We talked with Julie about:

• How to build client engagement by getting into the client’s headspace
• Why it’s important to have a niche that is authentic to you
• How generational differences affect client experience

About Julie Littlechild:

Twice named among the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Planning, past member of the National Board of Financial Planners, and author, Julie Littlechild believes growing client engagement requires advisors to deliver not only what clients expect but what they need. She discusses how shifting conversations to truly understand each client’s headspace creates a personalized, high-impact service.

Featured Resources 

• Julie Littlechild’s LinkedIn
• Absolute Engagement LinkedIn
• Absolute Engagement Website

Full Audio Transcript

Lauren Hong (00:00):

Thank you so much for joining us today. I was just reviewing your LinkedIn and all the things you've been involved with and it's so impressive. So you were on the National Board of Financial Planners for several years and then one of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Planning. I think it was twice. Is that right? 

Julie (00:22):

Yeah, I think so. 

Lauren (00:24):

And the list keeps going, influential practice management awards and then an author and I'm thinking, oh my goodness, you've had such an incredible career that has not only been recognized but you’ve been able to add so much to this space and what's going on. And so I really appreciate your time and I'm excited to hear from you today. 

Julie (00:45):

It's all right. I think if you just stick around long enough, people have to acknowledge you for something. <laugh> That's been my strategy all along. 

Lauren (00:52):

<laugh> Well, it's working and I love to see great work acknowledged; it is so important. So I wanted to give a brief introduction just for folks who are listening. So it seems like the sweet spot here, a lot of it is around practice management and all kinds of research. And I'd love to hear more about that. We'll start there. I know you've looked a lot into client engagement. You've talked with tons of advisors and firms about kind of their secret sauce and what works really, really well for them. And what's kind of the umbrella? What are you seeing with firms over the years and growth and what works? 

Julie (01:34):

Yeah, so our focus is very much in that spot of client experience and client engagement. And you're right, we gather our insights, not just from talking to advisors of course, which we do every day, but from an industry investor study we do every year, and then our day-to-day work, which is gathering input on behalf of advisors from their clients. So every day we're given this glimpse into that particular piece of it. And you know, the whole concept of engagement has changed a little over the years. And we're really on a soapbox at the moment because I feel like we've been using this word, client engagement, for so long that it hasn't had much meaning for people frankly. Everybody has their own definition of what engagement is. And so they're right. 

Julie (02:34):

I guess if there's no agreement on a definition. So a lot of the work we've been doing lately, just to kind of give you a little context for that question, is to say, well, what is the definition of engagement? Can we actually have a clear definition? Is it defensible, as in does it actually lead to business outcomes that we're trying to achieve, in client outcomes? And then is it actionable? So when we've been looking at the research over the last year, that's really where we've started digging in and we've been able to really demonstrate that yes, there's a definition. The definition we use as an engaged client is the most satisfied, five outta five, and they've provided a referral. And then when we dug into that, we could see that they were more loyal, they provided all the referrals, they were more satisfied with investment performance as in like the flip side being they felt like they were getting more value from advice and clients were more confident about their financial futures when they were engaged. 

Julie (03:40):

So all of this began to get us saying, let's get really specific about what drives engagement so we can be more tactical about it. And we absolutely see some correlations in terms of what drives it. But a lot of it for us is sort of boiling it down to this idea that we can all deliver great service, understand expectations, meet or exceed them, you're good to go—but if you really wanna engage at that deeper level and achieve all of those benefits we talked about, then it's much more about leadership. It's about the conversations you're having with your clients, the kind of communications you're sharing, and the extent to which the entire experience is designed, intentionally designed, to help them based on what's important to them. And so this is what we're sort of seeing. It's kind of big picture questions but then we try to drive down to what does that actually mean, tactically mean? 

Lauren (04:44):

And what's important to them, specifically meaning the client, not necessarily the employee that's servicing the client. Can you maybe give some examples of the tactics? And you talked about leadership. Are there things you're seeing firms doing? Is it the kind of value sets in how they're communicating or are there specific technologies they're deploying or things that are helping with that client experience, however we're defining it? But really client experience as it does map to ROI. I’d love to hear a little bit of that side, of the tactical implementation. 

Julie (05:24):

Yeah, sure. So when we think about it tactically in that sense, there's definitely examples and you mentioned technology because I think technology is allowing us to do a lot of this more effectively now. So that's certainly a big help. But I would give examples like, if you wanna deliver good service, you understand your client wants to meet twice a year and you reach out twice a year and you set a meeting and you have a good review, and you look at their plan or portfolio and you follow up and you do all of the things they expect you to do; that's good service. It's what they expect. When we're seeing the shift to engagement, it's advisors saying, I'm gonna do all of that but what I'm going to do is try to co-create the agenda by getting incredibly good at teasing out what's on your mind, how you're feeling, your concerns, challenges, and aspirations. 

Julie (06:21):

And then we're gonna build the agenda around what you wanna talk about, not just what I wanna tell you. And so these are kind of subtle shifts. That's one example. And the theme of co-creation is sort of big in our world. Maybe a more granular example would be, we could have an advisor who has a great content strategy, right? Sending out great articles, writing blogs, doing all of that, in touch regularly. But maybe it's more generic content. Maybe it's content the advisor thinks the client should find of interest. And then the shift we're seeing is actually asking clients what they are concerned about, what their interests are, and then being able to personalize the content that is shared based on that. So it's like tweaking how we service in a way that's much more client-centric. 

Lauren (07:16):

Yeah. Less about sort of your own headspace and more about how do you get in the headspace of your client. 

Julie (07:22):

Exactly. 

Lauren (07:24):

Basically serving up things of value for them. We see that all the time too. Especially content brainstorms, things that we may be passionate about but that doesn't mean the receiving party is. 

Julie (07:38):

Well, and I think we have to be careful even in how we ask the question, cuz I've seen people talk about that and then maybe they get a little better and say, well, you know, I'm gonna think about the last questions my clients asked, that would be good content. Which is true. I think, if these are the questions you're hearing but often the questions you're getting from clients are still quite investment-focused or planning-focused. They're very granular and tactical and that's great. It's never gonna hurt, right? But if you could almost look inside your client's head and understand what was stressing them out and what they were worried about and what they were talking to their spouse about that night or the night before, and provide content that got at that stuff, that's a whole different level. 

Lauren (08:24):

Yep. I absolutely respect that. Easier said than done. 

Julie (08:29):

Of course <laugh> there are ways to do it, but easier said than done for sure. 

Lauren (08:32):

Absolutely. We talked a little bit about client engagement, leadership serving the clients, but then there’s the team, right? Cuz it can't just be a solo advisor who’s spearheading; it's gotta be the team. Are there certain things you're seeing that help create that communication and cohesion within the team to be able to have leadership at various levels besides just holding that to one person to help and not just be the rainmaker, just the CEO, but really bringing out that culture. I'd love to hear if you're seeing ways that's carried out through training or what have you. 

Julie (09:10):

Yeah. I mean, to me, this is a big question. It's an important question because when that kind of culture is infused all the way through and it's being reflected in every part of the business, that's pretty powerful. And I think some of the challenges we see are helping the team understand how their role connects to this idea of leadership, right? Because it's one thing, as you say, to sit down and say, well, I'm meeting with a client, we're talking about their life. The leadership opportunities might be a bit more obvious than the receptionist or if it's a paraplanner or somebody who's in the background. And one of the best ways I've seen is simply helping the entire team formally invite input from clients. 

Julie (10:04):

Sharing that with the whole team. So if clients feel concerned about their children's future right now, how could we each lean into that? How can the marketing team find content on that? How can the receptionist find an opportunity to maybe chat about the kids when they come in? How can we ensure we build that into the plans? Right? It's almost like taking the key challenges and concerns and then looking at how that might filter throughout the entire organization. That takes intention and it takes focus. It's not just gonna happen but I think it's a powerful exercise. 

Lauren (10:46):

Absolutely. Oh, I love that example. You can see how it can transcend. It really bleeds into all different parts of the organization too. 

Lauren (10:56):

Shifting gears a little bit, obviously it's been a kind of crazy few years with COVID. It's been stressful, it's been chronically stressful, with so many political and cultural things, all kinds of things going on. So, the markets, etc. How is that or has it impacted the clients you're working with? And has it changed really the definition for client engagement or just really shifted at all what folks are doing?

Julie (11:31):

It has, I think significantly, and I would argue that there's always some formance of uncertainty in our lives. It's always impacting clients and what they're worried about. It might not be a global pandemic, but it could be a family health scare, right? Sometimes it has the same impact, just at a very different level. So I think a lot of these concerns have been there but the pandemic and all of the other uncertainty you point to has really put a spotlight on how clients are feeling. So we've been thinking a lot lately about how client mindset actually impacts the experience or should impact the experience. And even in the research, when we went out this year, we were very focused on not just what they expect but what they need. 

Julie (12:29):

And that took us down the path of asking them about client self-confidence, which is a sort of index we track, the impact of uncertainty on their lives, the concerns they have right now and how they're experiencing stress in their lives right now. And it's probably not any surprise that it was pretty significant <laugh> and even to this year, right? It's not as if it's gone back to where we were, right? And so I think for those advisors who have leaned into this idea of mindset may influence experience, it might not impact how often I wanna meet, but it's going to impact what I wanna talk about when we meet. It might not impact my expectations of the material you send me, but I'm gonna be much more impacted if you can send me the right stuff, right? 

Julie (13:27):

So it's been a fascinating ride for me looking at this data because the other thing I'm very aware of as you look at it is that how I'm feeling can influence my relationship. So for clients who are less confident in their financial futures, satisfaction tends to be low, loyalty tends to be lower, all those metrics. So there's like this positive or negative halo effect on the advisory relationship. And that to me is an opportunity, right? For advisors to really lean into, understand, not just say how are you doing but to tease that apart, understand how clients are feeling and have those different conversations. Cuz we're seeing the impact just all over the place right now. 

Lauren (14:17):

Yeah. I love actually to hear about shifting the conversation too. You gave the example of how are you doing or other ways to be able to say how are we doing for you? How can we support you? Those kinds of things. Are there further examples of personalization that help to kind of carry through what you're seeing in those emotions, either that the individual's carrying out or that you're seeing globally or through the data that you can be more aware of that relationship to create more personalization? 

Julie (14:55):

I think one of the things that almost gets in our way with this issue is that I think as human beings we're not particularly good at articulating how we feel, right? I mean, it's not always the problem of the advisor. Sometimes they're trying to do all the right things, trying to understand how clients are feeling, but you know, if you asked me if I sat down with my business, how are things going? I'd say, yeah, they're good, you know, it's good. The kids are good, everybody's like we're not dealing with any major crises but it wouldn't take them scratching too far below the surface to understand, I've got a 13-year-old son and a 90-year-old mother and this and that, and all of this impacts my ability to hear advice, to take action, to think reasonably in a way. So I say all that because I think we have to be very clever about the kinds of questions we ask. So if it's just tell me how you're doing, you might get a good, fine. But if we can ask even things like can you rate your level of concern on the following things right now, I'm gonna give you a one to five, that's easier than sitting down and seeing if there’s anything you're concerned about, right? 

Julie (16:13):

So if we can tease those out, learn if the plan reflects what's most important to you right now? These are the kinds of questions that are preludes, I guess, to deeper conversations. 

Lauren (16:28):

I love that too because it all maps up to what we started the conversation with, right? Which is around how do we define client engagement and how is that directly related to ROI and what are ways we can do that subtly, either individually or through technology and such. So I have a few more questions for you here. I know we're covering a lot of different things but they’re all related. So in marketing, of course, we talk a lot about really finding your niche, right? And I'd imagine if you're looking at a firm at large being more personal if you know a particular niche, if you're working with Gen X or whoever it might be, right, you can create an experience for that audience. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. Do you see a lot of firms really going after niches? Or is there a way that folks can choose a niche to be just more authentic or really to help support with client engagement being the end goal, right? Cause that impacts retention, that impacts the bottom line. 

Julie (17:43):

Yeah. I mean, you've hit on so many of the issues cause I know you see this I'm sure as well, but one thing for clarity is I absolutely believe that this is a critical part of engagement. That to deeply engage we need some focus. Otherwise, diffusion is the enemy of engagement if we're just trying to be all things to all people. I think you can deliver good service to a lot of different kinds of clients. I don't think that's a problem at all. But if it comes to engagement and leadership and some of these other issues, you've gotta go a lot deeper. So that's my bias <laugh> here. I would also say this is probably one of the hardest things for advisors to do. 

