Sponsor[/caption]
If you're looking for financial advice you can trust from someone who's got your best interests in mind, then you're looking for David Biondo.
Recently, I sat down with Denver's harmonica-playing finance guy, David Biondo. I asked him about his career journey and how he started Signal Butte Financial Corp, his harmonica playing story, and just what it is that makes him so different.
David Biondo is a true New Jersey boy, born and bred in the Garden state. He enjoys our laid-back lifestyle here in Colorado just as much as you and I do, and he has a unique hobby when he's not out in the mountains with his horse! You see, back when he was 18 years old, someone handed him a harmonica and told him "David, you're very musical, you need to learn how to play this." The rest is history!
Let's take a step back, though, and talk about the other half of his moniker. The finance guy. David got his start in the financial world as an audio equipment salesman. While he was successful, he left to go into advertising instead. When that didn't tickle his fancy, he moved into insurance sales because of the unlimited earning potential.
What David found, though, was that insurance is a business that people fail out of all the time. At a pep rally/dinner, David hit upon the needle in the haystack and found the solution by putting together a 120-point questionnaire that would determine whether or not company share price could increase. He became successful in helping people achieve appreciation time and time again. He would find winners and sell them when that 10 percent appreciation was achieved, then place them in fixed accounts before going after the next needle.
He quickly learned that investments and the market were all based on manipulation and greed, not care for the customer as it was when he first got in the business. Now it had come to a head where this was not a plausible approach, as Wall Street despises anyone who is smarter than the supposed experts. Tired of the greed and lack of care, as well as the lack of time he had with clients because of all the changes being proposed, David Biondo turned in his securities license in 1994.
David found his true calling at Signal Butte Financial Corp. Now, he gets to spend time one-on-one with his clients. He gets to understand the person in front of him rather than just the numbers on a sheet. Most importantly, he gets to see the genuine results of his efforts helping people.
When I asked David about his greatest success story, he said he doesn't have one. Obviously, that confused me. I mean, everyone has a success story that they aspire to, right? So I asked what he meant. He explained that he doesn't believe in having one greatest success story, one story that you can always aspire to be better than another because life is a journey. David lets his driving factor be making his clients successful, rather than focusing on his own success. That way, he focuses on taking the time to make each and every client successful.
Towards the end of our interview, I asked David if he had any financial advice for the readers of OCN. He gave me two pieces of great advice to pass on to you, dear readers! First, he said it's important to always ask why. The only way you'll get to the root of explanations and truly begin to understand the world around you is by constantly asking why things are the way they are. Second, he said to always invest in yourself and nobody else. Stop risking money in the casino disguised as a stock market and invest in yourself instead.
