Around the time Peter Finkel was born 42 years ago, his father Eliot started an investment firm called EF Invest. Advising people on their personal finances has been in his blood since high school, when he and some fellow students won a stock market challenge sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. “I was the only one that was obsessed,” he says, laughing about how he had to “pull along three friends.” After college, Finkel hoped to join the family business. His father’s response? “Go try the corporate world for a while.”
A small firm like mine is like having a doctor or an accountant where they get to know you, and, in some cases, they kind of nudge you or protect you from yourself.
After about a decade in banking, Finkel felt burned out. Despite being very proud of his investment research, he felt disheartened: “I had grown up with my father learning about long-term investing, and here I am in the corporate world, and the bottom line for the quarter was all that mattered.” So he worked full-time with his father while attending business school, where he learned the many tools needed to help run a small business like EF Invest. Now based in San Francisco, Finkel enjoys the flexibility that comes with making his own hours and being able to coach his two young sons’ baseball teams. As for what he misses most about the corporate world, the “water cooler talk,” he’s able to get his fix at WeWork SOMA.
Photos: Nate Rivera