Julie (18:36):

So you see that too. It's when we talk, everybody nods and says, I get it, I get it, I get it. And then a fear of some sort takes over. It's like, what if somebody walks away? Or what if my clients think I'm not focusing on them? Or what if and what if and what if? And I get that too. But if I set that aside for the moment, <laugh> I do believe if we can really sit back and say, what if every minute of every day our team was focused on the needs, goals, and aspirations of a defined group, wouldn't we come up with some really cool ideas and ways to support them? And couldn't we build the entire business around that from the form of our communication to the frequency of our contact, to the content, to the digital presence, to all of that? 

Julie (19:40):

I mean, that becomes such a powerful attractor. One of the battles I guess that we see is partly in definition so I'm certainly a believer that there's a difference between a target audience and an ideal client. So I could say I'm targeting business owners doesn't mean I target every business owner. My ideal might be a certain net worth or an investment philosophy or something. But I think we conflate those two things so much and as a result, we get a lot of people saying, yeah, I have a niche and it's clients with a million dollars or more, which we all know is not a niche, it's just a wealth. That's an ideal client and that's fine to have a target. So all of that makes it harder. 

Julie (20:36):

So I think there's some work to be done. It's like, why am I there? Who truly energizes me? Who do I wanna work with? Who do I wanna support? Who do I wanna build this business to support? What's gonna get me bouncing out of bed every day? Cause I just either love to work with these clients or do this work. I think specialization can be an itch as well. I mean there's challenges but we've seen it work more times than we can imagine. 

Lauren (21:05):

And to circle back, at least from what I've seen it take, it really does take leadership to be able to make those play calls and champion behind them and put resources behind them but when it happens, it can be very powerful. 

Julie (21:18):

Yeah. One of the things we've been talking about is to use the word authenticity earlier. We talked to advisors a lot about this idea of what we call the authenticity test. The idea is first of all, that whomever you're focused on has to be authentic to you. Right? So if I say the words, I'm targeting clients with a million dollars in investable assets and more, does that truly resonate for me? Is that inspiring to me at some level? And then if I flip that around, if that was the welcome sign on my door, <laugh> would clients go, oh my gosh, they understand me? And of course they wouldn't in that case. But I think as soon as it's authentic to you, if you can understand why you wanna target a certain group, usually that's the answer. 

Julie (22:15):

Maybe it's even if you picked a group like pre-retirees, which some people do and we kinda laugh cause it's so big. But I actually believe if you did it well, like they have a set of needs, they have certain concerns, there are demographic issues, there's a lot that you could pick up and if that's what compelled you, helping people through that phase of complexity and anxiety for some in their lives all of a sudden, that's very compelling. That can be the sign on your door. 

Lauren (22:48):

That’s so well said. It gets me excited <laugh> but you're right. Because it's coming from a place of authenticity, which fuels passion. And so it's all interconnected. 

Julie (23:06):

Yeah. 

Lauren (23:08):

Okay. One last question—we're about at our time here—but one last question just for folks to get a look ahead. I know you're doing research and you've got your finger on the pulse on a lot of different topics. Anything you’d like to share related to that? Just kind of look ahead or trends that you're seeing? 

Julie (23:34):

Yeah, for sure. We do this every year because we can see trends and doing it over the last few years has been a real gift because it's given us this look into mindset. I guess the one thing I've noticed that I might mention as a way to think about change in future is that a lot of the change we saw in the last few years has been to do with the pandemic, right? So obvious things like we shifted in terms of how we meet with people, all of those kinds of obvious things have changed at the same time. And maybe we weren't noticing because the pandemic was so all-consuming that the demographic shifts were having the same impact, so younger clients under 45 wanna meet more often, want virtual, tend to use social media, and these trends aren't going away. 

Julie (24:34):

Right, <laugh> even if you believed we'd go back to how some people felt pre-COVID, which I would argue is not happening either. We've got these demographic shifts and some of the most significant differences we see are based on age. If it's younger, it's about expectations. But if it's older it's actually about concerns and challenges and mindsets. So I think we need to lean into demographics and think about if and how that means we need to segment our experience a little differently going forward. Because it's very clear we're not going back to the way it was. 

Lauren (25:13):

That’s so interesting. It makes me wanna dig into the research and hear more of what's going on. 

Julie (25:18):

<laugh> 

Lauren (25:20):

Well goodness, thank you so much for your time and for all the work you do. And it's really fascinating to hear not only what's happening today with the pandemic and what you're seeing but also just that bird's-eye view of what you've seen over the years and what works and what doesn't. So I appreciate your time. 

Julie (25:40):

Well thank you. Appreciate it.

‍
We talked with Stephanie about:

• Spearheading the advancement of women in the financial services industry by partnering with Females and Finance Career Center
• How career path priorities for financial services employees have shifted toward flexibility and increased pay
• Attracting and capturing talent through an expedited hiring process

About Stephanie Roberts:

Owner of Humans Being Resources, a “full-life cycle recruitment” firm with a specialization in finding professional talent for the financial services industry, Stephanie Roberts has firsthand insight on how companies can elevate their employee searches to engage top talent in today’s market. With over 12 years of experience in recruiting, she helps companies modernize their hiring process. Stephanie’s work with the F&F Career Center has helped expand opportunities for women in the finance industry.

Featured Resources 

• Stephanie’s LinkedIn
• Humans Being Resources
• Humans Being Resources LinkedIn page 
• F&F Career Center
• Females and Finance
• Females and Finance LinkedIn page

Full Audio Transcript

Lauren Hong (00:02):

All right. Well, Stephanie, we are so excited to have you on the show today. I have been following a little bit about what you've been doing with the Females and Finance group, and I've been enjoying looking at your website but I don't want to steal your thunder. So why don't you, if you don't mind, just share a little bit about your background, your company, and the kind of work you do—just to set the stage here before we get into a little bit more of the nitty gritty of this engagement with Females and Finance. 

Stephanie Roberts (00:32):

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate you having me today. As you indicated, I'm Stephanie. I'm one of the owners of Humans Being Resources, a recruiting firm that specializes in the financial services industry—financial services meaning also insurance and banking as well. It’s honestly kind of a funny story how I got into it, but I like to give a lot of credit to my mom, because she is a human resource director, so I kind of grew up in that environment. However, I honestly started my college career going into fashion merchandising. So I always thought I was really thrilled with fashion and wanted to own some stores. I actually owned a couple boutiques in my previous life and then got into staffing, worked at a temp agency for a little bit, and then went into more of the financial services side with a large FMO. And then, just kind of having that entrepreneurial spirit, my husband and I put our heads together and started HBR based on his background in operational <inaudible> and my experience in recruiting within financial services. So we created our model and have been here for a little over six years now. 

Lauren (02:01):

Wow. Well, just with our clients, I know it's a challenge. We all constantly hear it's a challenge to find top talent. There's an alignment of values and expertise, investment, philosophy, just depending on the type of business. So why finance? Is it just because of that background or seeing the need. I'd love to hear a little bit more. 

Stephanie (02:25):

Yeah, so I would say a lot of it started just from the relationships I had already built and just kind of my knowledge within this sector. When we first started, we didn't really niche ourselves in financial services. However, that is where the majority of our business was coming from. I'm sure you're familiar with financial firms and financial advisors—they don't go into business to be a recruiter or a hiring manager. They're great at the financial advice side of it. So as we expanded, we were just really seeing that there was this big need within financial services. So then we finally decided, let's just drill down and say this is our niche and this is what we specialize in and that's what we're gonna do. And that's exactly what we do. So we've kind of just kept it that way. And we work all across the United States with various firms. 

Lauren (03:27):

And what kind of placements are you typically? Are they senior level? Are they partners? Are they more operation support? And are there trends you're seeing? 

Stephanie (03:40):

Yeah. So we do all positions up to a financial advisor with a transferable book. So we'll do a receptionist, we do marketing, client service. They can be licensed, unlicensed, para planners, portfolio managers. So really huge variety, up until we get the call that they want an advisor with a book. That's when I have some good partnerships that I'll refer that business out to other firms. That's kind of where we draw the line, but we get a lot of calls for junior advisors right now. So maybe they're looking for someone who has two, three years of industry experience and they're licensed. They don't need to bring a book over but being in that advisor capacity is the role that individual would take. 

Lauren (04:30):

That's fair. It's a different kind of engagement when you're at that relationship if you're looking to roll over a book. So if I can just shift gears a little bit here. I'd love to hear more about the Females and Finance career center partnership you've established. I thought that was really intriguing, an interesting hub. How did that all come about? I mean, obviously you've got this dynamic background with what you're doing and there's an alignment of a shared vision or audience per se, but tell us a little bit more about how that partnership and that platform came about. 

Stephanie (05:01):

Yeah, so I have to give credit to one of our repeat clients who we've built a really good relationship with out in Georgia. She referred me to Cheryl, and Cheryl as many people know is just a fabulous connector, very involved in this industry and definitely someone you want to know and really build that relationship with. So Meredith had made that introduction and Cheryl and I actually had several conversations prior to the career page actually being launched. So she has these great big visions and she had this vision to get this page going and asked if we would be interested in being kind of the sponsor and kind of head that page. And we said absolutely. Because it obviously goes very well with what we do. So that's been launched for probably a few months now, maybe three. 

Lauren (06:01):

My gosh, is that just a few months? 

Stephanie (06:02):

Yeah. So that page is fairly new but we're excited. It's definitely taken off and she's done a great job of promoting it. 

Lauren (06:14):

And how are you sourcing the opportunities and managing it? And I mean, even the platform that was chosen, how did you sort of get from concept to launch? What happened in that in- between phase? 

Stephanie (06:28):

So that all goes to Cheryl, with the mastery skills she has. She is the one who put it all together and it's a good opportunity for HBR to be exposed to some other positions that might be out there. And if one of her members needs assistance in just not having a good process to follow, we're there to lean on and to help. So she really manages that page and does it very well. 

Lauren (07:03):

Okay. So then she's really managing it, setting up the software, all of that. And you're acting as that sponsor to then help to further support with the actual platform. And are you sending potential candidates there or what kind of relationship do you have with supporting that in your sponsorship engagement? 

Stephanie (07:24):

Yeah, it's a good resource for potential candidates but it's also a good resource for clients or members of the organization. If they have an open position, like I said, they're more than welcome to engage with us and our services if they don't want to go through that process themselves, or it is even available for a member to just post their position out on her site. And then, between her and I and other members, we do a lot of promotion and marketing of that page and really promoting those open jobs. So it's always being updated. I constantly update her on new jobs we're working on. And with members who want to work on it, maybe putting jobs out there. So it's good for candidates, but also for members and clients. 

Lauren (08:21):

Okay. Yeah, that's fair. I think it's a pretty dynamic platform and it feels like it fits a real pain point right now. Are there other platforms? I haven't seen anything quite like that. I think FPA has some options, if I remember correctly, and other groups, but not quite like this or more all encompassing sort of broader financial services. 

Stephanie (08:43):

Yeah, one of the things I really like about Cheryl and Females and Finance is how much she does to really promote it and market it, and I think she's grown to well over 3,000 members now. 

Lauren (09:00):

Great. It's amazing. Yeah.

Stephanie (09:03):

She definitely wants to make an impact in this industry and really just kind of change it and bring a lot more workforce into the industry as well. She's doing a great job, so we're excited about it because the idea is to really try to expand and get more individuals into this industry. 

Lauren (09:26):

Yep. That's fair. To take a step back and transition a little bit. I’d love just to hear what you're seeing in the industry, in this industry at large. It's a different market we're in right now, you know? COVID, post-COVID, all sort of gray, right? And work from home, and the challenge of finding top talent and all sorts of things. Are you seeing that in this industry? What sort of trends are you hearing or how are you helping, frankly, companies stand out to really find that right fit? I'd love just to hear more about the pulse you all have on the market or the industry at large. 

