A financial advisor asked one question about a clock in his logo, and the answer rewired how he sees wealth, time, and his clients.
For more than sixteen years, there was a clock hidden in plain sight.
It lived where a letter O should have been, set into a word on a financial firm’s logo. Sean Kirby walked past it almost every day. His father drew it there in 2004, the year he opened his first business. Sean grew up with it. He inherited it. He even redrew it once, during a rebrand in 2020, smoothing it into something cleaner and more modern.
And in all those years, through two versions of the mark and one full rebrand and a few thousand client conversations, nobody had asked the obvious question.
Why is there a clock in the logo?
Not a single client. Not a single teammate. Not even Sean.
When he finally asked his dad, the answer came back in one sentence. “Time’s the only asset you can’t buy more of.”
Sit with that for a second, because Sean did. His first reaction was not pride. It was closer to disbelief. *Why have we never told anyone this?* Here was the truest thing the firm believed, the one idea that separated them from a Charles Schwab or an Edward Jones, and it had been sitting inside the logo the entire time, unspoken. A truth bomb in plain sight.
This is the part most experts get wrong, and I see it constantly. The most valuable thing you carry is almost never the thing you talk about. It hides in a habit, an offhand line, a design choice you stopped noticing years ago. You assume it is obvious, so you never say it out loud. It is not obvious. It is buried treasure, and you are standing on it.
The question that changes the whole room
Here is what I find beautiful about Sean’s work, and why I keep insisting that a financial advisor is an artist whether he believes it or not.
Picture the version of you that walks into a financial meeting. You arrive thinking small, even when you believe you are thinking big. You are running the math on taxes. How do I save here. How do I write that off. How do I lower the bill this year. Your imagination is boxed in by April.
Then someone sits across the table and asks a different question. Not how do we save you a little money this quarter, but where do you actually want to be. Where do you want your kids to be. Where do you want the compounding to land in twenty years, in dollars or in your actual life.
In the space of one question, the whole room changes. You start thinking bigger. You start thinking differently. You start thinking in a register you were not capable of an hour earlier. That shift, that expansion of what a person believes is possible for their own life, is a creative act. It is the same thing a painter does to a blank wall. Sean just does it with a financial plan.
What he is actually selling is time
Sean is in the middle of living this out right now, not narrating it from the safe distance of a finished case study.
He has a client, a man about his own age, who runs a large construction company. This man does all his own payables. All his own receivables. All his own payroll. And then he goes out and does the work in the field too. Seven days a week. Rain or shine, because in construction there is always something that needs doing and always a reason not to stop.
The old version of the conversation would have been about equipment write-offs and a rainy-day fund. The new version is quieter and far more dangerous to the status quo. Sean is trying to pull the pressure off this man’s week. To pass the financial weight to a team. To hand him back a Saturday. To give him, whether he is comfortable with it or not, a more normal life.
Because the real account Sean is trying to grow is not the brokerage account. It is the number of evenings this man gets to be a present father and a present husband. Those are the deposits that compound into a life. As Sean’s dad told him, the first hundred thousand is the hardest to earn. After that the numbers double faster, one to two, two to four, four to eight, and on. The same is true of the small, daily, unglamorous deposits you make into the people you love. You have to keep making them, especially at the start, when it feels like nothing is moving.
The artist who still feels like a fraud
When the word artist landed on him, Sean was honest in a way I respect.
“It feels like imposter syndrome most of the time,” he said. Recording in a basement felt like imposter syndrome. Putting his voice out into the world felt like imposter syndrome.
Notice that, because it might be the most important sentence in the whole story. The man building something real, the one with the family legacy and the clock and the conviction, still feels like he has not earned the right to speak. That feeling is not evidence you are doing it wrong. It is usually evidence you are finally headed in the right direction. The fraud feeling shows up precisely at the edge of the work that matters most.
Sean’s frame for it was the only one that holds. You keep making the deposits. You keep refining the process. And you measure the whole thing not by what you accumulate, but by a single question.
How many lives can we change along the way?
That is the artist’s question. It has nothing to do with your industry and everything to do with your conviction. There is a clock in your logo too, somewhere, some truth you have stopped noticing because you see it every day. Say it out loud. Someone is waiting on it.
You were made for this. The world is waiting.
Watch the full conversation, and if it moves you, send it to one person who needs to hear it. If you want to build a thought leadership platform of your own, visit 1898creative.com.
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Full Transcript
Darren: Take me to that moment where you’re going, I gotta do something more than just this. What was going on emotionally? What were you feeling at that time? Just explain that moment.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. So the interesting part is, it hasn’t always been this way. Just like any entrepreneur, I’ve had massive failures. In 2018, I was about to exit my company, and I guess I’ll share it on this podcast, the exit happened, but it wasn’t pretty.
I had lost a significant amount of money that I thought was going to happen. I had a mentor at the time who, in our exit contract, there was one line that my lawyer didn’t catch. He basically took the next two years and used the entirety of the profits of the business to scale the company up. The business showed zero profit, which, I had made a specific deal with him that I would take a percentage of profit. Anybody listening, if you exit a company, never do that. Always take a set number, take a set multiple. I was young at the time.
It kind of put me back massively, because at the time, that year while I was getting prepared to exit, I had started doing a ton of content. I made, I think, 700 videos all across different platforms. I was on a bunch of podcasts. I was going to create this group, a different group, which I won’t mention the name on here.
