Albuquerque economics expert Dustin Soflin wants you to invest. But that’s not all the UNM Anderson School of Management graduate wants. He wants your interest in investment — whether for your personal wealth priorities, or those of your small business — to become an ongoing, collaborative effort that involves an expert like him guiding your efforts with precision, knowledge, and experience dealing with the market, local, national, and global.
Solfin told us that such ventures should, by nature, be collaborative.
Soflin is interested in how you plan to get where you want to go, and he wants to be part of the team; more importantly, he wants to do the heavy-lifting while you sit back and manage your dream business or live your real life.
When Albuquerque City Lifestyle sat down with Soflin to discuss the logistics behind personal and small business investment strategies, we felt at ease and in the company of a real, yet accessible expert helper.
We began our amiable, investment -oriented conversation as acolyte and master; I didn’t know that much about personal and business investment, but Soflin is a seasoned professional who double-majored in finance and accounting. He’s been with Capital Strategies for many years and clearly has the expertise to guide our discussion.
Speaking about his roots as a business-minded Lobo, he recalled that “The accounting part never really appealed to me like the finance end of things. I was never going to be a CPA. Once I graduated, I started my career here at Capital Strategies”.
That career — nurtured and built over more than a few years immersed in the American marketplace — is something he defines as a form of help, a form of shared navigation that brings prosperity and wealth to all those on board. “My job is helping people grow their businesses, grow their investments,” he admitted with a slight smile.
Soflin says he and the firm take what’s known as a CFO approach to investments. I told him to explain that to me, to our readers who may not have heard of such a methodology before. In a humble, soft-spoken yet utterly confident tone, he told me about the ‘chief financial officer approach’ and replied, “We want to be a partner in a client’s financial decisions, whether such decisions involve questions like ‘Should I pay my mortgage off early or put that money into investments?’ We can answer questions like that, questions like ‘How do I sell my business?’ or ‘Should I buy a building for my business?’ …’ What do the income potentials look like in these cases?’ … We aim to partner with clients in their financial lives and the decisions they make.”
Soflin has mastered his trade and helped improve our local economy by working with local business owners of all sorts, including more than a few thriving “private medical practices, including dentists and optometrists”. He also told us that the thing that sets those entities apart is a matter of performance, pointing out that, “We serve high-performing business owners, businesses where they’re starting to grow, where revenues are starting to increase; maybe they’re diversifying or adding new team members. These are just some of the indicators we use; these are businesses that are crushin’ it, so to speak.”
It’s interesting to note that this reporter wondered why a successful small business might need the power of expert advice and professional, results-driven guidance to continue down its own path toward personal wealth and well-being. Soflin seemed to sense this fence-sitting with regards to the power of investment and told me, “Usually our clients want some clarity about [things like] cash-flow, what that looks like, and how it impacts their own personal wealth, how we can help them translate that business success into personal wealth. We want to find them a higher interest rate than they can find themselves in something like a money market account. A lot of people seem to think that the money that they give us to manage is locked away, and they really can’t get access to it. And that’s not true, we try to be as flexible in our plans as possible … The way that we plan with our clients is to keep as many options as possible available to them. We get people’s money working for them, so they can concentrate on their other goals”.
Soflin and his associates at Capital Strategies have been on target in that regard; as the number of successful small businesses in our city continues to grow, it is clear that our city’s continued economic development has to do with investment strategies aimed at sustaining and enriching small businesses.
And Soflin’s record of success with his numerous clients — economic partners in the true sense of the word — have led him to an optimistic view of our shared economic future. After all those daily and deeper looks into individual business investments, as the weekend approaches, Dustin Soflin feels optimistic about business in America: “There’s a lot of noise out there from politics. If you ask one person, they think the sky is falling; if you ask another, they’ll tell you everything is fine. For us, we look at the data, we look at the science. We’re independent [thinkers] in that regard. Our opinion is that the next six months, getting us through about mid-year, have a very positive outlook, [financially speaking]. Past that time frame, things get a bit murkier, because this is an election year, and in an election year, you see more [market] volatility.”
But that volatile market action is all short-term Soflin reminds us, “Yeah, we know about short-term volatility, but we tell our partners, ‘if you have a savings [or wealth] goal that we are investing these dollars in, for say the next five or 10 years, why are we so worried about the volatility coming up this year, when we know if we continue to save through and past that, we will meet your [economic] goal, regardless.”
At the end of the day, after considering the sort of success envisioned by Capital Strategies, Soflin's optimism also extends to his own vision of Albuquerque. He concluded our meeting by telling me, “I think that the city is growing. I drive around and see a lot of new development: hotels, apartment houses, homes. I assume that the population is growing, too. That means that jobs are coming in, that all usually means that the economic outlook for the place is improving. Our mayor seems to be pro-economic development. It feels pretty good to be in Albuquerque right now.”
8100 Lang Ave NE #102, Albuquerque. 505.554.3281 https://capitalstrategiesus.com
We get people’s money working for them, so they can concentrate on their other goals.