think the stress would kind of undo me if I were doing that by myself. What was it like for you back then?

Yeah, so for me, it was definitely not something I had a lot of experience in. Had I not been driven by this community that I could tell wanted to be together, this group of bloggers that through the interactions in the forums, commenting on each other's sites, and just sort of getting to know the blogosphere, I had confidence in them. I had confidence in this handful of people, this group of people that I knew were colleagues, were working together, were supporting each other. And so that gave me a lot of confidence to do it. I had been going to some other conferences, general blogging conferences, Blog World Expo, some of the WordPress conferences that they were putting on and coming home from those. The Affiliate Summit was another one I went to. 

And coming home from those, I always felt like, oh, we need our own space. Because when I would go to those events, I would meet in the hallways with other finance bloggers. And I found myself just wanting to spend more and more time with them. It became evident that there was enough energy around this particular niche within the event space that it could support its own thing. And so I think I read an article in January of 2011. So this would have been a year after I had gone full time as a blogger, and it said something like 2011 will be the year of the niche blogging conferences. How about that for a sign from heaven that like I needed to do this? And I remember I was actually maybe even reading it at bed at night, I said to my wife, babe, I just feel like I just need to do this. You know, this is like a moment where I need to take action. So I got up out of the bed that night, went and registered the domain. Financial blogger conference dot com or something like that. And I started building up the website immediately. 

I put up an email list sign up form on that page and I messaged everyone in the forum or put a post in the forum saying, hey, I'm gonna do this thing. If you're interested, sign up. So instantly I think I had 100 people on the list that had gone to the website and signed up and showed interest. 

So there was no information for an upcoming conference. It was just like kind of wish casting with nothing more than a landing page. ‘I want to do this in the future. Sign up if you want to be notified once we have something.’

I hadn't read the Lean Startup book, but apparently I totally used the Lean Startup method to create the conference where I just tapped into the community of people and asked for a raise of hands. Who wants to kind of help me do this thing and start this thing?

And once they started signing up on the email list and showing that they were interested, I just started engaging with them. We picked the location. We picked the date. We picked the format, the speakers. We sort of all did it together in a survey-based – I think I used SurveyMonkey back in the day, to sort of solicit information. And that in combination with the forums was sort of how I switchboarded building this thing, all the ideas behind it.

And the first place you landed on was Chicago. And that would have been fall of 2011?

Yeah. To be honest, I wanted downtown Chicago, like some cool hotel down there. I liked the idea of a hotel because, you know, we weren't going to require a lot of meeting space. I sort of liked the idea of all of us being together throughout the whole 24 hour cycle so that we could hang out in the hallways, have breakfast together, have meals together, be at the bar, kind of facilitate this community. Ultimately I worked with a company called HelmsBriscoe,  and I would highly recommend them. They're a sourcing provider. They work for you as the event planner for free. They get paid a commission by the hotels once they ultimately sign you up on a contract with the hotel.

So they helped me locate different hotels in the Chicago area. And we settled on a suburb of Chicago in Schaumburg. And I think it was the Hilton or the Hyatt. I forget what property it was there in Schaumburg, Illinois. But they had a great meeting space for us. They had a great hotel rate to keep it very affordable for our attendees. And to be honest, it wasn't that far from the airport either. So I would highly recommend HelmsBriscoe for that.

What kind of upfront investment was that? I don't know how this works. Was the hotel like, oh, you can pay us based on how many tickets and hotel rooms you book? Or did you have to pay something in advance? Or was there some kind of minimum guarantee? 

Yeah, so the way I managed the risk of it all was in two parts. Well, for one, I created a... in my mind a budget for conference A and a budget for conference B. So I said if we sell this many tickets then we'll think about doing conference B, but for now let's be safe and conservative and do conference A. The agreement with the hotel did not change necessarily based on that, but my agreement was definitely based on conference A. 

And so I forget, it was somewhere around 100, 150 people that I was shooting for. The hotel agreements for events, if you rent their space – typically, they'll give you the space for free as long as you commit to two things: meeting a certain room block, so a set amount of people booking rooms there for the event, and then commit to a certain amount of food and beverage spend.

So I think my food and beverage spend might have been $10,000 or $15,000. And then I think I committed to like 50 rooms a night or something like that. So it was a very simple, small agreement. The math worked out for them and they took a chance on me. 

So it wasn't much upfront investment. It sounds like $15,000, plus you'd be on the hook if you didn't fill those 50 rooms.

