Today’s news is a two-for-one deal, introducing our new team member PJ McDaniel, as well as Hillfolio™, our ground-breaking new digital platform. We’d be hard-pressed to decide which we’re more excited about! Fortunately, we don’t have to. In a perfect pairing, PJ has joined our St. Louis office to oversee the new service.

What’s Hillfolio? We’re glad you asked! Hillfolio will bring evidence-based investing and institutional-level portfolio management to a wider audience, including those who might not otherwise be able to experience the high-touch care we strive to make the hallmark of every investor’s experience here at HIG. We’ll be covering it in more detail in the months ahead; for now, call it one of our most ambitious dreams being realized.

Back to PJ. Although new to the team, his relationship with us began six years ago, when he and Matt Hall both began serving on the Saint Louis Club board. Besides bonding over their status as the group’s “young guys,” they also became co-mentors, each learning from the other’s perspectives.

PJ had spent more than a decade in alternative investment sales. As he consulted with financial advisors across the country, he kept seeing huge variations in the quality of advice investors were receiving … and it bothered him. From Matt, he grew to appreciate the powerful differences a fiduciary mindset and efficient evidence-based investing can bring to people’s investment outcomes.

“I am excited to play a direct role in moving more people into evidence-based investing,” says PJ. “Once you understand that you cannot predict the markets, you get to focus your time on family, friends and other activities that make life enjoyable.”

For Matt, PJ’s experience in launching and growing new businesses was equally inspirational.

Call it fate or just good timing, but as PJ found himself increasingly uncomfortable in his career, we were beginning to seriously advance our Hillfolio platform, to the point where we needed a new team member to become its full-time champion. That’s when we and PJ realized we had a unique opportunity to join forces on our shared dream to put logic, data and evidence to work for every investor.

In addition to his 13-year career as a financial professional and an advisor to advisor firms, PJ holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Regis University. He also was selected to attend a “Semester at Sea” program where he studied international finance. Married in 2008, PJ and his wife have grown “the McDaniel tribe” to a party of five, including their three boys Jack (6), Patrick (4) and Henry (2). His wife is an accomplished evidence-based dietitian, cookbook author, corporate wellness guru, and media spokesperson who you may have seen on St. Louis’ local Fox 2 station.

When he’s not working or parenting, PJ can be found running, swimming or playing a round of golf. During his college years, he was a caddy at an exclusive country club, where he had the opportunity to caddy for Tiger Woods, then-sitting President Clinton, and countless other characters. Reflecting on the experience, PJ says, “Whether you watch a pro player or the leader of the free world duff a chip, it reminds you that we’re all human. The real eye-opener is how people handle or recover from their mistakes.” This is a lesson he hopes to instill in his boys as they grow old enough to take on summer jobs of their own.

Please join us in welcoming PJ to the HIG team … and watch for unfolding Hillfolio news to come!

Back in February, Rick Hill posted his reflections on why he’s not yet retired from his lengthy career as a financial professional. “Why am I still here?” he asked. “Because I am still in a great place!”

I, for one, am glad he is still here. We may tease him about his white hair, but from my first encounter with Rick in 2012 (which I still remember vividly – we talked about my alma mater Trinity University and San Antonio), he has shaped many of my own personal and professional values. Had Rick instead opted for spending every day on the golf course, I’d be poorer for it – this much I know.

I’m not the only young buck who has been inspired by Rick, the mentor. Check out this recent post: “This Lesson I Learned from a 75-Year-Old Man Might Earn You a Career.” It’s about Rick, written by one of our past summer interns, Dominic Vaiana. In sharing a few of his own takeaways from his internship with us, Dominic wrote that Rick “oozes wisdom and has a contagious energy that people half his age do not.”

I hope that 20-somethings will be saying the same about me when I’m 75 and still working at Hill Investment Group. That sounds more rewarding than any day on the links.

When Rick Hill and I founded Hill Investment Group in 2005, we knew we wanted to do something very different from anything you’d find in the traditional financial services landscape. As we set about converting our ideals into reality, we referred to our culture as an island of idealism, rising above the status quo.

Knowing little about branding, we surveyed several St. Louis influencers to help us find a firm to create our logo and tagline. Rick also had one request: He was hoping the firm could include his name.

In the winter of 2005, we selected TOKY Branding + Design to help us with this challenge; we are still their clients to this day.

In hindsight, the rest may seem like a no-brainer. Because they all work so well together, it’s easy to assume that our firm name Hill Investment Group; our hill-shaped logo, our Take the Long View® tagline; and the professional, polished line drawings that now characterize our graphic presentations came together practically overnight.

You’d be mistaken. And we’d be doing a disservice to the visionary souls who have put in countless hours and creative capital helping us shape and refine our now “obvious” brand.

Usually these marketing types labor on unsung behind the scenes, so we thought you might enjoy meeting one of the incredibly talented teams behind our branding: TOKY Branding + Design.

We love how Eric Thoelke and his TOKY team took Rick’s name and helped us connect it with our greater ideals, guiding us on how to meld our identity with our desire to coach people on how to take a higher perspective with their wealth. In his own words, here are Eric’s thoughts about our collaboration (and, yes, Eric’s last name is pronounced the same as his firm’s simpler spelling of the same: toe-kee):

“Back in 2005, I got to spend a couple of leisurely lunches with Rick and Matt, talking about their nascent business, and how their investment philosophy and deeply personal service would set them apart. It was immediately obvious these were true differences, not just distinctions in style. Our goal was finding a way to articulate those differences by integrating the firm’s name, logo and positioning.

The best brands encircle a target audience with messages that are meaningful and distinctive. It’s like pointing all the engines on a rocket in the same direction; alignment creates the greatest thrust. In working with Hill Investment Group, I never get tired of the rush that fires up all their branding engines and targets them in the same direction.”