Ara Bayindiryan · Founder
I had been careful with money my whole life. It turns out being careful with money and knowing how to invest it are two completely different skills.
In my early thirties, three friends and I started a technology company in Chicago. We built it out of almost nothing and we had the time of our lives doing it. We sold it in 2005. Twenty years later the four of us are still close friends, which probably tells you something about how it was built.
Up to that point I had been careful with money my whole working life. I saved. I lived below my means. I kept a spreadsheet where I tracked my net worth every quarter. A close friend of mine still uses that same spreadsheet today.
What I had never done was invest a serious sum. Those are not the same skill at all.
The calls started almost immediately. Brokers, advisors, real estate investors, people with something to sell. Every one of them had a product, and every product sounded sensible while it was being explained to me. So I bought some of them.
Here is the part I own. I had been successful at most things I’d tried in business. I was on a hot streak, and I felt like I couldn’t miss. I should have done more due diligence. I should have stuck with what got me there in the first place: being careful, running the numbers, and asking questions until I actually understood the answer.
Then 2008 arrived. The market fell, and it kept falling for years. Because there was no plan underneath what I owned, nothing sizing the risk to what I could actually afford to lose and nothing saying which money was needed when, there was nothing to cushion it either. It cost me more than it ever should have.
It wasn’t that the products were bad. Most of them were perfectly legitimate things that are right for somebody. The problem was that nothing was deciding which ones were right for me.
Looking back, I understand why. A lot of this industry is built around gathering assets, which really just means getting money in the door. Very little of it is built around lining up a client’s goals with the right solutions. Nobody asked me what I wanted the money to do for me, either then or down the road.
A collection of products has no way of telling you when something no longer belongs in it. A plan does.
That is the reason Bayworth works in one order: goals first, and written down, because a goal you haven’t written down is just a mood. Then the plan that serves them. Then, and only then, the question of which investments and insurance belong in it.
I look back on it now as tuition, the cost of learning to do it the right way. Expensive, and honestly, that’s okay. It is the reason the firm is built the way it is.
I spent fifteen years in technology and financial services before any of this. I was a co-founder and executive vice president of Katabat Corporation in Chicago, which grew from a single beta customer to serving many of the largest brokerages in the country before we sold it. Earlier I ran international business development at 3Com, and before that product operations at U.S. Robotics, for a division that grew from $355 million to $1.2 billion in revenue.
That background is the reason business owners tend to find their way here. I have sat where they sit: building something, running it, selling it, and then finding out that the day after the sale is a completely different problem from the one you spent a decade solving.
I have lived in Illinois for more than fifty years, and on the North Shore for a good stretch of them. My wife Laura and I have been married more than twenty-seven years. We have a son and two daughters.
It is relevant to the work, I think. Most of the people I sit down with are trying to solve the same problem I am, making sure the money supports the life, rather than the other way around.
I don’t do this alone. Avo Mavilian brings tax planning as an Enrolled Agent, Sev Meneshian brings deep pension and retirement-plan work, and Paul Mardoian brings more than thirty-five years helping individuals and businesses with health insurance. On most client plans, more than one of us is involved.
Everything a registered investment adviser is required to disclose about itself is public, and you can read ours before you ever pick up the phone. Our Form ADV and Form CRS set out how we are paid, what conflicts of interest exist, who owns the firm, and whether there is any disciplinary history.
Look up Bayworth Capital (Xceed Capital Management, LLC), CRD #284360 →
I would rather you checked. It is a strange industry in which almost nobody points clients at this, and it takes about four minutes.
Thirty minutes, no cost and no obligation. Mostly I will ask what you are trying to do and whether what you own is set up to do it.
Bayworth Capital serves clients across the North Shore and greater Chicago.