That's it. Yep. That was the commitment. Yeah. And so there was a moment where, you know, I said, okay, here we are. I'm committed to this, you know? By that point I had already sold tickets. I had reached a level of comfort with a commitment from the attendees, and even partners were reaching out to me at that point. People who I was working with on the blog had sort of caught wind of it or I had reached out to them and so I knew they had some interest in being part of it as well, so it sort of felt like I was comfortable making that that commitment, and then ultimately I knew I still had six months to to plan it and I'd figure something out.

The initial version, was it just a one day of programming?

No, it was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So it was two and a half days, actually. Yeah. So once we sort of settled on the dates and the place, we started working on the schedule. And, you know, a lot of people wanted to share. A lot of people wanted to bring their knowledge to the community and I certainly wanted to have time for like meals together and parties and to have exhibits there so people can meet with the brands and set up deals. I wanted it to be a business conference, you know, so I wanted to allow plenty of time for that. We ended up with 225 people.

Yeah, and the internet in 2011 was very different than today, when the personal finance space and the creator economy has gotten so freaking huge. But YouTube, there weren't many full-time YouTubers back then. Podcasting was tiny compared to now. I'm guessing most of the people who were coming were bloggers, because that was  a lot of the creator economy back in 2011. Was that the main thrust of the first conference? What were you educating people about?

Yeah, I told you my passion, which was for the subject of actually creating this content and marketing it and getting it out there to audiences. So that's where my interests lay. But I was open to working with the community to see what programming they wanted. So in the survey, the things that definitely bubbled up were the business topics of how to create your blog, how to make better content, how to get it in front of more people, and then how to monetize it. There was some interest on the personal finance side as well, specifically for topics that were sort of perceived as cutting edge or maybe more technical. And so we did make way for, you know, true personal finance topics being talked about at the event as well. But there was no interest in coming together to sit around, talk about the best way to budget. or, you know, how to get out of debt, because we were all at that point experts on those topics. And so it didn't make sense to necessarily drill down into a lot of them. We just wanted to talk shop. And so that's what we ended up doing. 

I think there might've been like one person there, one or two people there who were comfortable with YouTube by that point who were doing stuff. There were a handful of podcasters that were going at that point, but I had named the event the Blogger Conference, right? And so I initially had committed to it. But by the time we got to the event, I realized it was a bigger idea even than blogging. And so I felt like the blogging term was handicapping the event already from the beginning. And so I immediately just shortened the event's name to FinCon after that first year and said, you know,

we're just going to go by FinCon because this encompasses more than blogging. 

And who were the initial sponsors? Was it like the companies that were selling these financial products that, you know, you were doing the affiliate deals with and stuff like that?

That's it. Yeah. Budgeting companies, banks, cards, and then some of the networks would come as well and work with us. Affiliate networks. So like cj.com impact.com, the companies who work between the brands and the creators.

So if you're a bank, your motivation for being a sponsor back then was like, I want these bloggers to start recommending my products to their readers or something like that.

A hundred percent. Yep. But there's also a little thought leadership. They know they're in a room of people who are passionate about helping the end user move toward a better positive financial place. And so they want to position themselves and what they have to offer within that conversation, too.

So I would say that's their, you know, higher level goal for being there as well. But there's certainly a transactional reason to be there.

So 50 people was the minimum you needed. You got 200. It sounds like it was a smashing success. How did that change your life after that first year?  What was kind of the mindset set shift after that?

It was one of the most challenging things and rewarding things I'd ever done.So I was completely worn out and exhausted from the experience. I didn't make a lot of money. I want to say I made $20,000, $30,000 off of it, which for a first-year event, I guess, is not bad.

At the time, that was good additional money to have. But I knew it would be a long road to build it to a point to where it was its own standalone business. Luckily, my blog was doing very well at the time. That year after FinCon was the best year I ever had with the blog.

I completely attribute it to having been the guy who ran the conference. At the time, I was sort of a B-level blogger within the community. Everyone sort of knew me. but I hadn't been around as long as most. And I certainly wasn't as prolific or as effective as some of the others. But FinCon catapulted me into a place where my blog was more respected and more known. It put me in a pivotal position, I guess, within the community. So I was blessed to have that. 

Did you change the blog at all after that in terms of your strategy or were you just still doing more of the same stuff?

Actually, I probably got more personal with the blog and started doing income reports and get out of debt reports. So I actually tried to pour more into it for the end user. And it was taking off. So it was becoming, you know, it was becoming very successful financially.

I was happy I had done the conference and I said we're going to do it again, even though I didn't know where or when. I left the first conference having no plan for the second one, but that's mostly because I was having so much success with the blog. The conference was an aside and it was like, okay, that'll be gravy if we do it again, but I've got to sort of ride the horse that's running the fastest right now. And that was the blog. 