Stephanie (10:06):

Yeah, you're right. It is very tough. The past couple years, the market has definitely shifted and changed. I feel a lot of candidates put priority over certain things that maybe they wouldn't have in the past. So while pay definitely is still important, there's still a high importance for candidates to have good balance. And so that remote option or hybrid, that's a big one right now we're hearing a lot. And you do still get firms that are insistent and know they want them in the office. So it definitely shrinks your pool of candidates when you're not willing to offer that flexibility of hybrid or remote. So I do feel that since COVID it's made remote more desirable for, for many reasons. And then like I said, going back to pay and there's just so many jobs open right now. 

Stephanie (11:06):

This is where I really explain to clients that it is important to use a resource like us to really do all the work for you because it can be very time-consuming when you're trying to do all the recruiting and sourcing. Anybody can post a job on a job board right now but more than likely it will be lost because there's so many jobs posted on these job boards. So we definitely use job boards, but where we find a lot of our success is through our recruiting and the sourcing and just cold reaching to candidates. So what else? I think you asked me a few questions. 

Lauren (11:47):

Not really. Just those trends you're seeing and the industry at large. So that's helpful though, just to hear a little bit more about what you're seeing on the employer side. Anything you're hearing on the employee side, or things employees should keep in mind in this job market too? 

Stephanie (12:06):

Yeah. So as far as the employee side, we typically do work more from the client side. So when the client has the need, they reach out to us and then we start that process. Through my networking and the different relationships I have, individuals reaching out, I do get a lot of great experienced candidates who are ready to leave their firm. And oftentimes they're ready to leave because of either the lack of flexibility or their pay. Some companies have not adapted to the new environment we're in and needing to increase their current employees’ pay. So we have seen a lot of employees leaving for better pay, but also the better flexibility and just overall opportunity. A lot of individuals want a career path. 

Lauren (13:01):

That's fair. Yep. And along that kind of vein, I always have like the marketing lens on, right? We talk with a number of companies about how to promote what your company's like from a value standpoint, and it could be awards like best places to work or just company happenings, if there's fun events or just more showing off that company culture. Do you have any tips for employers about ways they can help an employee get to know who they are, either through their interviewing process or even just before they were to engage with the company, to really help warm up that prospect or even for them to self-qualify if they're a good fit? 

Stephanie (13:47):

Yeah, so as part of our process, once a client engages with us, we schedule what we call a client intake call. And that's where I really go deeper with the client in regards to the position, but also their firm and their culture. So I really want to learn as much as possible about their culture and just the overall opportunity they have for their candidates. And we really use that information as we're engaging with those candidates. But of course, like you said, then it does fall on the client once they get that candidate in front of them to really sell their firm and why someone should work for them. 

Lauren (14:30):

Yeah, that's fair. Are there any things you're recommending, like if they've got a top candidate, they talk with other employees within the company? Or even like sort of onboarding processes? Or are those things that your team doesn't touch? Just curious. 

Stephanie (14:51):

So we don't get too involved in those types of conversations. We'll give a little advice through my conversations with candidates, learning what are some important things to them as they're looking at new opportunities. So I share that with the clients. Training definitely is one of them. But I think that's a great idea that they meet with some of the other team members. We have some clients who will maybe do dual interviews. So it'll be the advisor and then somebody else in the interview as well. The thing is, they just want to keep in mind to not drag that interview process out too far. Because especially in today's market, candidates go very fast. So if they're going through multiple interviews, you're gonna lose them. They're probably going to go down the street to your competitor. 

Lauren (15:49):

Out of curiosity, I'm sure it changes by the kind of role, but I'd just be curious if there's an average for where timing typically falls. Or even an average for more of like a partner or a more senior hire. I'd be curious to know the length of time. 

Stephanie (16:10):

So we tell our clients on average eight to 10 weeks. But like you said, there's so much that goes into that, so it's kind of hard to really drill it down exactly because location's going to be one, what they're offering, their overall offering the salary, and just kind of how they compare with their competition in the market so that really can vary. But we do tell them eight to 10 weeks. 

Lauren (16:35):

Okay. That's fair. And then any tough conversations or things behind the scenes that you think even before you get going that you're having with your clients? Maybe job descriptions, if you've seen more unicorn job descriptions or other things like that. I'd just be curious about things that might help employers as they're thinking about who to hire and how to put this together and all of that. So what do you wish they would've done? 

Stephanie (17:07):

Oh, that's a great question. There's definitely a lot that comes to my mind. So we do help them with the job posting; we create the job posting based on the information they give us. So one thing we have found is that advisors or firms have different titles for basically the same position. So we really give our advice based on our experience and what title works once we post that position. So they all kind of like to name it different things, but it's all essentially the same. So that's one of them. I would say the toughest conversation really is salary. And really just educating them on what the market is like today, that we are not in the same way we were in three, four years ago. 

Stephanie (17:58):

Pay has changed a lot and if you want to attract top talent, you really have to make sure you're in line. And again, that's part of our process too. We do research based on their area and these certifications they're looking for and their minimum requirements, and we'll provide them with what our recommendation is. And then timing is a big one, really making sure they engage with us, they are committed to the hiring process. So really setting time aside to put those candidates through an interview and ready to offer when the time comes. So those are kind of the top ones, I would say, but we really try to keep them as involved and try to take as much off their plate as possible when they go through our process. 

Lauren (18:53):

Yeah, That's fair. That makes sense. And I would assume not only routine timing can be involved, but then you think about the holidays and all these other things that come into play, right? That just can throw a cycle off. So very good. Well, any other closing thoughts before we wrap things up here? It's been so fun to hear about your role and relationship with the Females and Finance group and all of that.

Stephanie (19:19):

I don't have too much else to add other than we're here to help. Again, like I said, we want to just save clients time, let them focus on what they're good at and then outsource the other parts of it. It's what we specialize in. We're a recruiting firm, so we know where to find good talent and really will help kind of get them through that process. 

Lauren (19:48):

Well that makes so much sense. Easier said than done, right? It's all about the people, right? So having a good team is just absolutely what it's all about. So thank you so much, Stephanie, for your time. Really appreciate you sharing more about not only your day to day, but the relationships and also how you're giving back to the community as well. And really I think helping to support and create a platform to help recruit talent and share opportunities. So thank you again.

Stephanie (20:25):

Thank you.

Johanna has always been a people person with a passion for building relationships and helping others achieve their goals. She also thrives and sees abundant opportunities working in ever-evolving environments, making project management and marketing a natural fit for her. Johanna brings her gifts for client care and project organization to Out & About.

A New Day, A New Opportunity

Having moved halfway across the globe at a young age to attend college, Johanna is no stranger to adapting to the world around her, with her path eventually landing her in the field of marketing. While pursuing her bachelor’s degree in communication from San Diego State University, Johanna got her feet wet as an intern helping a local cosmetic company build its online storefront. Later, her passion was cemented working as a marketing assistant at a biotech firm, where she expanded her skills in event coordination, advertising, and market strategy.

In her role, Johanna helps organize the tasks and deadlines that contribute to bringing our ideas to life and producing tangible outcomes for our clients. We’re thrilled to share her talents and ability to find opportunities to be creative and learn with whatever the new day brings with our team. 

What You Can’t Tell Just From Looking at Her

Johanna, who lives in San Diego with her son and husband, grew up in France before moving to the States to pursue college. She’s a photography enthusiast with an eye and heart for capturing priceless family memories in portraits.

We love having Johanna on the team! Learn more about her and the rest of our team on our team page.

We are looking for a Marketing Campaign Manager to join the Out & About team to oversee and support with implementation of organic and paid campaigns. Day-to-day duties include auditing workflows, setting up campaigns, monitoring campaign performance, tracking data, and providing performance recommendations and projects as assigned. This is a part-time, remote, and non-exempt role starting at 20 hours a week. 

To apply, please submit your cover letter, resume and any examples of campaigns you've managed to hello@outandaboutcomm.com.

Does this sound like you?

• You dig data. You love getting into the heart of a campaign. You like to know what makes it tick or why it’s not ticking. Your passion is looking under the hood and seeing why funnels work or aren’t working.
• You are eager to make recommendations or give a presentation. You welcome opportunities to speak to the team and to clients to educate them on the why behind your recommendations. 
• You love explaining the details, but you first start at a high level. You know that the technical side sounds foreign to those not in the SEO/PPC/funnel world. If asked questions on the spot, you love the challenge and the opportunity to explain the why.
• Knowing the latest happenings in the algorithm world keeps you glued to your screen. You love not only being in the know about all of the latest changes, but also how these changes impact your work.
• You love to partner with a team to support the design, oversight, and implementation of marketing campaigns. Once the work is up and running you monitor and poke holes to ensure we are aligned with our KPIs.
• If asked to set up a campaign across different channels, such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook/Instagram, or retargeting, you can run with the implementation. But you also love tracking, monitoring, and making recommendations including everything from budget spend to in-depth audience targeting.
• You value SEO and the long game. If asked to run keyword reports, audit content, or support with content planning for SEO rich keywords, you are ready to pull and analyze the data.
• You look past the content and keywords, to explore backlinks, metatags, permalink structure, and so much more. If given the opportunity to run with SEO implementation, you take it on and know how to use the appropriate data tools to make it happen.
• It’s not just about individual campaigns, but it’s about UX/UI, design, videos, copy and more. You are eyes wide open and excited to work with a team to enhance campaign engagement on all levels.
• Working with a team of creatives who puts their best foot forward at all times is a dream come true.
• You see the value of a fully integrated campaign. You love the harmony of SEO, paid, brand design, brand voice, content marketing, automation, and more that is all together targeted, focused, and timely.

Educational Level

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience, preferably in Marketing, Communications or relevant field

Related Experience

• At least 5+ years experience in a digital marketing, SEO, or PPC related role
• Hands-on experience with digital marketing campaigns and workflows
• A/B and multivariate experiences
• Optimization of landing pages and user funnels
• Experience in the financial services industry

General/Special Knowledge and Skills

• Demonstrated experience setting up Google, LinkedIn, Facebook/Instagram, and retargeting campaigns
• Deep knowledge of Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, and the suite of Google data tools
• Knowledgeable about marketing funnels, automation principles, list purchases, and more
• Experience with collaboration tools like Google Docs, Dropbox, Slack, and Asana Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Self-starter who sees problems as exciting puzzles to solve
• Ability to get into the weeds, but know when to step back and focus on the big picture
• Staying up-to-date on trends and best practices in digital marketing and analytics
• Deep understanding of digital marketing ecosystem and ability to identify ideal tactics based on client resources and goals
• Excellent analytical, organizational, and project management skills
• Ability to multitask, managing multiple projects and people while leveraging knowledge and experience from project to project
• High attention to detail
• Problem solver who responds quickly and effectively to issues and opportunities while ensuring compliance with brand strategy and guidelines

We talked with Mac about:

• The journey behind his mission for improving financial literacy for kids 
• How he utilized his network to help develop new tools to support his mission 
• What he hopes a financial literacy app can bring to underserved communities

About Mac Gardner:

As a CFP®  professional and founder and CEO (Chief Education Officer) at FinLit Tech, with over 20 years in the industry, Mac Gardner has presented over 4,000 financial plans. It was during this time that he saw the need for more user-friendly financial literacy education. He started by looking for ways to educate adults, but has since pivoted to focusing on promoting financial literacy in children through books and technology.

Featured Resources 

• Mac’s LinkedIn page
• Mac’s Twitter page
• FinLit Tech
• FinLit Tech LinkedIn page
• The Four Money Bears 
• The Four Money Bears Kickstarter
• The Four Money Bears LinkedIn page
• The Four Money Bears Twitter page
• The Four Money Bears YouTube channel
• The Four Money Bears Facebook page
• The Four Money Bears Instagram profile 
• Motivate Your Money!: Plan Spend Save Invest Gift by Mac Gardner 
• The Four Money Bears by Mac Gardner 
• See It Be It Role Model Award by Investment News

Full Audio Transcript

Lauren:
Well, thank you for joining us. I'm really excited to hear from you. I know we were just chatting before, but you've been in the industry for 20 plus years or something you had said. 

Mac:
Yeah, I say 20 plus because you start putting the other one on get so 

Lauren:
Well, what sparked this conversation is this Kickstarter campaign that you've been working on around, you know, financial literacy and this game for kids. I’m excited to get into that. But before we do, which I know is kind of the prerequisite to this Kickstarter campaign is you've been writing books for some time. And I’d love to hear a little bit about that kind of journey and how that got started, and then how that brought you to the campaign that's recently been running. So maybe we start there. 

