Don’t shoot me, I’m only the piano player

Elton John’s first studio album in 1973 was his second straight No. 1 album in the US and first No. 1 album in the UK. Two of the hits on the album were Crocodile Rock and Daniel, a personal favourite for many years after seeing it live on TV in what was then Rhodesia during a rugby tour in the same year. Of course, South Africa did not have TV then.

According to Wikipedia, the title of the album came from friend and actor/comedian Groucho Marx. Elton was playing the piano at a party at Groucho’s home. Groucho, who referred to him as “John Elton”, held out his middle and index finger in the style of a pistol. Elton then raised his hands and said, “Don’t shoot me, I’m only the piano player.”

Information refining is equally dangerous

Moonstone started as an information refinery on 1 April 2000. The original business plan envisaged us assisting independent financial advisers to mine their client base in order to optimise its potential. Twenty-three years later, our service offering is, of course, vastly different, yet still based on the same game plan – making a positive difference in the lives of the often-maligned financial advisers.

When we started out, we were an unknown entity. We were called many things, Moonshine, Moonlight, even Moonstruck, or worse, at times. To build the brand, we decided to produce a weekly newsletter called the Investment Indicators that would be sponsored by product providers and distributed to financial advisers free of charge. As the only truly independent source of comparative annuity rates, we soon became an integral part of the adviser’s “skietgoed”, or arsenal of sales aids.

From 2002, the Indicators was expanded to contain industry news of importance to advisers, and in 2005, we launched the Moonstone Monitor to expand on other aspects of financial advice to assist the industry in mastering compliance requirements and, in particular, the regulatory exams, which were a major challenge for most advisers.

Refining complicated legal jargon into meaningful and understandable plain language is quite a dangerous undertaking, but we bit the bullet and today have a distribution list in excess of 35 000 subscribers.

As the bearer of what was often viewed as bad tidings, we had to take some flak for the content that we shared, albeit merely conveying a new regulation or some such information. But, for the most part, we built up a core of loyal readers who came to rely on us for staying abreast of developments in an increasingly complex environment.

The times they are a-changin’

Bob Dylan’s prophetic words ring true to this day.

Probably the most famous quote from the baseball great Yogi Berra is, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Years later he explained: “I just meant that times are different. Not necessarily better or worse. Just different.”

This applies equally to the world of communication.

My successor, Mark Bechard, is doing a great job, embracing modern technology and bringing a far wider range of topics than what was covered before. There is so much information in this space that readers are demanding seriously abbreviated content, which can, of course, be very dangerous for the one tasked with doing the refining.

One of the modern aids at our disposal allows us to gauge what content readers find interesting and recalibrate the compass to bring you information you need, rather than trying to guess what you want to know. Then, of course, there are institutions such as the Financial Services Tribunal which brings legal clarity to grey areas, especially when new regulations are introduced.

Despite the wide variety of delivery platforms, the core essential of good reporting is even more important in these days of fake news – information you can trust.

This has been our approach all along and will continue to be in the future.