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.”