Mac:
Sounds like a play. Well, first and foremost, thanks for having me. This is a great opportunity to share our story with your viewers. The first book Motivate Your Money, this book I wrote years ago, that's an old picture. I was younger and had more here. I wrote that book when I had my practice in Houston, and I wrote it to really help my clients. I just found it was pretty eye opening. I was working with folks who were multimillionaires, very wealthy, but they really didn't have any financial planning, guidance, you know, foundation. And so, one of the best compliments I've ever received as an advisor is, “Mac, you make this financial planning stuff easy to understand.” I like to share these Mac nuggets, little ways to break down a story or break down the complex things that are going on the financial service industry and make it easy for folks to digest.

Mac:
So that was my first book. And then one of my clients said, “Hey, Mac, love the Mac nuggets, love the first book. Would you be open to creating something for kids?” And so that is how the Full Money Bears book came to be. And so that book, the essence behind it is there's only four things you can do with money, right? Spend it, save it, invest it, and give it away. Kids like bears. So we created these full bear characters: spend a bear, saver bear, vested bear, and give a bear. And they show throughout the book, their pros and cons, each function of money and that when they work together, great things can happen when you form a budget. 

Lauren:
So what kind of, you're able to explain that. So simply, I mean, what was it just through your conversations or for your training or what, what kind of, how were you able to make the complex simple? 

Mac:
So in my first book, I talk about the five steps to financial success and that these are steps of things that people were doing that I had been engaging with. I've been very fortunate. I've provided and presented over 4,000 financial plans in my career. And so I've done a lot of financial plans in financial planning. And with folks that ended up having money to retire or to pass on, they were following these five steps. Step one, plan accordingly. Step two, spend cautiously. Step three, save diligently. step four, invest wisely. And step five, give generously. And so what that really ties into is that, you know, always have a plan. And then those four functions of money. Remember there's only four things you could do with money: spend it, save it,  invest it, give it away. And so the bigger picture behind this four money beers book is the sad fact that financial literacy is not taught in schools. 

Mac:
And so you have parents with young kids that unless they're a CFP or a CPA, or in finance or an advisor, they really don't have that guidance. And so if you never got it, how can you teach your kids about it? Right. And so that's really what we were looking to do with the full money bears is to create a story, which is actually a story of me and my wife, teaching our kids about money that a parent can sit down with their 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 year old kid and say, “Hey, wanna learn about money? They're these four bears.” Yeah, and so that's how it came to be. 

Lauren:
So how was it received? You got the book, put it together, shared it with the world. Sorry, you tested on your kids first. Like, you know what? 

Mac:
Here's the funny part, uh, I wrote the book as a request of a client. Yeah. And took the book. We were living in Houston at the time. Two of my kids' school said, “Hey, you know what, I'd love to be able to read this. The principal's looking at this book.” And she says, “Do you know what you have here? Like a book that helps some kids and parents talk about money.” This is five, six years ago. The state of Texas had released these peaks, these sort of cool curriculums for financial literacy starting in elementary school. And she was like, “Mac, no one has anything like this. This is awesome.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, thanks.” And so that was how the journey started. I sent the book off to 30, 35 state school boards. Wow. The process to get a book into a public school, Lauren, is mind numbingly difficult. 

Lauren:
Oh, I can only imagine. 

Mac:
Yeah. So we tried a lot of different things to get into schools to get different ways. But what we did see was that teachers were using digital solutions, apps, games and so forth to teach their kids. And so that's one of the drivers towards how Finlay Tech started digitizing the book and creating a gamified solution to allow parents, teachers, enterprises to promote financial literacy. 

Lauren:
So was that kind of the turning point where you said, “okay, we've got the printed version. We need to now take this to the next digital level of where kids are at and where education is at.” 

Mac:
It was. So we, everything, both of my books are self published. You know, you can jump on amazon.com. Like you can buy pretty much everything nowadays. 

Lauren:
I know. Yeah. Amazon is a little too easy, right. 

Mac:
It is, but you can buy the book on Amazon, and we are so blessed. And so fortunate Lauren, when I tell you that we have book sales around the world. We sell our book in England, France, Germany, Italy, Canada. Yeah. And what it shows is that financial literacy isn't just a US issue. Right. It's a global concern. There are parents with young kids around the world that want to teach their kids about how to manage money. And so the cool thing about books is that kids are still a demographic that rebook, but they're also early adopters to technology and are also learning through iPads, laptops. 

Lauren:
Yeah. 

Mac:
Phones. Yeah. So that's why we had a lot of responses and a lot of demand and requests to create some sort of digital version of our book. 

Lauren:
So you've got the financial knowledge that you're bringing to the table, a book alone, to be able to publish that, create the visuals. I can't even imagine what it's been like to try to create, you know, this interactive app. How have you built this team? I mean, unless maybe, maybe you've super power skills. I just can't imagine how. Tell us about that. What's been that process to be able to take this vision and then to be able to take that to life in print and digital?

Mac:
So I have been a huge fan and advocate of networking, the power of connecting with people and connecting people. And a few years ago, executives and leadership at EMO got a hold of my book. And they said, “Hey, this Matt Gardner guy is doing some really cool stuff. He's starting a financial literacy conversation, like at age five.” Yeah. That's super cool. And so we worked informally and then last year began working formally in partnership with Finlay Tech. And one of the great connections that I made years ago was a gentleman by the name of Ryan Gallini, who heads up DI games in Austin. And so last year I said, “Ryan, you know, we met four years ago, maybe even more. And we had these great ideas, but you know, the timing wasn't right.” Things were, you know, the COVID and all kinds of wild things happened. 

Mac:
So last year we reached out and I said, “Hey, Ryan, we're ready to do this.” And he said, “Mac, I have been waiting.” He has an extensive background in gaming and has been building some really cool tools. And so I said, “Okay, I've got this idea.” One of the other responses we got from folks with the book is, “Mac, love the fact that you're teaching kids about what to do with money once they get it. You gotta write a book about teaching kids about earning money.”

Lauren:
Yeah. Oh yeah. 

Mac:
And so what we're able to do through this, through the Four Money Bears Berryville, which is the name of the new app. The child or the user learns both sides of the personal finance fence. What we mean by that is you inherit your family's berry farm. So you're running a farm and the farm stand. So it's a farming simulator is really what it is. And then once you earn the money, we'll have quests and quotes and little quizzes in the game to help provide that guidance as to what to do with the money. 

Lauren:
Got it. 

Mac:
And we've developed a new way for teaching financial literacy. We call our TAT method where we teach, analyze, and then track the progress of the user over time to be able to say, “Hey, these are the habits that are forming. These habits become behaviors when these behaviors become traits.” 

Lauren:
Yeah. And the gardening piece is something that everyone can relate to. I think of various ages and it's something easy to talk about and I like this idea of it's relatable. 

Mac:
So then, and it's a game. It's a simplified game, and that's one of the other big issues, Lauren, when it comes to financial literacy that we've seen is so many financial literacy courses are way over the user's head. We want to meet these young people where they are, and kids when they're playing games, they love to play games. And if we're learning and we're teaching them that way and they’re having fun, why not? 

Lauren:
So tell us where you're at with the app process, and you kicked off this Kickstarter, which I think overnight you hit your goal. I mean, it was crazy by the time that I went to check it out, I'm like, oh my gosh, it's already surpassed. But that's a whole other conversation. I'd love to hear just more about the ramp up too for that Kickstarter, but where are you at with it now that you know you're going to get those funds and then is it going to be going into development of building this out and kind of what's the next. What's the red carpet if you were to roll it out for next steps. 

Mac:
Our initial idea behind this app was to put together a demo. So for those of you who are listening and watching, if you go to www.thefourmoneybears.com, you can actually download the demo. So there's a playable demo that's available now. See the bears, meet the bears, see what the users have to do in the game. And when we were looking at different ways to raise funds and raise awareness of our “teach kids money” mission, we like the Kickstarter platform because we can raise funds. But really what allows us to do is to raise awareness of what we're doing as a company and why it's important to get it done. And so we were fortunate in six days, we raised the minimum threshold. We were like, “wow.”

Lauren:
Great. That's something there. 

Mac:
There's definitely something there. But you know the more we raise, the bigger and better we can make the game. Right. And so the next step is to continually develop the game, get that aspect of it built, but what we're finding as we continue to walk down this road and we start engaging with different folks is the use cases of our game are really interesting. So I'll share with you the three that we thought of. And then things got really, really, really, really deep with it. So, the first one was just parents with young kids, right. Hey, you know what? You've got a child, they're wasting too much time on their electronic device. Yep. Play this game and then learn a little bit about money. So that's on. The second channel are teachers. Teachers have come to us and say,” Hey, you know what? We want to teach this stuff to the kids. We know it's important, but there's no like consistent utilization tool that a teacher in Florida versus a teacher in DC versus a teacher in California.” And so we're building a tool that will allow teachers across the country to be able to use that platform, our platform teach, analyze, and track. The third one, which is getting a lot of attention, is from financial institutions. 

Lauren:
Interesting. 

Mac:
Happy to give back. So, let's just say you're a bank. Banks have something called CRA, community reinvestment act groups, wherein they're giving back to the community and they're giving a lot of things back. And so we're talking to a regional bank here in Tampa right now, and they want to utilize our Berryville app to give to children in underserved overlook communities in the Tampa, St. Pete area. To be able to not just teach them financial literacy, but you know, there's a crazy stat that said a child's financial success is almost exclusively determined by the zip code they grow up in. 

Lauren:
Wow. 

Mac:
So imagine being able to drop a game into a community, into a zip code, and then all of a sudden to change the conversations that are being had in that household. Yeah. The ramifications that can happen for that child, for that family, that community, just to talk about investing, talk about giving and all these different things. So, it's phenomenal some of the things that we're seeing ahead of us right now, and different applications. 

Lauren:
That's amazing. It gives me goosebumps here and you talk about it cause it's the power of mass, right. Being able to reach other people and to be able to make an impact across generations. 

Mac:
And that's the thing that we can do with technology, with an app, that we can't necessarily do with a book. Yeah. It's hard to scale a book, but with an app we can create this platform. We can literally disperse it into a community. Give it away. And just have young people absorbing this fun, new way to learn about money. 

Lauren:
That's so fun. My goodness. So to backtrack a little bit, I really resonated with what you're talking about with the why Kickstarter platform. Right. It's not just about raising money, but it's about the bigger picture strategy to reach more people. So can you share a little bit more about how you went about doing that because the marketer hat is on, right? So, I mean, what was your game plan to be able to reach people, to get this word out, and to use this as an excuse, if you will, to do so.

Mac:
I have been very fortunate. I have been utilizing platforms like LinkedIn for years. In fact, I owned stock in LinkedIn before Microsoft bought it years ago. So, I have probably 24,000 connections on LinkedIn and just the folks that have been following our journey since we wrote this Four Money Bears book. Financial advisors across the country use our book. So if you're a financial advisor and you've got a client with young kids and you want be able to give something back and make that connection with the next generation, we have book sales across the country from that cohort. And so I had a nice natural, pond of folks who were willing to support this mission, and this new digital solution that's coming on board. 

Mac:
So that definitely helped. EMO is a huge supporter of our mission, and they were contributors to the campaign. Just what Kickstart allows you to do is to have this platform that sort of magnifies the message. Because you'll have people that come in that, you know, you do your outreach to say, Hey, you know what, we love your supporters report, but what we found is that the faster that you get to your goal, and reaching it there are certain metrics, I guess, within Kickstarter that pushes you higher up the list then, you know, other folks do. So it becomes this sort of domino effect that allows us to reach more people. 

Lauren:
So powerful and a smart approach because it fits in well with the mission of, you know, what you're trying to do, too. and hearing you talk about it, so excited, where do you even find the time? My goodness, you know, you were talking earlier, you've got kids of your own, a business you're running. I mean, it sounds like it's just been little pieces over the years and just making it better and better.