But honestly, I think that God, it was actually supposed to happen. Because as everyone knows, when you look back, it all makes sense. When you’re in it, it sucks. Every time I look back at that moment, I realize one, I wasn’t mature enough at the time to handle the success that was coming. Two, my wife and I weren’t in a great position in our marriage. Honestly, we probably would have divorced each other. It’s very interesting how that had to happen.
Then over the last, what is it since 2018 and now, seven, eight years, we rebuilt. Not only did we rebuild our financial situation, our marriage is stronger than ever. We have two young kids, nine and seven, and we’re blessed. The kids are amazing.
Along the way, though, one of the keys that I saw was that I didn’t really have anywhere to go. I’ll be honest with you, just like all men out there, high achievers, you don’t want to look weak. So frankly, I didn’t really even tell people that the business, that the exit, didn’t go well. A lot of people assumed that it did. I put up a front and just kind of led through that world, which is not a great place to be.
I had a phenomenal mentor after that, and even with him, I was so weak that I didn’t want to share with him the situation. He could have helped me immensely. I think for men listening, the biggest thing is just know that it’s okay. You’re not weak. You just need someone that you can go to.
That’s why we created the Lighthouse Brotherhood specifically, because we want to have a group that we’ve selected, or they self-select, and we’re talking about these things so we can help high-achieving men through some of the struggles they’re facing. In most of life, you’re not going to go to your church and tell all your buddies that your marriage is struggling. Instead, what’s going to happen is that divorce creeps up, and then everyone’s like, wait, what happened? How did that happen?
That’s kind of the scenario, but it’s been awesome. Looking back now with God specifically kind of working through this, lots of magic, if you want to call it, but it’s really God. Relationships came out of nowhere. Finances kicked back in. I’m a big believer in the parable, the 11th hour parable, where God will always give you back, a 10 to 100X what you lost. I think I had to go through that to basically get to where I’m at today, where I feel like a much more complete guy versus back then. I was still insecure, and I would have done stupid stuff with my money.
Darren: No, I hear that. As you’re talking, I’m thinking of so many things in my life. I was one that went through divorce, lost everything that I thought was, as a man of faith, I was like, oh, God’s got me the whole time, nothing’s going to happen. Then all of a sudden it all falls apart and you go, what the heck? Your life gets flipped upside down. For me, it was a marriage. But for other guys out there, it might be business, like that one line in the contract for you that literally uprooted everything that you thought you had.
There’s so many moments in our life that we think, oh, we got this, we’re good, everything’s solid. Then when it flips upside down, it breaks apart everything that we hold true.
What I love about your story, Matt, is what I’m hearing is the breaking down, the replanting of who you were, was actually what allowed you to grow and become who you’re being today. It actually allowed you to become the artist that you’re starting to be today. Around here, art doesn’t mean just creativity and painting and whatnot. No, it’s the art of your life and the things that you’re getting to do now. The paintbrush strokes of your life now become so beautiful because of that breaking down.
Let’s talk a little bit about what you were saying about how men struggle so much to be honest in those moments. We might have a friend circle, we might have a church group, we might have those that we work with day in and day out, but we have a hard time looking at them and saying, I’m struggling, I’m hurting, I’m in pain. One, why do you think that is? Two, what do you think we should do about it?
Matt: Yeah, I appreciate this question, Darren, and you nailed it. The biggest thing is, specifically for high achievers, most of our lives we’ve been this way. Let’s be transparent. Whether it was through sports, school, and I’m not saying every single high achiever was a high achiever as a kid, but oftentimes it’s the case. Our whole life, we’ve won in some capacity. We’ve also been told by coaches, sometimes parents, fathers, hey, don’t be weak. Don’t cry. Boys don’t cry. You’re a man, dude. Man up.
We still see the memes out there. Obviously there’s a good push right now for men. But I also will say that for about a decade, men were looked at as toxic masculinity. From a perspective, yes, there’s horrible people out there. There’s bad guys doing bad things. But what ended up happening is traditional manhood kind of got roped into the toxic word. Taking care of your family, being respectable in the community, that got roped in.
What came up with the original group chat, and with every high-achieving man I’ve ever met, every single one, they have something. I know that that’s part of our journey on earth, that we’re supposed to go through stuff so we can learn, and we can go back to heaven, and it’s amazing. But also note, from a male perspective, anybody who’s watching this just knows, you don’t want to look weak. You don’t want to be the guy who can’t handle stuff.
All those groups, the softball leagues that I’m in, I’m not going to show up on a Monday night and be like, hey guys, my wife and I had a fight last night. We’re just high-fiving and hitting bases and chatting about the Chicago Cubs. It’s a surface-level kind of scenario.
I think we were just talked that way, Darren, as men. Just fight through it, put your head down, no one’s coming to save you. All these things that we hear all the time now. I’m like, well, that’s a good message, but it’s also pretty faulty. There’s a lot of people who come to save us all the time, people who come out of nowhere. I’m sure you have people that have popped up out of nowhere and have helped you through these challenges, right?
Darren: For sure.
Matt: The biggest growth area in my life always stems from the ability to be vulnerable enough to reach across the table and say, I’m struggling, or I need help. Those moments are the moments that change everything.