The event certainly inspired me. Seeing and talking with so many others up close, sort of seeing where our industry was going. And I just wanted to be better. I wanted to be a better model. 

That was 2011 when you had the first conference. I was actually at the most recent one in New Orleans in 2023. So it's obviously an ongoing concern. How did the conference evolve over the years? Especially as, you know, all kinds of things with the internet change in terms of how the big social media platforms became a huge driver of traffic and then receded, the rise of YouTube, podcasts becoming super popular, then TikTok. I'm assuming that entire world is much bigger today than it was when you first started it.

Yeah, for sure. There are a lot more players and it's moved more toward video and the social channels. Absolutely. So, you know, back in the early days of the internet, blogs were where the conversation was happening. It was where we were commenting and it was social, you know, and so certainly even in 2012, 2013, we started seeing the move to podcasting as a secondary medium as well as social media being a great bolt-on for additional traffic. Traffic from Twitter was great early on. People were using that to kind of broadcast what they were doing on their blogs. Podcasting came on strong. I remember going to my first Podcast Movement conference. It was a year or two after the first FinCon. And I felt like that was the area we needed to push into, especially for the finance space, because podcasting is a safe place for people to listen and take financial advice without feeling exposed, and so I leaned heavily into podcasting initially and then by 2016, 2017 YouTube started coming on strong and we started catering more toward that. So we developed specific tracks for blogging, YouTube, podcasting and went directly at those channels and tried to market the event and the programming built around those models: the creator services companies that popped up, email marketing companies, podcast software, YouTube editors, they started coming into the space and working with us to directly find those folks. And by 2019, we had reached 3000 people with the event. That was our high watermark pre COVID.

And by that point it had become much more of a celebration of personal finance and financial independence and the industry that supports that than just this little blogging conference. So we had tons of topics, financial topics. We had Graham Stephan there from the YouTube space.

Ramit Sethi was there from the blog authorship space. We had reached a pinnacle point with it. I always felt like it had become this festival of personal finance to a degree, even though the consumers weren't there by and large.

So there were people who were coming who weren't content creators who just were interested in personal finance?

Yeah, and I would say the FIRE movement helped to propel that a lot because they were getting so much attention, and they really didn't have a home or  community at that point. And we had Mr. Money Mustache coming to the event. Lots of other FIREe bloggers that were very popular at the time would come.

What is a FIRE blogger? 

Oh, sorry, Financial Independence Retire Early. That was a big sub-genre within the personal finance education space that consumers are very attracted to. And so they used our event as a way to come together as well. And now they have their own event, and so they don't necessarily come to our show anymore for that. 

Yeah. So then the pandemic happens and obviously you're running a live events conference. So not great for live events. But on the other side, there were two things that happened with the pandemic. An explosion of entrepreneurship. And then an explosion of the creator economy. And now the personal finance and finance in general, that section of the creator economy is bigger than ever. Obviously, there was the initial pandemic when you couldn't have live events. Did you just take a year off or did you try to do an online version of it?

Yeah, so our event was in the fall. And so I don't know if you remember with 2020, there was this sort of big question of: is it going to happen? Is it not going to happen? So there was this big waiting game we played all year. Ultimately, late summer, we had to pull the trigger on canceling it. We did not try to replicate it online, but we did offer an online event that December that I think we called FinCon X or something like that, where we brought some people to Dallas in a safe space and recorded some sort of a live version of FinCon. 

And then the next year was in 2021. That was in Austin. So we benefited that year from, you know, having till the fall to produce it. And so 2021, we were back in force in Austin and we chose Texas because at that point they were a little more open than other states. And so we could more confidently produce an event there. So we were in the convention center in 2021.

Was the conference producing a lot of digital content year round or anything like that? Or was it mainly just a place for the in-person experience only?

We had a very strong Facebook group that kept the community connected. So that original online forum moved on to the Facebook group, probably 2013-ish. And then that Facebook group continued to grow and be a really strong house for the community's connection throughout the year. Up until 2019,  2020, we were doing all that stuff. We need to get back there. We're not doing as much of that these days, but, in 2021, we just needed to focus on getting the event back. And so all our marketing and everything centered around the event. And to be honest, we just kind of stayed in that zone for a while. But we need to get back to being a better content creator and community supporter for sure

Yeah. And so in 2021, I'm guessing people still were a little bit skittish, about live events. But going into 2022, 2023, given how big the creator economy got, has it come like completely roaring back, or what's kind of the state of now versus pre-pandemic?