Mac:
I joke around, I tell people, “yeah 'm doing this 25/8, not even 24/7, so 25/8.”I heard a great saying, you know, if you do something you love, you won't work a day in your life. So I just, I enjoy spreading the news. I enjoy making a change in the life of the financial lives of people that I interact with. And so, you know, being able to put my energy and, and have this great team that's, you know, Ryan and I sent to sit down like, oh, Mac, this is going to be perfect. This would be great. And to have someone that sees a vision and realizes, look, we can do something, we're at a really cool time. We're at a really cool place in time where a child can get a hundred dollars bill for a birthday gift. 

Mac:
And remember the four options, right. Spend, save, invest, and give. That child before maybe reading the Four Money Bears book, we'd be like, “okay, I want to blow the whole hundred dollars on a pair of Nike shoes.”

Lauren:
Yeah. 

Mac:
Now, because they may have read our book, mom and dad share with them, “Hey, you know, you got a couple options. You can spend some, you can save some, you can invest some of it.” And all of a sudden, now this child is saying, “Hmm, this investing thing, what do you mean?” Well, those Nike shoes that you said you want, did you know that you can actually buy shares of Nike and you can own that company? I can own the company that makes the shoes. And what's so cool about it is that the technology is here now, Lauren, that allows for things like fractional ownership of shares, where you can use your phone and you can literally buy five shares of Coca-Cola, buy five shares of Starbucks, buy 5, 10, 15, 20 shares of Nike, right. 10-15 years ago that wasn't even an option. And so when I tell people about our mission between building the bridge between financial literacy and financial technology that's what gets us to financial wellness. That's what I mean by being able to have the stories, have the education and then have the tools to be able to enact that education, and then change lives. 

Lauren:
Yeah. And not to mention the powerful piece about technology is you can track so much data and be able to see those patterns and which provides more insights and not only to be able to better the game, but then to be able to know what's working, what's not working all kinds of things. 

Mac:
Yeah. So AB testing, all that fun stuff. It's that whole world, you know. Ryan likes to flex the muscle, and I'm just like a kid in the candy still like, “okay, tell me more. That's so cool.” 

Lauren:
Technology. So the number side, right? Yeah. 

Mac:
Yeah. So fun. The tech side is pretty awesome. So, we're really happy. We're on a really cool path. We're getting attention from some really, really big names in the FinTech space, and if we can build a solution that can help more people when it comes to understanding and educating them about money, that's what we're all about. 

Lauren:
Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much for sharing the behind the scenes of the story and you know, where it is today. Can't wait to follow along with the journey. We'll make sure to include the links below, and I'm excited for updates. So thank you again for sharing a bit of background.

Mac:
You are so welcome. The financial life journey is a long one and, you know, we envision the full money bears as a child's on ramp to their digital financial journey. And as I like to say, the journey continues. 

Lauren:
Absolutely. Well, thank you again, Mac. 

Mac:
Thanks for having me. 

We talked with Ken about:

• The major hiring and retention trends affecting employers today
• How TurningPoint is working to weed out unconscious bias in recruiting 
• Advice he gives to those who are concerned about losing key talent during this Great Resignation

About Ken Schmitt:

Ken Schmitt believes it's a really good time to be in the “people business” because there’s so much happening right now. As founder and CEO of TurningPoint Executive Search, he has the opportunity to work directly with people on a daily basis to help them build the best team for their company. Most recently, that means navigating the post-pandemic hiring landscape.

Featured Resources 

• Ken Schmitt LinkedIn
• Ken Schmitt Twitter
• TurningPoint Executive Search
• TurningPoint Executive Search LinkedIn
• TurningPoint Executive Search YouTube
• TurningPoint Executive Search Facebook
• “5 Things We’ve Learned in this Tight Labor Market”
• “Turnover Trends - Who, How, & Why?”
• “How to Boost Hiring and Improve Retention: Tips from a Recruiter”

Full Audio Transcript

Lauren (00:00):
All right. Well, Ken, thank you so much for joining us.

Ken (00:03):
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Lauren (00:04):
Of course. So excited to hear from you today; I've been looking forward to this conversation all week. You just bring so much to the executive recruiting space and we'll include a full bio and link to your LinkedIn in the notes below, so why don't we just start off? How did you get into the space that you're in and really starting? And I mean TurningPoint, how many years has it been, 10 years or so? 

Ken (00:31):
We’ve been in business for 15 years.

Lauren (00:33):
Holy smokes.

Ken (00:34):
Yeah, it’s our anniversary. Time flies when you're having fun, right?

Lauren (00:38):
 Yes. Congratulations. So share a little bit more about TurningPoint and how it got to where it is today. I'd love to hear a little bit more and what you all do.

Ken (00:51):
Sure, sure. Yeah. Thanks. And again, thanks for the invitation to chat today. I really appreciate it. So I've been in the recruiting business now for 25 years, but 15 as far as TurningPoint goes. I always wanted to have my own business. That was always my goal from when I was a teenager growing up in a very entrepreneurial household with a Jack-in-the-Box franchisee for a dad and an interior decorator for a mom. So entrepreneurism is kind of in my DNA, but we've kind of ebbed and flowed and expanded over the 15 years as TurningPoint. We started off doing mainly accounting and finance recruiting in the early days. And then I did a complete rebrand and pivot, something you're very familiar with as far as branding goes, changed back in 2011, 2012.

Ken (01:34):
So it's been 10 years since we actually made the move over to sales and marketing and operations recruiting, and we don't do as much accounting or finance these days. So, a bit of a pivot and a rebrand there, but it's been great. It's been a lot of fun. I get to meet a ton of really great people. This time in particular, I always say it's a really good time to be in the people business. Yeah. Because there's so much happening out there and so many trends that are going on, partly because of COVID and partly just because of the changing demographics. So, I really do enjoy it. It's very fulfilling and very engaging.

Lauren (02:06):
Yeah. So let's jump in. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the trends, especially with the Great Resignation going on and COVID. I mean, hiring is challenging. So what are you seeing out there?

Ken (02:17):
Yeah, it really is. There's so many moving parts. It's really difficult; I really feel for a lot of employers out there that are trying to get their arms around everything out there—whether it's in regard to DEI and building a more diversified workforce or it's trying to retain the people you already have because they can go somewhere else and get a 20 or 30% bump in salary, or then trying to bring in new talent as well. Even people who are doing the same job they already have somebody on board doing today, but it costs them again, 20% more to hire a new person as compared to their incumbent. So there's a lot that employers have to really grapple with right now. Work from home is a big part of that, to your point, no longer are people just willing to, without question, just work from the office five days a week.

Ken (03:05):
We tell clients on a regular basis that if you want us to recruit somebody for your position and you're requiring them to be in the office five days a week, we can do it, but it's gonna be much more difficult. It's gonna take a lot more time and they're gonna have a lot fewer candidates to look at in terms of their pool of candidates, because there are fewer people who are willing to consider that kind of scenario where they have to be in the office five days a week. So it's tough.

Lauren (03:31):
I bet those are conversations you were not having just a few years ago or were they? I mean, is this just kind of a mega trend of new work life? 

Ken (03:43):
Well, it was a trend that was starting to take hold pre-pandemic, but mainly from the candidate side. There were candidates, especially in sales and marketing as you know, who were saying, Hey, I'd rather not have to go to the office every single day if I don't have to. Especially if you're in sales and you're traveling around to different clients anyway, there's not really a lot of value in being in the office, but it was really difficult pre-COVID to find companies—hiring managers, leaders, CEOs—that were willing to let their staff work remotely unless they already had a remote field sales team and they were already used to that. That's one thing, but most companies were not. And so that was the challenge. It was a little more on the demand side, but not as much on the supply side in terms of opportunities and jobs that would allow for that.

Ken (04:30):
But then COVID comes along and just changes everything completely, and accelerates that trend beyond anybody's wildest imagination. And now, the majority of companies have realized their people are just as if not more productive working from home. People are certainly happier about it. They're engaged. They don't have to spend and waste their time driving to an office every single day. But companies are also having to adjust how they manage. And there's definitely something to be said for the loss of collaboration and creativity if you're not together as often. So it's requiring a change in how we manage as leaders, and how we engage our team and how we create that collaborative space.

Lauren (05:12):
And how are you filtering for that? I mean, I assume a lot of this comes down to values of the company and trying to pull that out within the prospective candidates, but what sort of things are you filtering for with this new world that we're living in to see if that would be a good fit, that virtual environment, or even just a fit for the company?

Ken (05:37):
Yeah, that’s a good question. And it really kind of depends on the organization, but also on the position itself, the function. We have a lot of tech clients, but we also have a lot of manufacturing clients as well. And the manufacturing clients—while we don't recruit for warehouse positions or frontline workers, as far as being on the manufacturing floor—a lot of the folks we are recruiting are leading those kinds of teams, right? And so if the leader's not in the office, then why should the team be? So there's a little bit of a challenge there. And so to your question about filtering, we have to really kind of dig more deeply into why for the role you want us to recruit for you.

Ken (06:17):
Why does it have to be in the office? What's the dynamic around that? Is it a turnaround situation? Is it an early-stage company where they have to build up a team? And so having that physical presence with the rest of the executive leadership team is really important. That makes some sense if the answer is, well, it's always been this way; COVID was a goofy blip on the radar screen. We're all going back to being in the office five days a week, and that's a different story. And that's where you have a much harder time finding candidates who are willing to do that when there's no real compelling reason behind it.

Lauren (06:51):
That's fair. So it's really unique to each company's situation, right?

Ken (06:57):
Exactly. What's going on, and I think right now it's kind of this confluence of things. So you've got this work from home dynamic, which is brand new on top of that. You also have this very real war for talent, and there's a big shortage out there for qualified people, regardless of the function in the industry. And so companies that may have been more stringent about certain things pre-pandemic, or when the labor market wasn't so tight, now they're having to relax those kinds of things to get anybody to even be interested in the job because the supply of people is so short. Even things, for example, like drug screenings, right? Which was the norm across a variety of industries pre-pandemic, right? But with COVID and the labor shortage, and on top of that, more and more states legalizing marijuana, obviously companies are having to adjust to that. And so now you don't have to have a drug screen every single time, or maybe you don't have to have a college degree for a lot of the jobs. They realize a college degree is not a bad thing, but it's not really an absolute must to do the job. So companies are having to adjust their criteria a little bit with their own filters when they hire people.

Lauren (08:07):
Oh, that's so interesting. So as you were alluding to earlier, each company's so different, right? The leadership team, the culture, the values, all of that. As a partner with them and helping them to identify how to build their team, how are you pulling back layers of the onion to really get a pulse on the companies, just how they work, how they communicate their values, so you're able to create that best fit for them for longevity. What sort of steps do you all take to look under the hood?

Ken (08:40):
That’s a great question. I mean, we've done this for such a long time that we know certain cues when somebody is kind of BSing us and it's not exactly the true, complete truth, right? But you also look at what's the average tenure at this company. When we talk to a company, whether it's professional or financial services or manufacturing or anybody else, we ask what's the reason the job is open, what's compelling them to hire this role. If they say, well, we've had three sales managers in this role in the last 18 months, or the last two years, and none of them are good enough, well, that's a pretty big red flag, right? That's some insight into the culture out there.

Ken (09:20):
If the company's going through a changeover in leadership, that's some insight as well. If the hiring manager we're working with is giving us this laundry list of requirements for the position, and we push back and say, well, you can have six of those things, but not all 15, if they're not willing to be open to that conversation. If they're not coachable, as we call it, if they're not willing to accept our feedback as the experts in the marketplace, then it's probably not the best client for us to work with. It's gonna be very frustrating for us and for them, because we can't find this perfect person out there because they're being so restrictive. 

Lauren (09:59):
That makes sense. And then it would probably be personality cues for the type of person you need to hire to be able to work with that type of team or what have you. 

Ken (10:08):
Exactly. And it takes more time, to your question. It takes more time for us to peel back those layers and it's not just give us a job description. Okay. We're gonna go off and start recruiting. Now it's, let's have an hour-long, we call it kickoff call, usually over Zoom. It's a more in-depth conversation after we've already decided through my previous calls with them that they are the right fit. Then we dive even deeper into the actual position and the company culture with that kickoff call before we actually go out to market and start to recruit for that position.

