Teaching what school often misses
Clearwood & Co. creates practical books and educational content designed to help people understand money, business, and the decisions that shape their lives.
Why clearwood exists
It all started with my twin brothers.
When my twin brothers were freshmen in high school, I started teaching them about the things I thought they needed to understand before becoming adults.
We talked about bank accounts, credit scores, credit cards, investing, and the different paths they could take after high school. I explained how a Roth IRA worked, what it meant to buy or short a stock, and why the financial decisions they made early in life could have such a lasting impact.
The concepts were not especially difficult once someone took the time to explain them. The problem was that no one was explaining them.
After spending about a week going through everything with them, I had a simple thought.
I should write this down.
At first, I pictured the book as a resource for my brothers. When they asked me a question, I could point them to the chapter that explained it. They could read it on their own, and then we could sit down together and talk through anything that did not fully click.
But as I started writing, I realized this was not just something my brothers needed. These were questions that teenagers, college students, and adults were asking every day.
That idea became What They Should Have Taught You and eventually Clearwood & Co.
The education I was fortunate to have.
I was always a night owl as a kid. When the other kids went to bed, I usually wanted to stay up and listen to the adults talk.
A lot of the people around me were entrepreneurs, so those conversations often centered on business. I heard them talk about how to grow, when to expand, how to manage what they had already built, and where the next opportunity might come from.
At the time, I did not think of any of that as an education. I was just curious and liked being included. Looking back, those late-night conversations taught me more about business than I realized.
But investing and the stock market were not discussed nearly as much. I grew up in an area where people tended to think about wealth through businesses, real estate, and things they could see and control.
That was something I discovered on my own.
Over time, I became fascinated by investing, technology, and the companies changing the way the world worked. I began combining that newer perspective with the practical, build-it-yourself mindset I had grown up around.
That blend still shapes the way I think about money and what we teach through Clearwood.
Why I wanted to teach it differently.
I was never someone who naturally loved school. For years, I questioned why I was learning certain things and how any of it would help me in the real world.
That began to change when I found subjects that felt practical. Economics helped me better understand the world around me. Finance showed me how money could be used as a tool. Business law showed me how rules, incentives, and decisions fit together.
Those experiences shaped the way I wanted to write for my brothers. I did not want to create another textbook. I wanted to explain things the way I would explain them across the table: clearly, practically, and without assuming they already knew the basics.
That approach became the foundation of Clearwood. We write practical books and create resources that make money, investing, business, and other important decisions easy to understand.