The iconic writer never launched a blockbuster company or media franchise, but the right choices and sheer tenacity added up to a career and a life that the rest of us could emulate.
It’s possible to do exactly what you want for half a century and still leave plenty of wealth behind. That’s the lesson Tom Wolfe exemplified in life and now we’re learning it from his death.
Wolfe didn’t really have a regular job since the early 1960s, when he left the newspaper grind behind to chase magazine features and then increasingly lucrative book deals.
Beyond making his editors happy enough to keep the work flowing, his only mission was keeping up with controversy over the decades — making sure to insert himself into each debate that erupted.
It’s not a bad way to live, as long as you stay within a few common sense parameters. For Wolfe, it added up to career earnings up to $60 million, maybe $20 million of which was still piled up when he died last week at age 88.
It only takes a few home runs
For a public intellectual in the modern world, that’s an extraordinary amount of cash. A lot of Upper East Side writers with that kind of money were born to it and never quite managed to spend it all. Wolfe earned it.
And unlike a lot of purely hypothetical “celebrity net worth” numbers, this one makes sense. His novels were routinely million-sellers, a standard royalty split of which translates into $8 million or more per title.
Multiply by four, add the nonfiction and the movie rights and you’re already in the $60 million ball park. Big checks from magazines like Vanity Fair, Esquire and Rolling Stone easily take him over the top.
Essentially, if someone wanted to pay him enough to work, he’d write the article or give the speech. His speakers’ bureau set a $50,000 minimum on his appearance fees and in a good year he’d do a couple of college graduations and then live off the honorarium.
People paid him because they knew they’d get a highly differentiated experience, a distinctive point of view and a memorable form of expression — he gave a good show, whether he was wearing one of the wild suits or something more subdued.
Even though most of the books had a polarizing effect, he also made sure to give each one everything he had. Bonfire of the Vanities took him six years from start to publication. After that, he came out with one novel a decade.
A simple magazine profile might take several weeks or even months of close interaction with the subject, effectively embedding Wolfe in the scene. That’s a time-intensive process. You can’t squeeze five out in a day and you need to be paid accordingly.
Giving Rolling Stone the early serial version of Bonfire earned him $200,000. By that point he had two decades of star reputation to draw on.
He billed like a star
That’s the secret of his success right there. He always handled himself like a star, the person who could tell the most interesting story in the room even if he himself knew how to fade into the background.
Spend 50 years training the world to consider your participation a precious gift to be compensated accordingly, and you’re going to end up making money.
It’s a lesson all advisors and indeed everyone can stand to learn. You’ve only got so much time. Once your career is in a place where you’re filling every day profitably, it’s time to ask for more. Ultimately, it’s quality of relationships — a few books with the potential to go big, a byline that editors will pay big to get — that makes the difference between paying the bills and real wealth.
For advisors, that means conserving the resources you need to chase really big accounts. A single bona fide billionaire can literally pay more wealth management fees than a thousand mere millionaires.
The account is more complicated, but is it a thousand times more complicated? Not at all. Odds are good that the first big win will set you up for more of the same, without straining your overall capacity.
Either way, if you need more resources, enough cash is flowing that you can hire more people. And if the service is exquisite, you can even raise your fees. Wolfe learned how to communicate his value dramatically enough that his “clients” — the editors and publishers — reached for the checkbooks.
The money was there in publishing in the 1960s and through the 1980s. By definition, the money is there in the wealth management world now. All it takes is a good track record, a unique proposition (think white suit) and a refusal to settle for less than what the market will bear.
Persistence is critical
Of course Wolfe was fortunate in having a half century at the top of the literary pecking order. He lived a long time and he kept working until just about the end.
Arguably he slowed down around the turn of the millennium. He was 70 and the world was changing, but he stayed active and relatively relevant throughout.
Still, his last big paycheck was only six years ago: $7 million for the last book. It takes a little work for an 80-year-old to spend that much cash. His kids are already established and don’t need help. When their mother is gone, they'll end up with what their parents left behind.
In the meantime, professional reputation becomes an annuity. You give more $50,000 speeches and write fewer $7 million books. You stop promoting yourself. Maybe you coast a little.
Wolfe’s official website still belongs to the publisher he left a decade ago. He never took it over or updated it. He didn’t care.
A lot of advisors retire that way, running the legacy client accounts without putting a lot of effort into chasing new ones. They may not be able to look forward to 50 years of success, but lifespans can be surprising.
The lesson here is that Wolfe kept doing his thing, decade after decade. His interests evolved but the basic proposition was set in stone — after all, as long as it wasn’t broken, there was no reason to fix it.
Eventually, his reputation outweighed his overhead. While younger New Yorkers envy his luck in buying a prime 12-room apartment back when the city was priced for apocalypse, even renters can accumulate wealth if they work long enough.
Wolfe worked a long time and his career choices ensured that he’d end up accumulating more wealth than most magazine people will ever be in the same room with. He’s proof that you can make it without playing the Silicon Valley or Hollywood games, much less simply going the hedge fund route.
From all accounts he had a great time along the way. Don’t sell your professional talents short and you may do the same. If fee compression is a factor at your end of the industry, it’s okay to move. Make yourself over as a premium player and have a little fun.