Lauren (10:39):
Okay. And then can you share a little bit more about that out to market piece of it too? What are you doing to be able to solicit that talent? I know you talked earlier about how you're having those challenging conversations and also creating transparency around the trends of what's happening in the marketplace which might help to shake, like you said, to bend on expectations, if you will, folks may have put a line in the sand previously, once you've had that. And once you're at a point where you're actually going to find that talent, what are you doing and how are you screening for that talent with those criteria that have been laid down? 

Ken (11:13):
Yeah, that's really kinda where the secret sauce is, so to speak. That's why clients hire us. Many of our clients actually have their own internal HR or what's called TA or talent acquisition teams. But when they have a situation where it's a very high impact, high sense of urgency position, or it's a role where they just don't have the bandwidth to do the search, they come to us. They come to us because of our ability to source candidates and then also screen the people we do find. So because we're a more specialized firm, we have a pretty sizable database, as you might expect. So we look at our database for people we know who could be the right fit or could be a referral point. But we also tell our clients that even though we've got a very deep database, the best person for that job may not be someone we already know. 

Ken (11:58):
So we don't wanna limit the folks we're gonna consider for the job to just the folks we already know. Let's look at the full universe. So our database is one component of that searching. Then the other one is social media, being LinkedIn. And so we rely very heavily on LinkedIn to compare those people who are out there to the folks we already know. And so that's a big part of it—kind of knowing how to find these people. When I got into recruiting 25 years ago, there was no LinkedIn, right? It was all good old-fashioned phone calls. So back then, the secret sauce behind the value we bring to the table was trying to figure out who to go after, trying to figure out who are the key players. If a company is looking for someone in their competitive landscape, who are the right people in those competitors that you actually go after? These days, with LinkedIn and just the internet in general, it's easier.

Ken (12:49):
It's not easy, but it's easier to figure out who to go after, who to target, but now the secret sauce, the value add, is the messaging. How do I compel a high-performing VP of marketing to respond to my outreach when they're also getting kind of bombarded by 10, 15 other recruiters and companies that are hiring at the same time. So that messaging is really important for us. And so we have to really know what it is that's going to compel them to respond and kind of what their hot buttons are depending upon their function. So then once we find them, the next phase is obviously the screening process. And we go pretty deep. So we do a phone screen for about an hour. We have them complete a customized client questionnaire that asks even more in-depth questions about their fit for the role. And if we like that, then we do a virtual Zoom interview as well. So we've usually spent between three and four hours with every candidate before we present them to our client.

Lauren (13:46):
That's fair. And to go back to the point about the messaging, I think that can't be undervalued or under-appreciated. I think you see a lot of just mass see what works these days. Especially with email and being in the digital world, you can't take out that personalization and the human element. I think like you said, really being able to connect with people and be able to see if that might be a good candidate. I'm sure that's something that only takes years of experience, right?

Ken (14:18):
Right. And you just have to ask questions. I mean, your phrase, you just peel back the layers. That's what we use. We say the same thing internally when you ask somebody a question. You're trying to screen them for a certain job; you can't just take their first response at face value. You've gotta say, okay, so tell, tell me more: Why did it happen that way? Who else was involved? What were the challenges along the way? One of the big questions we ask is, tell me about your last three deals, whether you're in sales or marketing or operations, your last three initiatives. And then with that question, it's a pretty simple question, but you really glean a lot of insight about the individual. Are they taking credit for everything and blaming other people for the bad things? Is it more inclusive? Are they more of a we kind of person versus I? What do they attribute their success to? Those kinds of things. So you really get a good sense for who they are as an individual.

Lauren (15:07):
Yeah. That's fair. I would assume also it helps to color if the cultural fit would be a good fit as well, right?

Ken (15:13):
Right. And there's a lot of people—I mean, we work with a lot of mid-market companies, so a lot of our clients are on the low end 10 million, on the high end about a billion in revenue. And so people who come from very large organizations, from Microsoft or from Dell or from whoever, they many times say, yeah, I wanna work for a smaller company and we have to really explain to them, okay, when you say that, that means you're gonna have a company where there's 100 employees total, whereas at Microsoft, you have a team alone of 5,000 people or whatever the number is. So it's very, very different. You've gotta be truly understanding of what that means with how that dynamic's gonna change, and how hands-on you're gonna have to be to really survive in a smaller company.

Lauren (15:57):
Yeah. That's very fair. And then I'd love to hear a little bit more too, just about DEI and hiring. And if there's anything you have folded into your processes, if you're maybe interviewing folks or scanning resumes or that sort of thing, or if that's been a conversation that's come up. 

Ken (16:16):
It has quite a bit actually. We spent about six months or so researching, trying to figure out what we can do to help with DEI hiring. It's obviously diversity, equity and inclusion, right? And we're in a pretty unique position as a recruiter because we can help impact that with our clients, obviously, and many of our clients, because they are mid-market, many of 'em don't have a formal strategy if you will. So as an example, one of the things we are now doing as the result of all the research we did over the last six months or so is that when we present our first batch of candidates to our client, we used to send them the full resume along with the link to the person's LinkedIn profile.

Ken (16:58):
And a lot of times it's not deliberate, but a lot of unconscious bias creeps in when any of us are doing any kind of hiring; you wanna hire somebody who came from a similar school, grew up in a similar part of the country, looks and sounds like you, and has a similar background. It's just very unconscious, right? But that ends up resulting in weeding out people who are different—different ethnicities, different gender, different backgrounds—whatever it might be, unconsciously. And so we are now changing that up so when we present our first batch of candidates to our client, we are not including the person's name. Or the location where they live or anything like that. They have the full resume, but just not the person's contact information, and we're not sending out the LinkedIn profile.

Ken (17:42):
We want our client to decide which of our candidates to interview based solely on the merit of their background. Then once they say, great, I wanna meet candidate one and candidate three and candidate four, then we'll obviously say, okay, here's the individual. We'll include the full information about the person. And at that point, then we can at least know they're interviewing people for that reason. We also then talk very candidly with our clients about how diversified is your workforce. Do you need to really do a better job of bringing in more people of color or how many women do you have in leadership positions? What does that career track look like? That upper mobility? So just being willing to have that conversation really goes a long way. And then doing thing like the resume screening is helping quite a bit also,

Lauren (18:31):
How has it been received? Do you have different reactions from before or pushback or any of that?

Ken (18:38):
Yeah, so of the several dozen folks I've talked to, 90% of them are very receptive to that. They like that idea. They appreciate it since they've been trying to figure out ways they can also improve their own diversity hiring. I would say 10% of the time they say, hmm, I'm not sure how that would work. And I'd be curious to see how that goes or let's try and see what happens. So they're a little bit more skeptical or uncertain about it, but the majority of folks have received it very, very well. For sure. And the other piece of it is that, I mean, there's three different pieces, right? There's how do you source your talent? Where do you get your talent from?

Ken (19:16):
So a lot of us tend to use, like I said, LinkedIn or our database. If our LinkedIn network is comprised of a lot of other similarly aged white males, then most likely the folks I'm going to be pulling from in my recruiting are similar, cuz that's the network I'm pulling from. And so I've gotta do a better job of diversifying my own network, my own ecosystem if you will. So I can pull from a broader class of people. We need to look at recruiting deliberately, recruiting from historically black colleges or Hispanic colleges or whatever that demographic might look like so we can bring a more diverse slate of candidates to our companies, to our clients as well. And that just takes some time. 

Lauren (19:59):
Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that insight too. Any other trends or challenges that would be helpful to share as we look ahead? It's a wild world we live in, especially the last few years with COVID and all of that. What would be smart for folks to be thinking about with hiring or just things to be aware of?

Ken (20:20):
Yeah, I think, I mean, we've talked a lot about hiring, and there's a lot of things that are out there. I think on the retention side, it's also really important with the Great Resignation and reshuffle, whatever term you want to use. There's a lot of people who are changing jobs, an awful lot of people at a record number. And I think a lot of employers feel like they don't have much control. That's kind of it is what it is. They're gonna leave, but you can do some very small things to really make a difference. Most importantly, just communicate, right? We have this mantra I've been using now where it's take notice before they give notice. In other words, take notice of your key players, your top performers, acknowledge them before they're sitting across the table from you handing you their letter of resignation.

Ken (21:04):
You don't have to have an hour-long discussion every single week, but once a month, identify your key players, the folks you really can't afford to lose. And once a month, once every six weeks, have some kind of a touchpoint, a phone call, a Zoom, a conversation, coffee if you're in the same city, whatever it is, just to kind of keep them engaged. And find out what's happening with them. How is their family? Take the time to learn about what's important to them. Don't apply a one-size-fits-all management style to all of your employees, right? That was maybe okay 20 or 30 years ago. Today, people wanna know that you know what's important to them. Some people value compensation and other people value no commute, while others want upper mobility.

Ken (21:48):
I just wanna learn different things and get a broader exposure. So you have to take the time as a leader, as a manager now, to really know your staff and then engage with them. And people are still gonna leave, right? That's inevitable. But you can really stem that tide quite a bit if you take extra time to communicate with them and stay in touch on a regular basis. So that's a trend, I think, that is certainly here to stay. It's not a COVID-related thing. It may have been accelerated by that or sparked by that, but that's just the new dynamic of the workforce today.

Lauren (22:19):
Yeah. That's so true. There's an article I read recently that talked about something like, what do employees want? You know, some sort of headline like that. And it talked about human connection. It's not always about being in the room with the senior leadership or this or that, but sometimes it's just about how are you doing, how's your family, it's building those relationships that create connectivity, right? And so just to your point earlier, it's like you said, I don't think that's COVID-specific. It's just probably more chatter right now with everything, right? 

Ken (22:51):
Right. Well, the days of leading the way that Jack Welch led are gone—where you have A, B and C players and the Cs are already out, either you're up or you're out kind of thing, where you didn't bring your whole self to work as a leader, you weren't really allowed to be vulnerable. Everybody thought that was a weakness if you talked about your family or personal things, right? Said, gosh, I'm really struggling right now where things are difficult. That was the way it was 20, 30 years ago. Today, if you're not willing to be vulnerable and bring your whole self to work, and I'm not saying wear your emotion on your sleeve and air your dirty laundry, but you've gotta be willing to talk about you as an individual and your employees as individuals, as people, not just as numbers or a cog in a very large wheel.

Ken (23:37):
Those are the leaders that did a great job. There's a great book I just read by Hubert Joly, who was the CEO and really drove the turnaround at Best Buy. He was also at Gartner for a long time and at Carlson, a travel company. The book is called The Heart of Business. And it's literally around the heart, right? The people side of your people, and how important that really is and how the old mantra—that employees come last and your stakeholders, your shareholders are first, customers are second—that's all been turned on its head. You've gotta look at your employees first because if your employees are happy, then revenue, profit, happy customers will follow inevitably; it'll happen. So I'm a very big believer and follower of what he's talking about in that book.

Lauren (24:27):
Yeah. I think my husband says it's something like, it's not just about the people—it's all about the people, right?

Ken (24:34):
Exactly. Yeah. Appreciate them. It's a great way to put it.

Lauren (24:38):
Oh, that's great. Well, Ken, thank you so much. I just really appreciate your time today and sharing a little bit more behind the scenes about what you do, what's happening, what you're seeing in the market today. It's so timely with just so much disruption if you will, or just so many changes that are happening across industries. So thank you for taking the time and sharing a little bit more.

Ken (24:59):
Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for the invitation and for the great conversation. I appreciate it. 

Lauren (25:03):
Always good to see you. 

Ken (25:05):
You too. Take care. Bye.

‍We talked with Sheryl about:

• Her experiences as a woman in finance searching for a network of other women 
• How Females and Finance™ grew to over 3,000 members and its goals for the future  
• Tactics to keep community members engaged in professional organizations

About Sheryl Hickerson

When Sheryl Hickerson started her career in financial services, she was often the only woman in the room. She decided that needed to change. With a passion for community and commitment to growth, Sheryl launched Females and Finance™ in 2018. The membership group is dedicated to recruiting, training, and advancing women in financial services.

Featured Resources 

• Females and Finance™ Website
• Females and Finance™ Facebook
• Females and Finance™ LinkedIn
• Females and Finance™ Instagram 
• Hall of Femme Podcast™ 
• Lauren LaForge, business coach 
• Get Untamed: The Journal (How to Quit Pleasing and Start Living) by Glennon Doyle 
• ClickUp

To learn more about our On Purpose guest, check out Sheryl’s LinkedIn page or follow her on Twitter.

