Show Your Work

An investment expert’s personal “finance manual” becomes a book.

After many years making mistakes, then finally perfecting his investment strategy, Pat Keogh believes he’s found the best formula to provide investors and their families with a stable, prosperous financial future.

Disillusioned with the mainstream advice to “save for retirement” and measure investment success by portfolio value, Pat developed an investment approach that focuses on the amount of income earned from investments. This, he explains, sets the investor up for a stable future of increasing income, as opposed to preserving a set amount to be used up in retirement. It also positions the investor’s family for ongoing wealth.

In essence, he advocates replacing retirement planning with succession planning.

“Your family is going to spend more time with your money than you are,” Pat says. “It’s for their wellbeing. As the title says, you want to ‘Make Your Family Rich.’ In doing that, you will become rich too.  ‘Rich’ not only in a monetary sense, but in the satisfaction of knowing your family’s future is prosperous and secure.”

This approach demands a shift in mindset. It sometimes goes against more traditional advice about what—and when—to buy and sell.

When Pat began sharing his investment strategy with others at meetings of the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII), the enthusiastic reception of his ideas inspired him to share this knowledge more broadly.

It was time to write a book.

Pat had already written down much of his strategy and philosophy as a handbook to help his children manage the family portfolio one day. The logical next step, it seemed, was to turn that material into a full-fledged book.

Wanted: Partner With Complementary Skills

Pat began researching programs that promised to help aspiring authors write their first book.

“I started looking around at different ways to [write a book] and I realized that, in order to do it properly, I was going to need a whole lot of various skills,” Pat says—skills like professional editing, selecting and working with a printer, figuring out cover-art, and more. “I didn’t want to become a professional at all those things,” he says. He wanted to stick with writing about his investment ideas. So, Pat decided to investigate services that would help him take the book from first draft to publication.

He felt that some book coaching services took too much of an authoritarian stance with their authors. Others seemed to have a one-size-fits-all attitude.

Nancy Erickson of The Book Professor?, on the other hand, was just the right fit. Pat says “Nancy seemed to offer a more ‘cafeteria’ approach. You could pick and choose from among the various options and services involved in creating a book”.

Freed to Focus on Expertise

“I found Nancy very comfortable to work with,” Pat says. The Book Professor’s program offered Pat the guidance he was looking for while still allowing him control of his vision for the project. “Nancy doesn’t force feed [ideas], but her ideas generally end up being the right ones,” Pat soon realized. “Nancy does not pull punches; if she thinks you are doing something wrong she will make sure you understand. I like that”, Pat says.

The Book Professor’s  1-2-1 Coaching program allowed Pat to focus on the part of the process he felt most competent in: writing the manuscript. Once his ideas were on paper, The Book Professor? helped with professional editing and formatting, the cover design process, printing, and much more.

One Book Down, One to Go

The end result was exactly the book Pat wanted. Make Your Family Rich: Why to Replace Retirement Planning with Succession Planning lays out the investment strategies his family has used and offers a roadmap for other families to do the same. “It was organic,” he says. “It’s just documenting the work that I and my children were doing.” He calls his book “the handbook for training the next generation” of investors.

The book released in May 2020. Thanks to Pat’s involvement with investment groups, he has opportunities to share his work with the readers who need it. Check out www.makeyourfamilyrich.com for his presentations and articles.

Pat is also working on a second edition to reflect updated information, including thoughts on post-Covid investing and an update on his family’s succession progress. Thanks to his strategy, Pat’s two adult children have taken over most management of the family’s investment business.

In addition, Pat is writing a version of the book aimed at a teenage audience titled Hey Kid; Wanna Own Great American Businesses? Because the point of smart investing is to pass the portfolio on to the investor’s family, Pat believes it’s important to get younger generations educated and passionate about the process early.

“The concepts in the teen book are the same, but more fundamental” compared to the adult version, Pat says. The teen workbook will focus on the pride and sense of accomplishment that comes from investing in, and thus owning a piece of, many great American businesses. He believes it can change a young person’s self-image to see him or herself as someone who is an owner of great businesses, even if they only have $30 or $50 available.

Pat believes that his family and other families will benefit from his ideas for generations.

Someone Needs Your Work

Who needs to hear about the work that you’re already doing?

Maybe, like Pat, you’ve developed an innovative strategy that could help others better navigate an important aspect of life. Perhaps you’ve fought through a difficult challenge and have insight on how others can make it through similar crises.

If that strikes a chord, chances are you have a book inside of you.

Contact The Book Professor? today to learn more about how to get these ideas down on paper and release them into the world to help others.