Getting to Know Sean

Show Notes

This is the episode where Dan turns the tables and interviews me, so consider this my introduction. Dan and I come from the same town and went to the same school in Indiana, but I'm the one who studied mechanical engineering at Purdue. It wasn't some lifelong calling — engineering was maybe the fourth or fifth career I'd tried on. I went through dentist, architect, even a brief run at wanting to be a chef before I realized chefs never get a night off. What pulled me toward engineering was physics in high school, some family friends who were engineering professors, and growing up close enough to campus that I could take a class or two before I'd even graduated. I picked mechanical specifically because it felt foundational and agnostic — it kept my options open instead of locking me into one narrow track.

That optionality mattered more than I knew. I graduated in '08 and moved down to Houston right before the great financial crisis, into a chemical plant that turned natural gas into plastics and industrial materials. The company had just merged, taken on a pile of debt, and within months we were in bankruptcy. That's where I accidentally found out I was interested in business. I learned what EBITDA, free cash flow, debtor-in-possession financing, and corporate bonds actually meant in real, consequential terms — zero accounting classes, just on-the-job and whatever I was picking up from Planet Money on the drive. I came out of it realizing business was genuinely fascinating to me.

Oil and gas is a deeply cyclical industry, and I've lived a lot of cycles since. There was the boom from 2010 to 2014, then the bottom falling out at the end of '14 and a downturn that dragged on — a couple of coworkers and I still call it "the factory of sadness." I bottled up a lot during those years and it caught up with me later. What I took away, and what I now tell the people I mentor, is that cycles are inevitable, so you have to be eminently useful. I always found something worth doing that added value, even when it wasn't technically my job, and I think that's a big part of why I'm still here. Be helpful, be useful, ask questions — that advice travels well beyond any one industry.

Honestly, helping people is the thread running through all of it. I oversee a staff of around fifty folks with backgrounds ranging from no high school diploma to master's degrees — wrangling cats, basically — and the most rewarding work I do is connecting with people and helping them get unstuck or improve what they're building. Some of the best training for that didn't come from engineering school at all; it came from being a camp counselor at the YMCA. The difficult conversations, the disciplinings, the layoffs — those are the hardest days, and the thing I've learned is to always assume I can do it better, stay open to that, and give people room to reflect before anything goes too far.

That instinct is what I'm trying to build into something of my own. I started a small business called Fig, a registered investment advisory, while I was still in business school, and I've been iterating on it ever since — make a plan, do it, check it, adjust, repeat. The vision is to provide sound, accessible financial planning, and then use what we earn to help other people start their own small businesses. My first memory of a financial planner's office is being about five years old, coloring in a chair while my grandparents went over compound interest charts on thin paper, and somehow that stuck. What drives me now isn't one bad event — it's how few people I meet, from any background, can really speak to what they're doing with their savings. Most of that knowledge should be attainable without an Ivy League sticker price, and a lot of it should just be taught earlier.

That's also why Dan and I are doing this podcast. If the stuff we share here ends up helping more people than I ever could one client at a time, all the better — I'd love to educate enough folks that they don't need someone like me until much later in life, if at all. We don't need a million followers; a consistent group of people we can actually help navigate the roadblocks life throws is plenty. So that's me. Thanks for being here, and welcome aboard — I'm glad you came to hang out with us.

— Sean