While staring off into space is all well and good when waiting for a total eclipse of the sun (what a treat!), when it comes to our clients and our firm, we prefer to be a little more focused.

That’s why, shortly after co-founding Hill Investment Group in 2005, Matt Hall and Rick Hill turned to Collaborative Strategies, an independent strategic planning firm, to help them articulate the vision they had for us, and to hold us accountable for getting the job done. Lots of businesses have ideals, but not nearly as many solidify them into the measurables: What will it actually take to achieve them?

In a way, our strategic planning began before Rick and Matt even co-founded HIG, sandwiched into lunch breaks at their previous career. Today, all of us convene with Collaborative Strategies every few years to revisit our plans. We hold our meeting out of the office, where we can focus on the business at hand. Our most recent round took place in July at the Saint Louis Art Museum (so we could wax creative). There, we reviewed our ongoing focus as a firm and tightened up our succession planning in the context of our larger, multi-office team.

Now, if you’ve been reading all of our commentary, you may think you’ve caught us in a contradiction, based on a comment Matt posted last spring about our Houston office: “Opening another office was nowhere in our strategic plan.”

The thing is, having a strong strategic plan in place is not only paramount for existing initiatives. It also serves as an essential touchstone whenever new opportunities beckon. While our Houston office wasn’t specifically part of the original plan – and neither was hiring me as the firm’s first COO – the idea fit so well with everything else HIG had in mind that what might otherwise have felt like a random wager became a clear, confident choice. Similarly, our leadership team also has felt more comfortable declining several other tempting opportunities when they did not fit as well with our existing plans.

So here’s to many more years of well-structured strategic plans, with the occasional twist of serendipity to season our success.

Anyone who’s been with us for a while knows we’ve long felt that among our greatest roles is to help investors Take the Long View® with their wealth. But did you notice a subtle change? If you’re especially attentive, you may have caught that we’ve now established a Registered Trademark ® to more fully protect our defining tagline.

Until now, we’ve had the sentiment more lightly protected as a service mark. When our marketing team first suggested the mark back in 2005, we felt that “taking the long view” perfectly expressed our passion for changing people’s point of view about their wealth, offering them an improved vantage point – a symbolic Hill – from which they could see past the daily details toward their ultimate goals.

Our belief in the power of the expression hasn’t changed one bit. In fact, we realized we’d achieved an important milestone when people started repeating our tagline back to us, demonstrating how much they, too, valued the sentiment. We decided it was time to beef up our rights to ensure that Take the Long View® would continue to serve us, our clients and our community for a long, long time to come.

Would you like to Take the Long View® along with us? Let us know how we can help!

*PS We cleverly purchased www.takethelongview.com and, if you ever decide to try this address, you’ll notice it takes you straight to our site.