Tell us your name and a little about yourself.
Hi, my name is Steph, I’m the founder of Everest and my passion is investing in property. I started Evarvest as a way to help others start investing and scale their wealth – it’s a bit of a pen to paper of everything I’ve learned and continue to learn. My mission is to make financial education free and accessible to the masses.
What exactly does your company do?
There are a few things we do so I’ll break it down into 3 stages.
The first is to provide a free investment education platform so anyone and everyone can ‘DIY’ their way to wealth.
The second offer we have is to offer a simple solution to investing in the stock market. We’re working to make this as close to free as possible and free to trial, ensuring that investors don’t have to risk their hard-earned money vetting our service. – I’ve had my own bad experiences with ‘professionals’ so hopefully, this helps others avoid some of them.
The third offer is a borderless bank. As my passion is property and I’ve seen what saving and investing has done for me, I want to be able to help others enter the world of property with a bank that supports you to build wealth no matter where you or your investments are in the world.
What were the biggest challenges you have faced and how did you overcome them?
There have been plenty of challenges along the way that it’s sometimes difficult to choose the biggest ones. Often challenges seem big at the time until you move past them.
For me, the biggest challenges have been learning curves and often fairly expensive learning curves, but I like to think what’s expensive today is cheap tomorrow – this philosophy has really given me the ability to gain perspective, now I think of challenges as more of an adventure.
For example, the biggest challenge we faced was deciding where to obtain our banking license, the challenges we found in different markets around the world led us to a country I never would have expected to live – it’s taken us all the way to Lithuania. So far it’s been an amazing adventure and one that will not just unlock the European market but help us to have borderless offerings so we can really make an impact and change the way investing is done for not just our generation but for all future generations that come behind us.
What piece of advice do you wish someone had given you at the start of your career?
Your gut instincts are never wrong.
Who are your biggest influences and people you admire and why?
I’ve always admired Stephen Hawking. Given two years to live and look at what he accomplished. Understanding that success is a mindset really became a significant influencer for me. This key to success has really been reaffirmed by Allan & Barbara Pease’s book ‘The Answer’ and of course Gary Vee because sometimes you just need a passionate and stern word reminding you that you have control over your own life and the outcomes.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?
There are so many people that have helped me along the way that don’t even know it. All the people that added their 2 cents worth either in a positive or negative way have influenced my path to success and for that, I will always be thankful.
There are however three people that I am most grateful for, my mum (of course) for her unwavering support – if it weren’t for her pushing me to write to our local paper, showing that you can buy property, then I may never have reached this point. My partner who uprooted his life and career to dive into the deep end and share this crazy journey with me. He’s always got my back on this journey and he’s the one to thank for editing my terrible punctuation – grammar is not my strong suit! Last but not least, my sister. Sometimes it may seem like there is a rivalry between us but it’s more than we support and push each other to be better, a little healthy competition is a good thing when you know they have your back and only want to see you succeed.
What do you see as your greatest success in life?
Wow, that’s a hard one. I’m proud of a lot of things and there are a few successes I’ve had so far but I think I move the goalposts a little too often, so I don’t think I’ve had my ‘greatest’ success yet.
Some of the goals I’ve achieved that I’m most proud of are: handling failure, moving past criticism, becoming an experienced investor, becoming a contributor and a published author, becoming a speaker (although public speaking is still terrifying to me), finding my passion and staying true to my values and vision.
How can people contact you?
http://evarvest.com/
https://www.facebook.com/evarvest/
https://www.instagram.com/evarvest/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniesbrennan/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/evarvest/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2ge9PGyL8qcjM6aoEvW8TQ?
