Meet the Creators Taking Their Passion for Investing to the Next Level

For many people, investing is something they do (or that someone else does on their behalf) to help reach their financial goals. For others, it’s a passion, and it might even transform into a business or other creative endeavour. Raymond Fitzpatrick and Gladys Estolas are two people who have taken their interest in investing beyond their portfolios. Here are their stories.

Making business-owning finance more accessible
Raymond Fitzpatrick describes himself as a “boring CPA”, but if you look at his resume, it’s clear this isn’t actually true. The Fredericton resident started his career working as a chartered accountant for big companies like McCain Foods and Irving Oil, and then moved into venture capital as an investor. It was there that he saw a huge opportunity to improve the way business owners deal with money.

“I started working with start-up companies and noticed very quickly that many of them had little financial know-how,” he says, noting they didn’t have the skills or the language, to understand their finances, let alone to explain them to potential investors. “I was asking people for things like budgets and forecasts, and it wasn’t their expertise. They came from every walk of life other than finance.”

Enter Profitual, the company Fitzpatrick founded in 2022, which aims to make it easier for start-ups to input their financial information and get the forecasting and budgeting information they need. “It’s trying to bring business owners financial information in a way they can understand; focusing on the relevant stuff, as opposed to the nitty-gritty details that aren’t important."

At first glance, Profitual seems like finance software, but it's more of a communication and motivation tool, helping business owners tell their financial story. It's one that Fitzpatrick uses regularly in his other business, as the co-owner of a distillery. You might think he and his business partner, also a chartered accountant, would be on top of their books, but that’s not always the case. “We know we want the financial information,” he says. “We know we should forecast, but sometimes it’s just a pain.”

The program, which has been likened to ‘the Canva of spreadsheets’¹ – referring to the hugely popular graphic design program aimed at non-designers – enables users to create budgets and financial models in just 15 minutes. With its "building blocks" tools, companies can easily develop income statements, balance sheets and cash flow reports, which ultimately help entrepreneurs gain a better understanding of their operations, enabling them to avoid potentially costly mistakes.

Fitzpatrick is motivated by Profitual’s potential to help companies get off the ground, and he appears to be on the right track. He recently had a conversation with engineering students who tried out the platform. He expected they’d want to ask questions about how to use the platform, but this wasn’t the case, and they wanted to chat about his business experience instead. “The platform’s so easy that three students with no finance background were able to jump in, watch a video and start using the platform,” he says. “The best part is knowing we’re serving that demographic.”

Profitual is also aimed at venture capital, so founders can both understand their books and communicate them. “There’s a million reasons why a start-up may not succeed,” Fitzpatrick says. “We want to make sure it’s not their finances.”

Turning stock data into art
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people explored new side projects. While many of us turned to gardening or making sourdough, in 2020, Gladys Estolas launched a new style of art: illustrations inspired by the peaks and valleys of the stock market’s ups and downs. “I was stuck at home and thinking about the future,” she says. “My husband invests, and I started to join in. The charts looked like cityscapes and mountains, and as I browsed through companies, I had to get my ideas on paper.”

Estolas, who’s based in Hillsboro, Oregon, has since turned everything from Tesla to Bitcoin to the one-day performance of the S&P 500 into works of art – often minimalist landscapes, filled with mountain peaks and valleys. She's also created cityscapes and other eye-catching imagery. Her work, created under the name Stoxart, ranges in price from USD$45 to $180, while commissioned pieces can cost more than USD$1,000.

Estolas, who spent nearly 10 years at Nike, where she turned complex information and insights into data visualizations, says she loves “to take numbers and make them easily digestible. I see shapes in different contexts.” Still, she was surprised at just how much attention she received after she posted her first stock market–inspired drawing on Reddit. “It became this weird art project,” she says. “I didn’t expect that reaction.”

It was when people started requesting custom commissions, including traders who want to commemorate big wins – “It’s kind of like a trophy,” she says – that she realized her drawings could turn into a business. Some of her favourite clients are those who have personal reasons for commissioning her work. One of her clients received Apple shares as a gift from his late father and wanted to honour his dad by turning the iPhone maker’s stock chart into a piece of art. “Every part of that artwork represented his family and the history,” Estolas says, adding that she turned the chart into an apple orchard to reference the company itself. “There were elements he wanted to add that were very personal.”

While Estolas uses AI for some of her work, including to test out Stoxart ideas, the works themselves are entirely what she calls “traditional” and “organic” – authentic art that’s the product of a great deal of thought and emotion. In fact, a piece might take her a week or two to complete, depending on the amount of background work needed and how quickly inspiration strikes. “I do a lot of research about the company and then I fuse the personal touches of whoever’s paying for the commission,” she says. “I like to create my work knowing there’s a story behind the piece, rather than just lines and colours.”

Estolas’s work is in such high demand that she’s had to take a break from Stoxart to focus on other priorities, but she expects to get back to her queue of orders soon. Her art, she believes, speaks to people on multiple levels: not only does it visualize share prices in a comprehensible way, but it layers emotion on top of data that many perceive as “boring lines.” Customer feedback confirms that: “I’ve had people saying, ‘I’ve never really liked art until I saw this.’”