“We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature.” — Marcus Aurelius
On Monday, July 6th, it will be officially seven years for Painted Porch.
This past week, we took our leadership team to Gabilan Ranch in Northern California. One moment has stayed with us since. We asked the family who owns the ranch what the place meant to them. They didn’t hesitate.
“Family.”
That’s it. That’s the whole answer. Simple, and so human.
It’s the same word we’d use for our own team. But it’s not actually where our name comes from and the real story is better.
WHY WE’RE CALLED PAINTED PORCH
Twenty-three hundred years ago, in the Athenian Agora, there was an open-air colonnade painted with murals of old battles. Locals called it the Stoa Poikile — literally, the “Painted Porch.” Around 300 BCE, a philosopher named Zeno of Citium started gathering students there to think out loud. They debated in the open, in public, where anyone walking by could hear and push back. His followers became known simply as “those from the porch.” That’s where we get the word Stoic. Stoicism, at its root, is porch philosophy.
That’s the thread we pulled our name from. Not a porch as a cozy image, but a porch as a place built for honest reasoning where ideas got tested out loud instead of polished in private first. Marcus Aurelius, two centuries later, was one of the Stoics who came out of that tradition, which is why his words open this post.
THE PORCH IS WHERE THE REAL CONVERSATIONS HAPPEN
That’s the environment we’ve tried to build inside our walls since day one: a place where collaboration matters more than competition, where the collective wisdom of our team is worth more than any one person’s individual win, and where the honest conversation beats the polished one. From advisors to operations, everyone has a seat on the porch. That’s not a line we use for marketing. It’s how we actually try to work and it’s exactly what our team was doing on the porch at the ranch, heads down, working through the year ahead together.
Because the truth is, most of what our clients wrestle with was never a lack of information. They already know the math. What keeps them up at night is the fear that comes with market volatility, the weight of a decision that touches their whole family, the tax implications buried three steps down the line. Our job is to anchor all of that in what actually matters to them their values, their why — so they can move forward with confidence instead of staying stuck. A model can’t do that work. It doesn’t know you. We do.
Listen to Founder and CEO Brian Lloyd dig deeper into the reality of human connection, with Justin Vlaanderen chiming in on the emotional side of decisions, at the end. AUDIO CLIP [one minute)
SEVEN YEARS IN
That’s still the foundation everything here is built on: trust, and a level of support that doesn’t come from a spreadsheet or a prompt window. We’re not just here to manage assets. We’re here so our clients can live the fullest version of their lives the kind Maslow meant when he talked about self-actualization. Not just success. Not just approval. The full expression of who they actually are.
The Stoics believed the good life was built on judgment, not circumstance. We believe something similar: the plan matters less than the person making sense of it with you. That’s what we hope to keep doing, on this porch, for a long time.
If you’ve been sitting on a question about your own plan — or you’ve never had a real conversation with an advisor and aren’t sure where to start — we’d love to meet with you. That conversation costs you nothing but a little time, and it might be the one that changes how you see the road ahead.
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