It began with a sewing table. Today, the husband-and-wife team is almost 30 years strong.
On Black Monday, October
19, 1987, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points in the largest
single-day drop in market history. The same day, a UPS truck delivered two
boxes stuffed with financial textbooks to Bill Larson’s front door in West
Seattle.
“You know, Larson,” Bill
said to himself, “Your timing just doesn’t get any better, does it?”
Those textbooks would
become Bill’s world for three months until he passed his financial advisor
certification exam. Almost immediately afterward, at age 37, the
logger-turned-business-consultant began Larson Financial Group from a sewing
table, having commandeered his son’s bedroom for the launch. It was his first
entrepreneurial endeavor.
“I had a telephone, some
business cards and nothing else,” Bill says. He went door-to-door for the first
two years, building a client base through old-fashioned community values. The
company went independent in 1990.
Glenda, a former Safeco
manager, brought her big-business experience to Larson Financial Group in 2003
by becoming its operations manager.
Even with Glenda’s
management and Bill’s many years of consulting, teaching business classes and
spearheading the Seattle Chamber of Commerce’s small-business division (which
Bill created in 1978 as the chamber’s business development manager), nothing
could prepare him for the challenges—and rewards—of owning a small business.
“I was a busy boy [in the
early 2000s],” he says. Teaching business classes at community colleges,
volunteering with the Boy Scouts of America between office hours (which he
still does today), and raising five children in his blended family left little
time for other endeavors. “But it was also at that time that I said, ‘What’s
the most effective organization for me, the entrepreneur in the state, that has
a seat at the [legislative] table?’”
His answer: NFIB. “I’d
been impressed with them for 30 years,” he says. “I wanted the organization
that I’m devoting time and money to to have their
phones ring by these regulators and policymakers, and I think that’s what’s
happening [with NFIB].”
Bill joined the NFIB
Washington Leadership Council, taking a short break after 9/11 so that he and
Glenda could volunteer with the Navy League Seattle Council (where he served as
president and Glenda as treasurer). They continue their NFIB membership today,
leveraging its support as their small business approaches its third decade.
Running a financial
services business is like being a “family physician of money,” Bill explains—a
privilege that comes with great responsibility. Larson Financial Group’s
website lists “meaningful communication” as a service alongside investment
management and retirement planning.
“I have people bringing
their children and grandchildren to us—gosh, that just makes you giddy,” he
says. “These people know that we know what we’re doing; we’re taking real good
care of their loved ones. It really is a privilege.”
Securities offered through
LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC
