There’s no business like the financial advice business if you’re husband and wife team Philip Olson and Julia Lorenz-Olson of the Art of Finance, a four-year-old firm in Austin, Texas.

The two found love and a career in finance far from the bright lights of Broadway they originally aspired to as college students.

“I attended the University of Texas, where I met Julia while we worked backstage for a children’s dance show,” Philip Olson recalls. “Eighteen months later, we were married.”

Olson says that after their 2008 marriage, he struggled for the next five years to make a living, first as a theatrical performer and later as a theatrical instructor. To make ends meet, he waited tables, parked cars and made lattes until he found a new career as a licensed insurance and security broker for New England Financial.

In 2015, he became a certified financial planner and opened the Art of Finance.

Julia Lorenz-Olson’s career path from performer to advisor was just as circuitous. For years, she worked in a bank’s mortgage loan department while supplementing her income with part-time jobs.

Over time, Philip Olson says, the couple realized they would be more successful working together than apart. They decided to help young people like themselves, ranging from age 25 to their mid-40s, who worked in the performing arts and needed help managing their finances.

“That’s our sweet spot,” Philip Olson says in describing the firm’s primarily millennial clientele. “A lot of them lived through the last crash and have a lot of trepidation and worry about transparency.”

He says his firm does have clients whose names are widely known, though he cannot disclose them.

“One big way we cater to performers is to teach them how to budget and plan for variable income flows,” he says. “Actors, podcasters and musicians regularly see large spikes of income, followed by long dry spells [of unemployment]. We help them calculate a reasonable salary to pay themselves from their savings so they can avoid draining their reserves too quickly.”

In addition to instructing clients in the performing arts how not to live above their means, the couple works with them to establish S corporations and SEP-IRAs. The firm also partners with a CPA specializing in self-employed people.

“Performance artists regularly overpay their taxes by not taking advantage of these tools that are available to them,” Olson says.

He says many creative people he works with are highly attuned to the social and moral element of investing and want to make sure their dollars are invested in a socially responsible way. As a result, the couple build those clients’ investment portfolios in the SRI space to align with what is most important to them.

In an initial meeting with a high-earning performing artist or business owner, Philip Olson says the firm’s first priority is to set up a last will and testament, power of attorney and disability and life insurance policies.

“It creates wonderful peace of mind for [the client’s] spouse and/or children,” he says.

Lorenz-Olson says both she and her husband are firm believers in the power of budgeting and its value to their clients.

“They’re timid about admitting to not understanding a particular financial concept,” Philip Olson says. “We let them know we’re not here to judge.”

That doesn’t mean the two don’t add their two cents’ worth of financial advice whenever they get the chance. Several years ago, PBS executives saw the couple’s marketing videos and asked them to make a pilot. The network was impressed with the result and gave the couple a contract to produce Two Cents as a PBS Digital Studios online educational series.

“We were just making those ourselves, in our own house,” Lorenz-Olson says. “This is a perfect fit for us since our personal mission is to educate people without scaring them.”

Some of the episode titles in the Regional Emmy award-winning series include “Moving Without Spending a Fortune,” “The Ugly Truth About Airplane Miles,” “Is It Even Possible to Save for Retirement?” and “Do Kids Need to Learn About Money?”

Their fee-only firm is a work in production as well. According to Olson, the firm oversees $8 million in client AUM and works with approximately 200 families worldwide.

The family is growing as well. Last year, the couple became first-time parents to daughter Clementine.

“I don’t want her to get to college and never know how to pay a bill online,” Lorenz-Olson says. “I don’t want her to think that she needs a high-paying job either.”

Olson says he never thought to ask questions about finance until he was enrolled in college.

“Finance should never be scary, and no one should ever be ashamed to discuss what they don’t know about it,” he says.