Today we’d like to introduce you to Timothy Lutts.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
My father, Carlton Lutts, started the business with one newsletter, the Cabot Market Letter, in 1970, driven by a desire to help ordinary people become better investors, and that’s still our mission today. We publish investment advice aimed at the non-professional investor, taking care to avoid the jargon of the industry and instead communicating in plain English. The majority of our readers are in the U.S, but more than 10% are in Canada and others are in virtually every other English-speaking country in the world.
In the beginning, it was literally a kitchen table family enterprise, started on a shoestring budget. At first, neighborhood kids who stuffed envelopes were paid with ice cream sundaes. Later, my father hired mothers in the neighborhood who would work when their kids were in school. And I was there from the start (part-time of course), stuffing envelopes, running the postage meter, and typing addresses.
I joined the company full-time in 1986, I bought our first computer in 1987 (I was the techie) and I took over when my father retired in 2004.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We are a publisher, and we sell subscriptions—we carry no advertising—so the biggest struggle has been that faced by every publisher, the rise of the internet, and the resulting competition with information that is free.
In the old days, we marketed by direct mail; now it’s all web site and email.
The silver lining in this is that we no longer have those major expenses of paper, printing and postage.
Cabot Wealth Network – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We are proud of the quality of our investment advice and our service. Instead of a faceless corporation, we are a team of real investment analysts who often communicate one-on-one with our readers, backed by a team of customer service people who take pride in serving our customers well.
The average customer spends $200 a year for our advice, and we work hard to give them good value, with first-class recommendations about what stocks are the best investments, based on the system(s) they’re following.
On that note, we have 12 investment advisory services, ranging from aggressive momentum investing to conservative dividend-centric investing, and we work hard to steer people to the investing system that is right of them. We don’t hedge. We give very specific advice on exactly what to buy and why, so that readers know exactly what we’re thinking. They trust us!
Also, we have an annual conference in Salem at which attendees get to meet all the analysts, hear their latest investment ideas and ask them questions. It’s a very friendly group.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Every crash survived makes me proud. There was 1987, just a year after I started, which took the Dow down 22% in one day. There was the post 2000 bear market, which saw the Nasdaq lose 78% of its value—and many formerly popular stocks drop more than 90%. And there was the Great Recession of 2007-2009, which saw both the Dow and the NASDAQ lose more than 54% of their value.
Also, I’m proud that we’ve been able to survive without turning to the “doom and gloom” marketing used by so many of our competitors. Fear and greed are the two main motivators of people, and many competitors play on the fears of older investors, warning them of coming calamities. There’s always something to be afraid of. But my father was an optimist and I’m an optimist. I believe the world continues to evolve, and that even day creative people find solutions to problems that make the world better. For me, one of the benefits of my position is having a front row seat to all the new products and services that are making the world better.
For example, over the years, we’ve steered readers to Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Tesla, Google, Netflix, Priceline, Cisco, eBay, Gilead Pharmaceuticals and many many more.
Contact Info:
- Website: cabotwealth.com
- Phone: 9787455532
- Email: customerservice@cabot.net
- Facebook: facebook.com/CabotInvestingAdvice
- Twitter: @CabotAnalysts
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