Full Audio Transcript

Lauren (00:00):
Well, thank you so much for joining us today. So absolutely we are gonna jump right in and we'll go ahead and include your bio and all that below in the show notes. But just tell us a little bit about your story. I am so excited to hear about all the things that you're involved with. I'm not even quite sure where to start. You've got so many things between speaking and this whole amazing network you've created with women and men in financial services. I’d just love to hear more. So tell us about who you are and how you got to where you are today.

Sheryl (00:30):
Absolutely. So I did not grow up to go into financial services. It's probably not a shocker. I'll be 51 in a few weeks. And when I left school, I had all intentions of going into medical school. I went into St. Louis University and was just really excited about the idea of maybe infectious disease or something that was puzzling. I really liked puzzles. And I got in there and went, wow, that's a lot of homework. And I'm way too much of a social butterfly. I was like, oh, we're in trouble. We're in big trouble because my dad made a deal with me cause I wanted to go to Mizzou, the party school. And he said no. And he says, if you go to StLou, I'll pay for it. So he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse kind of thing. Oh goodness. So I did it. And I'm glad for it because it really did actually open up the door of what I didn't wanna do. And I don't know if sometimes people look at that as a blessing. I didn't know what it was I wanted to do, but I definitely didn't wanna do that. And so I packed up my car at 19 from St. Louis with a thousand dollars and I moved to San Francisco. I got there and was broke in like a second.

Sheryl (01:42):
But I got there and I was so full of energy and excitement and passion for whatever the world was gonna throw at me. And so I thought, well, I gotta get a job. So I went into the Kinkos in Berkeley, California. I'll never forget. And the first time I've ever seen a computer in my life, and I thought, well, it worked for her in “Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead” to copy the resume out of the book. If Christina Applegate can do it, I can do it. So I did, I copied everything in this thing. And then I faxed it off to the wrong number. And an insurance company called me and said I think you're looking for something different, but we're hiring so come in.

Lauren (02:24):
Oh my gosh. It's meant to be.

Sheryl (02:26):
It really was. And the gentleman who hired me is still my mentor to this day, Robert Grumby. And that was when I was 19, just about 20. And years later—I worked there for quite a while—I asked him years later, why did you hire me? Because clearly I didn't know anything. He says, you didn't. And it was beautiful because we actually had somebody who was so excited about living their life. And you came in every day, this breath of fresh air, and we could mold your mind around what it is that we did in financial services, right. Without losing your curiosity, your excitement and this willingness to want to serve others. What we do so much in financial services, people oftentimes forget the services part of the work we do. The money's a byproduct. It's all energy. Anyway, it's not real, it's just not real. I mean, crypto proved it’s not real. 

Lauren (03:26):
Another topic, right?

Sheryl (03:27):
Yeah. But I mean, the point of it is that honestly, it was about the service that we do. And I was just really drawn to that. So I got into financial services that way. Insurance companies are a gateway to financial services and it was wonderful for me actually. I really enjoyed it. To this day will die on the mountain of everyone needs insurance and risk management is important. But then I went out to explore other things, such as estate planning and I was often the only woman in the room. So it's really important. Understand where many of us who are in the 50-plus market, we were many times the only women standing in those rooms; men didn't know where bathrooms were for us, nor did they actually care. Men didn't understand that we had children at home that we were oftentimes the main caregiver of, and many of us in that sandwich generation had an older parent we were caring for as well.

Sheryl (04:21):
So there was just an inordinate amount of stress in a very oppressed way. And yet you flourish. Many of us just continued to flourish. Yes, we had fallout, but many of us continued to flourish. And so 30-plus years later, about three or four years ago, I just, after doing so many different roles, decided every time I tried to join more in a different female-centric membership or community or network, it just didn't feel like it was what I wanted. Like, I don't need someone to tell me how to manage my calendar. I'm pretty good at that. Or I needed real supportive networking. I wanted to hear what other women were doing. I don't really care to hire someone to come and speak. That woman who made a seven-figure income, could you put her up on the stage? I wanna know how she did that. That was what I was super fascinated with. So I built my own.

Lauren (05:20):
So did you just wake up one day and say, I wanna build this network, or was it just kind of all these small seeds over the years? Was there a turning point?

Sheryl (05:30):
I think it's almost always a culmination. But really what had happened was in January of 2017, I went to speak at an event in San Antonio, Texas. And I was speaking at this point—in 2016, I had like 40 conferences, crazy. Like every week I was on the road, but in 2017, I kinda halved that. And I went to this conference and got up on stage and I'll never forget. I used to ask, oftentimes the event coordinators, like how many cheeks are in the seat, just so I could plan accordingly for questions and she said 300 and I said, okay, great. And so I walked up and onto the podium and stand behind the lectern. And I looked out and I remember seeing just a sea of old white men. I kept thinking, how is this possible?

Sheryl (06:13):
And I stood there for a very awkward amount of time. And I actually was counting how many women were in the room. Four. It was four women. And they divided 'em like there was one in 25% in the room, one in 25. Like they were trying to break us up. And I thought, for goodness sakes. So I got done speaking, went down, sat at one of the round tables, the little clam shells. And I'm sitting there with a group of gentlemen, and it was the gentleman after me who spoke who actually changed my life and the trajectory of what I do today, because he got up there and he said, San Antonio has been great, so much shopping here. But if I don't hold my wife's hand in the store, we're gonna lose our retirement plan.

Lauren (06:54):
Huh.

Sheryl (06:55):
And the men laughed. And one of the women did too—I was looking—but it was not funny. I made the money in my family. I ran the finances in our family and I thought, no more. No more jokes are coming at our expense anymore if I have anything to do with it. So I felt a responsibility. So it just culminated to that point. And that was when I decided I'm doing something now. You can make a very cavalier statement and be like, I don't even know what that means, but I'll figure it out. And so that was it. That was my turning point.

Lauren (07:29):
Yeah. So it's amazing. So it wasn't just standing up on stage and then being able to look out and have that distraction if you will. But it was also the words and just the energy that was being built there and in an empowering way. To be able to make a difference. So now you've got this membership group, which is pretty impressive. And I think it's several thousand that are part of this group.

Sheryl (07:49):
Now we have 3,298 members.

Lauren (07:52):
That is crazy. I mean that.

Sheryl (07:55):
Yeah.

Lauren (07:56):
That is a lot. That's a lot of members.

Sheryl (07:58):
Yeah. 

Lauren (07:59):
Heck. I mean, there must have been something that you did to be able to catch fire. Was it through your network or was it through the speaking events? How have you built this? And I mean, to be able to retain membership too, right? You've gotta be able to offer significant value. So tell us about how you've built it.

Sheryl (08:18):
Yeah. So I think that the first thing is in the early days—I call it my original OG—I remember saying I'm gonna get 200 women. That was some random number I just pulled out of the air— 200 of them. And the beginning phone calls. And I love all those women who listen to me cuz they sounded like this. Like, hey girl, I'm gonna do this thing. I don't even know what it's gonna do, but will you come along and help me? And they're like, yeah. Yeah cuz you do things. You make stuff happen. Okay. Thanks. I love when that happens. Hey girl, I'm gonna do this thing. I mean, seriously, I didn't even know what it was. It was when you talk about startup and grassroots, whatever's underneath that, it was Females and Finance at the beginning.

Sheryl (08:58):
And you know what, I think it's a beautiful thing because what happened was I learned everything. I learned everything from how to build a website and how to start a marketing plan and how to do everything you could possibly imagine. And I still to this very day maintain our website, maintain the graphics that go out. I do not have marketing staff. And there's a lot of membership organizations that are smaller, like half the size of me going, do not tell my staff cuz I don't know how you do it, but I'm very efficient. I am transparent. I've got a few awards back behind on my creds that say I do marketing well. Okay. It's a matter of how do you bring passion through your dialogue? Cuz it hooks other people when they wanna be a part of that too. I can do that too.

Lauren (09:46):
What happened? So you started making these phone calls and then people started talking and then did you just sort of channel them into a list or what did you do?

Sheryl (09:59):
So you start off. It was definitely before the whole membership wave came. One of the things I have to say is I listen, I do a lot of studying in other fields of marketing and what they're doing and then I apply it to financial services. So there's some of my secret sauce. And I was seeing a lot of membership organizations popping up here and there where they were very niche and very extremely focused. Cuz the more niched and focused you can be, the easier the stickiness, absolutely. So I started a Facebook group cuz it was free and I thought I can go in there and it's a way for me to start. It's an easy way to get people to invite and women are on Facebook. I mean, if you look at the trends of it, there's a lot more women on Facebook than men. So away we went and I made that invite very clear at the beginning.

Sheryl (10:51):
I'm looking for abundance-minded individuals to come and do this. And I will tell you that the other thing people are always shocked about, how many people we've been able to do in three years. That's actually not the shocker. We vet every member. So every person who's in is a vetted, qualified financial service professional of some sort. And I am the gatekeeper. So you gotta make it through me to get in. And from there we move on and move forward. And I have a requirement that everyone participate; there are no wallflowers. You know, I want to be certain that we are all giving back to the profession. And especially what I like to call vintage professional; I'm not calling myself seasoned and old and all that stuff. I'm vintage, as somebody who's been doing this for 25-plus years. My desire to give back and bring a young person through and help—the pull is so strong—while I also still want to make money and things like that. Of course, I wanna keep my financial energy high, but I still wanna have that give back. And so I go into a lot of organizations and look for the young people who are not out prospecting for them to surround them with support and abundance and even just love.

Lauren (12:08):
And when you talk about just engagement, what does that mean?

Sheryl (12:12):
Yeah.

Lauren (12:12):
Being actively engaged as part of the network.

Sheryl (12:15):
Yeah. So we've always maintained, even to this very day in 2022, 56% of our community is active every 30 days.

Lauren (12:25):
Wow. That is significant.

Sheryl (12:27):
It's very significant.

Lauren (12:28):
On Facebook groups, that sort of thing, you've got a very small percentage that are active. So you've gotta have a huge amount of people that are in those groups to sort of simulate this idea of activity. 

Sheryl (12:41):
Yeah. And this is it. I'm really a good community builder. You've got to ask engaging questions and you've got to ask for help. You need to go out and actually have dialogue around things that are timely, trending things of that nature. And you also have to tell everyone it's not a love fest. People come in and present things that are sometimes, oh, don't ever put the insurance and the financial plan or people together. Oh, they get a little gritty. But they have their way. They believe in what they're doing and they be a little bit out there, but they're always kind. And one of the questions that someone asked me that I wanna make certain I also share with you is how many people I ever had to remove. That’s a little bit of a dicey conversation, right? And so I'm really proud of the fact that it's only been three.

Lauren (13:31):
Okay. That's great.

Sheryl (13:32):
And they were, and I'll also be transparent, because the other question, why were they removed, is because they attacked women of color and I will not tolerate that.

Lauren (13:40):
Oh yeah. Yes. That is bad.

Sheryl (13:42):
I have a zero tolerance policy.

Lauren (13:44):
Wow. It's shocking, and it sounds like in a public forum too.

Sheryl (13:49):
Yeah. I mean, we are a closed private Facebook group. But people can go to the website and register and sign up. We've always had a free option too from day one. And we've kept that to this very day. So people can come and create an account, register, get access to Facebook and LinkedIn, the groups. 

Lauren (14:10):
Good for you though, for holding their feet to the fire. And putting your foot down regardless of whatever's being said, you're holding to those standards, which is critical, right? It takes a community to be able to do that.

Sheryl (14:24):
It really does. Yeah. It's an African proverb that says it takes a village. It does; it literally takes a village of people to make a community happen. And going back to that question about the stickiness and why people do it, let's put it on the things that you're really good at, Lauren. I'm very dependent on you to be able to do your thing well, and I do my thing well, and I don't know if you're familiar with Glennon Doyle, she's married to Abby Wambach, but she wrote a book called Love Warrior and a few other books, including Untamed. One of the things that she said is people don't realize that there is an architecture; when something becomes a little unstable they'll introduce another piece of wood. A lot of times people think like a shim or something like that, where it comes in, it bolsters that piece of wood to keep it stabilized. That particular act is called sistering.

