Xerxes Nabong on Why Success Is Funding the Life, Not Just the Retirement

He's been a wealth advisor since 2005. Then his dad died at 58.

Xerxes Nabong found his career at a municipal golf course in Norfolk, Virginia. He was fourteen. His dad, a U.S. military officer named Ramsey, would drop him off for the day during summer while he went to work. The guys Xerxes played with were forty, fifty, sixty years older than him. They weren't working. They were drinking beer, smoking cigars, and playing cards in the card room.

He asked them once how come they didn't have jobs. One of them looked up and said, "Hey, listen kid. Our investments pay for our ability to not have to work and play golf all day long."

That summer, Xerxes learned the word retirement.

By 2005, he was sitting for the series seven exam a week after graduating from Old Dominion University. By 2010, he and his business partner Phil Maliniak had left Ameriprise and launched their own firm. They named it Maliniak and Nabong Wealth Advisory Services. Xerxes will tell you, laughing, that the name was the silliest thing they could have picked. Within a year, they rebranded to Virginia Financial Planning, and eventually to the name it carries today, Wealth Avenue. The firm now has eleven people.

Everything was working. Then, in 2014, his dad passed away at 58.

Why the work had to change

Xerxes was nine years into his career. He was growing the business, bringing on clients, networking on golf courses. After his dad's death, he realized something that hadn't bothered him before.

"There really wasn't a why behind it," he says.

His dad served thirty years in the military. He would have been 71 this year. That's the age Xerxes now helps his clients plan toward.

"When I talk to people and I bring on new relationships and take on new clients, one of the things I do is I tell them this exact story. I tell them about how life tomorrow isn't guaranteed."

That's the sentence that now frames every client conversation he has. Not as a sales pitch. Not as a scare tactic. As a reset.

"My job is to help you financially be secure and successful in your life, but also just as important, to enjoy your life along the way. Because tomorrow's not guaranteed."

It's a subtle shift in a profession that's usually measured in decades. For Xerxes, it moved the center of the work from someday to along the way.

The side businesses, including the one that cost him $80,000

By the mid-2010s, Xerxes was a financial advisor by day and a Yelp community manager by night. He'd been hired by Yelp in 2012. The job, as he puts it, was to eat, drink, shop, play, and throw parties he got paid for. He did it until 2018.

Through Yelp, he met an acquaintance who pitched him on investing in a cafe inside the YMCA. $25K to buy in. A steady base of YMCA members. A quiet silent-partner role.

He invested. The cafe lost him $80,000.

He'll talk about it openly. Not because it's a great pitch for a wealth advisor to make, but because it was the business education he couldn't have bought any other way. "Someone said you're smart if you learn from your own mistakes, but you have wisdom if you learn from someone else's mistakes. And that someone else was me in a different light."

The thing about the cafe, though, is that it introduced him to a 22-year-old named Kristen.

The escape room, and the hire who outran him

In 2012, at a Yelp team-building event, Xerxes did his first escape room. He couldn't sleep for weeks afterward. Virginia Beach didn't have one yet. In April he was talking to landlords. In June he had the lease. In July, he opened the doors.

He paid Kristen a $20,000 salary to run the operation, with a promise: when the business turned a profit, she'd get 20% of it.

They turned a profit in 45 days.

By 2015, Kristen was making $75,000 a year at 22 years old. That number translates to roughly a quarter of a million dollars in annual profit on the business. Over the seven years Xerxes owned it, the escape room did over $2 million in revenue. He sold it in 2022.

The line he keeps coming back to: "I spent three hours a month on my escape room."

Three hours a month, because he had Kristen. And because he'd learned from a business coach early in his career to do the things he had to do and delegate the rest.

"I have really great confidence that I could walk away for two weeks and know that my business is not going to burn up in flames. It's important that business owners really adopt that mentality. If you feel as though you have to do everything, there is a limit."

The sequel: Kristen eventually moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia, and told Xerxes the two and a half years she'd spent running his escape room had prepared her to open her own. Which she did. She was in her mid-twenties. Xerxes calls it his best business story.

What a schedule looks like when the why is clear

Xerxes started his career working twelve-hour days. Eight-thirty to eight. "If you set five appointments by 5:00 PM on Monday, you get to go home." That was the rule. He'd call his buddies when he got out early and they'd ask what he meant by early.

Now he works about eight hours a day, most days. He's in Scottsdale, working East Coast hours, which means his day starts around seven and often ends by two. Between two and six, he's working out, running errands, handling things most people have to take time off to do.

Some of his boundaries are simple. No phone calls on weekends. The phone gets put away at home. If he's watching TV on the couch with his fiancée Allison, he might open the laptop for a few minutes, but he won't take a call. Twenty-minute power naps are on the table. "I'm not afraid to take those."

He has two kids, Ava, 2, and Luca, 11 months. He thinks in terms of Halloweens. There will be thirteen of them before each kid grows up and finds their own thing. He and Allison have agreed they come first for each other, because the kids are going to be exhausting and it matters to be steady together.

"People do business with who they like"

Xerxes tells a story about a networking event in Scottsdale in 2021. He showed up with a pocket full of business cards, the way he always had. Nobody was asking for business cards anymore. They were asking for Instagram handles.

"You could throw a rock and hit a wealth advisor," he says. "Everyone's got a guy, they got a gal. In the end, you're gonna do business with people you like."

His Instagram is mostly his kids. He's fine with that. He wants clients to know that the person giving them financial advice is a human being with a family, hobbies, and a life he's actively living. He thinks that makes him better at his job.

The larger point is the one that keeps surfacing in his practice. Knowing what's important to you changes how you show up for the people in front of you. It changes what you plan for. It changes what you say yes to. It changes what kind of business you build, and what kind of business you choose not to.

Success, rewritten

For Xerxes, success used to mean saving enough to retire someday. It was the lesson the old guys on the Ocean G golf course taught him when he was fourteen.

His dad never got there.

Now success is funding the life along the way. It's an eleven-person firm that can run without him for two weeks. It's three hours a month on a seven-figure business. It's the story he tells every new client. It's the phone away at home. It's the parting advice he gave us at the end of our conversation.

"Never be the smartest person in the room. Always be in a place where you can learn from others."

Listen to the full episode of Success, Rewritten with Xerxes Nabong for the rest of the story, including the business that cost him $80,000, the call he made to Kristen, and what he does when his one-year-old wakes him up in the middle of the night.