To be totally honest, we thought it would. And so I started investing post-2021 back into the event, hiring additional employees, doing more marketing, trying to make the event better with better AV and production on site. But we haven't come roaring back for some reason. And that may have been because of my lack of investment in the community aspect of the event online or lack of content. To be honest, it's a mystery to me, Simon. But we've remained flat since 22. And I agree with you that the creator economy does appear to be growing holistically. And if you go to VidSummit, that event's growing. But for some reason, FinCon, we had a year last year where we just saw sort of flat growth, and it's kind of a mystery to me. I'm not sure why. I'm not sure. We certainly put forth programming that caters to new creators, focuses on new platforms, features guests that are doing well on those platforms.

We have struggled to get advertisers back. So big banks, big brokers, big insurance companies, they're not back like they were with us in 2019. And I'm not sure if just their focus has changed, if they're going direct to influencers or creators, if they feel like they don't necessarily need an event as a platform to do that. It’s stuff we're working on, stuff we're trying to figure out. But yeah, man, I don't have a good answer there. It's kind of a mystery to me. We have a great community, not to say that the people that show up aren't amazing and we have great speakers, but we have not necessarily benefited from what feels like a boom in the creator space.

So are you thinking any differently for 2024 in terms of programming, or like what's kind of your thinking on how you can address that?

Yeah. So two things: we want to engage more with the community. So Facebook for us has fallen off to a degree where we just feel like it's not serviceable. And so we're moving to an alternative platform for our community. So we're moving off of Facebook and we'll be opening up a Skool where our community can interact on a regular basis. In addition to that, we're going to be reintroducing a newsletter that connects and educates the financial creator community on a regular basis. And so those two things we're hanging our hat on.

We'll probably be at VidSummit, sort of representing the financial creator space there. We're certainly on the socials. Yeah. Working hard to get better brands there because I think if we can get the bigger brands there that are working with creators, then more creators will come because they want to meet them in person and set up deals, do business. Events are about gathering the tribe to a certain degree. And so we've just got to do a good job of sort of recruiting that tribe and getting them there.

So how has your personal career and life changed over the years? I was on the website for Part-Time Money. It looked like you hadn't published since like late 2023. Maybe I was looking on the wrong part of the website. But like as a content creator yourself,l are you still producing stuff under your own brand or are you mainly focused on the conference now? It looks like you're working on another conference called TravelCon. Like what's your kind of day to day now?

Yep. So I have a great events team who produces FinCon and has on their own for the past four or five years. So during COVID, I sort of took a sabbatical and my team who's been with me from the start really knows how to produce and run the event. And so I left it to them for a year and a half to produce it during that time frame. They did a tremendous job. I took a little time off the blog as well, and you're right, last year was a big year for acquisitions. So the event TravelCon was one that was

started pre pandemic but closed after the pandemic. It's similar to FinCon in that it's for creators, but instead of the finance space it's in the travel space, and so I spoke with the previous owner last summer and decided that I would make an acquisition of that brand. And so we acquired TravelCon.

And then my excellent event team, I charged them with producing both events every year instead of just the one. So they'll do TravelCon in the spring, which we just had last week. And we will have FinCon every fall. For context for TravelCon, it was about 500 travel creators that showed up with us there in Portland. We had a fantastic week and we're looking to grow that event now into the future. 

I don't blog as much. I'd love to do more. I just haven't made time, or I don't have a staff there to help me produce anything. I'm also a CPA still, and my father retired from our family accounting practice last year. And instead of selling it or selling it to the staff or a third party, we chose to keep it within the family. And so being the CPA in the family, I'm charged with running that as well. So I'm also working on that as an additional side project. 

And what is your ambition for like five years from now, 10 years from now? Do you want to become like an Informa, like where you're running a whole bunch of conferences and you're acquiring more and more conferences? Do you want to focus more on just growing your dad's former business? What's kind of the main focus going forward?

Yeah, it's hard to do a lot of things at once for sure. But I feel like I'm in a sweet spot. I'm in a good position with the assets that I have, if you want to look at them that way. Continue growing them. I would not be opposed to an additional creator niche conference. We're positioned very well to acquire another one. So I would be looking for that maybe in the health space or maybe the food space. There are plenty of creators in both those spaces.

So potentially a third event, but for right now we're content with just growing the two. And then the CPA firm integration we expect to happen later this year. I would love to sell to an Informa down the road and position what I have to offer to them down the road. We're still a ways off from that. I was close in 2019. I could see myself maybe just running the firm and then maybe getting back to blogging. Who knows? But I'm in a sweet spot. I took my own medicine as a finance blogger and moved myself toward a place of financial independence and freedom. And so I have the benefit of a lot of choice and freedom in my life. And now I get to sort of share that with the team and help move these ideas forward. So it's an exciting time. It's challenging because I have a lot on my plate, I feel like, but I'm excited for the future.