Sheryl (15:23):
You are sistering the wood so that it stays strong and foundationally will be there for a long time. And that act of sistering is what we do at Females and Finance. We are sistering in bringing in women and male allies so that we can create better communities of professionals for tomorrow. 

Lauren (15:50):
Now that's incredible. So it sounds like recruiting hasn't been as much of a challenge, but I know you've got some big goals. Just looking at a little bit of what you've put out there is the advancement of a hundred thousand women; is that right?

Sheryl (16:07):
That's it?

Lauren (16:12):
Yes. You put it out there before I could. So yeah. How did you come up with that number?

Sheryl (16:16):
Oh my goodness. Well, because I have a business coach, Lauren Laforge, and she asked me what would be a number that you could do? Well, in three years I've already got 3,000-plus members. So what is a crazy number that you could put out there and you could hire, mentor, and train in advance too. What would that look like? If organizations, all of them, came together, I firmly believe that we could hit a hundred thousand, even though it scares me to death. That number's like, oh my gosh. And so people have often asked me too, well, what if you only get to 53,000 women.

Lauren (16:55):
Yeah.

Sheryl (16:55):
You know what I mean? So I'd still be proud because that's the other part of it too— you pick these big, hairy, audacious goals. And then the goal is to get them to them or even go past it. Well, you know what, I wanna know that even if I don't for whatever that reason might be, I will do my darndest to make it happen. I wanna be really proud of the number because when people ask me about our membership and you asked me at the top of this chat, how many members do you have? And I said, 3,298, right? Every person counts; I don't round. I don't say more than this. I always know the number because every one of these women count in our community

Lauren (17:37):
So what has it been like with COVID going on? How has that slowed down or increased membership?

Sheryl (17:44):
That's a really good question because we were already online before COVID happened. So I was totally ready again. It's like, wow, got that one through too. And we were already meeting on Zoom calls and doing Facebook lives and things. So it was kind of business as usual to some degree. Now I say that, but I've got women in different communities regionally, cuz we've broken it out. We have 15 communities plus Canada; we went international this year. It's our first one. We have a few more that are coming because I wanna be an international financial service professional space for all women. But they wanna meet in person. So I was like, hey, we need to be safe. I have my Southern people who were just like, we love to hug you; I'm like, I know, I know, calm down, calm down. But now pretty much everywhere's open. I live in Missouri and it's pretty much everything's open at this point. So we've gone back to in-person. And I think it's beautiful because they'll go to an event, maybe they're going to the X, Y planning network event and they wanna know who else is gonna be there from Females and Finance so they can meet up.

Lauren (18:50):
Yep. Yep.

Sheryl (18:50):
And that's what we facilitate for a lot of those events. That's fantastic and they may not know it.

Lauren (18:55):
Yeah. That's fantastic. So for someone who is entertaining building a community, what tips would you have? You started to allude to it earlier, right? You talked about asking really tough questions, putting out value through those questions, just knowing what's trending. It sounds like you're creating opportunities to connect on and offline, but it's not an easy thing to do, you know?

Sheryl (19:27):
It's not.

Lauren (19:28):
Yeah. Talk to me more about that community aspect. Cause my hunch is that's probably really a critical KPI, if you will, to reach that goal.

Sheryl (19:41):
Yeah. And I have to tell you, I'm so glad you asked that question in particular because I think people sit back and they think, oh, I could do this too. So you might, you very well might, but I'm gonna tell you, you have to wake up every single day, whether it's vacation, you're at an event. It doesn't matter what it is. You are responsible as the leader of an organization, especially as big as mine, to every single day, bring it. You have to be excited. You have to believe in your mission. You have to be passionate and you gotta be there. And be thinking about what that looks like and changing like an amoeba flowing through. Some people are so rigid and that's not gonna work. So your rigidity is gonna work against you. You gotta have flex and flow.

Sheryl (20:24):
You have so many different opinions when you have 33 or a hundred people, you have 3,300 different opinions on things. So you're trying to crowdsource what that looks like, making certain that you are honoring what the ask was. It takes a lot. So I tell people when I look back at the time, when I said I was gonna do this, I am proud of the fact of what I've built, but I have the tenacity to make it happen. I get up every day, this excited, every single day to do this work. I dunno if I would be this excited about some other community or something, I'd be like, nah, I don't know. So you really gotta look at yourself and say I am ready to take this on and do this well. And not just plunk a bunch of people into a membership community like Circle or MemberVault or whatever else. You really have to see them as the humans that they are too and still love it every day.

Lauren (21:26):
So like you said, you could plop a group of people into this, but just to get a little bit more tactical, are you sparking questions daily? 

Sheryl:
Oh yeah.

Lauren:
Are you actually policing the forum? 

Sheryl:
Oh yeah. 

Lauren:
Are you creating questions where people can vote and articles?

Sheryl:
Oh yeah.

Lauren:
Sometimes you can throw stuff out there and it can be radio silence. How are you encouraging that?

Sheryl (21:53):
So I think part of it is using those really good content ideas trying to spawn some dialogue and stuff. We do a lot of times where we have let's discuss posts where something got published, you know? And are we really okay with this? Do we like this? Was this a good idea? And what I usually do is I look. Remember, because I interview every person, I have a very systematized and very intricate CRM system. So I can actually search in my CRM for people who specialize in those dialogues, tag them and pull them. And then they start the conversation flowing. And oftentimes they will then take the ball and run with it. So that's another thing too, for those of you who might be listening thinking I'm gonna start my own membership or they might have one, if you are not keeping copious notes on your members, on what they talk about, you're missing out on an enormous opportunity to pull them into conversations that will help keep your engagement high.

Lauren (22:54):
Yeah. These are real relationships. So is it a HubSpot CRM?.

Sheryl (22:58):
Yeah. So I use ClickUp. Everybody knows I'm a ClickUp nut. I use ClickUp for everything. So our accounting, our CRM, our project management, our document center; I’m a ClickUp warrior.

Lauren (23:13):
Well, once you've got a tool you love, it's good to maximize its use.

Sheryl (23:17):
But it takes a lot of time to build it the way you want it. I did. I felt like we tried HubSpot for a while and I was like, that didn't work. And I didn't like it. I tried Zoho. I tried all of 'em. And for me, I literally spent my entire day in my Females and Finance ClickUp space, from managing all of that. And I built it the way it made sense for me. So if somebody calls me now, just to give you an example, the CLTC is one of our sponsors. They can call and say, how many people are in your group of the CLTC and I can literally search it and come back and be like, it’s 82. That's meaningful to them, you know? 

Lauren (24:00):
You must have a good search platform too. I wanna talk about sponsorship in a minute here too, but I'd love to talk a little bit about the tiers. I know you have these membership tiers too. Does everyone have access to this forum or tell me a little bit about the tiers, how you set that up and why you went that route.

Sheryl (24:17):
Yeah. So part of it is because I felt that there was a barrier to entry from a financial capacity for young people who are new coming into the profession. So we always started off with a basic tier, which is a free membership. They register on the site, they get access to the Facebook group and our LinkedIn group. We actually have a Slack board that's pretty active as well for the people who are like, I don't like Facebook. Everybody has a Facebook and they're all liars if they say they don't. But if they really don't like it, we have backups for things so they can still participate in dialogue. The basic tier has always been there when they wanted something more. We move into a Community Plus, which just means plus everything else. They get access to marketing classes, some specialized networks, some writing and speaking opportunities that we get. My Community Plus members are so much fun. We keep it very low cost because we offset it from our sponsors who came in and I see that's the only way we're able to do that. So our cost right now in 2022 is $9 a month.

Sheryl (25:27):
Very, very affordable. And then what we do is we work with some of the college students and really discount that down even more for them. So, I have to tell you, one of the best things that's happened is we have members who have been there since my OG, my original gang that's been in there. A lot of them actually sponsor anonymously, young people who are coming in, they're paying for their Community Plus and giving it away.

Lauren (25:52):
That is so awesome.

Sheryl (25:53):
Yeah. It's really beautiful.

Lauren (25:56):
And just in hearing you talk, I think one of the things I really appreciate, just hearing how you've built this, is that it sounds like you've got your ear to the ground. You're really listening to what people need. If they don't like Facebook, they go to Slack, we've got Community Plus, we're doing this, we're doing that. And so you can feel just that you're in it, the way that you're talking about it. And my hunch is too that that's probably why it's grown the way that it has, because you're hearing people. So you've got your finger on their pulses.

Sheryl (26:24):
I really try. We started adding mastermind. We did the first one this year to see how it did all. It was amazing. So we're gonna be adding more mastermind classes and groups to our membership as well. 

Lauren (26:41):
So then tell me a little bit about sponsorship or partnerships that have been a big part of the success too. We'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

Sheryl (26:49):
So when we got to be about 1,800 members, I realized that I couldn't do all of the educational pieces to it. And at the same time we found that there were companies out there that do a great job, and our members would want to talk about them in our group, but they weren't in the group. And I was like, okay, hold on a second. We gotta rethink this. And at the time I was a startup and I had actually funded 100% my own dollars on building this company. I took no outside investments. It was just me and Wal; if my husband were here, he'd say me too. 

Sheryl (27:27):
But that was very intentional as well because I wanted to see if I could make it. A lot of times what happens, and I see this in membership organizations, oftentimes they'll go out and start getting sponsors before they even have their community built. And that is a really backwards way of going about doing it because you gotta have a proof of concept, gotta be solidified. And I think it's really interesting that people think that women are a niche and I'm like, no, there's no niche. It's just us because without us, there is no other human on the planet. We're pretty important. So I would say that we're the only ones that matter, right guys, but it's true. But you know, it's one of those things where, when we opened the sponsorships, it allowed them an ability to have a very focused eye on how do we fix things or how do we offer things or how do we change products? A good example was we had one of our sponsors that had a technical flaw in software. One of the women knew about it and had mentioned it several times, came into our group to complain about it, which was okay. Like I said, we're not gonna love fest on everybody all the time.

Lauren (28:33):
Right, right.

Sheryl (28:34):
But we made a courtesy call to that sponsor to say, I know this is gonna come down and I want you to be prepared so that you have an answer versus just getting caught off-guard. They were able to bump that to the top of their queue, fix the problems in a matter of 10 or 12 days, and then come back and say to that person, I hear you. Thank you. And then great. And present the problem. So guess what? We had a win for the sponsor. Yeah. A win for Females and Finance, because we gave them a place to commune and to communicate. And a win for the advisor and their client so they could continue to do the work that they needed to get done. So I just think that literally because of it, besides the fact that it was wonderful, but more importantly, their sponsorship dollars allow us to keep our cost low so we can invite those women in. Remember they're all vetted. So not everybody's making the cut, but they're there to have meaningful intent, intentional dialogue around how to be better stewards of financial services as a profession. And I think that's how you do it. Not go slam 'em on Twitter because they did a stinky job on something. That's not fair.

Lauren (29:42):
And this is a forum where you can talk. That's fantastic. Well, one last question for you before we wrap up here. As you look ahead, any big challenges you see as you're navigating forward?

Sheryl (29:59):
So I think that the first thing we're doing and putting in place is some updates on our site where we're gonna be measuring and asking people how to measure, because that is number one. How do you get there? Well, that's a good question, but I already have some ideas of course, on how to measure out our fearless pledge—what we call taking the fearless pledge, empowering the pledge of hiring, mentoring, training, advancing a hundred thousand women by January 1, 2025. And I think beyond that, some of the other things that I see that we really need to get a better handle on is the fact that I love to see what other people like Sonya Dreizler are doing and a few others, but I think that if we're not openly dialoguing around why there are not enough women, people of color speaking, but it's even more than that.

Sheryl (30:47):
Neurodiverse candidates, Andrew Komarow at Planning Across the Spectrum. I think that we really need to start looking at each of these areas. And we have to stress of the muscle inside of us to say, are we actually doing the best by our profession or best by our conference or the best by our presentation or whatever it might be, or their podcast even, are we showcasing not just the best of the best, but sometimes it's the voice of the people that they don't get to hear as often. You know what I mean? And I think that there's a lot of times where I love nothing more than actually going to conferences. Sure, I'd like to speak, but I actually like going and participating and listening to others and putting people whose voices may be just not as loud and pushing them up to the front saying, you're gonna go up there and speak.

Sheryl (31:34):
We do something at Females and Finance called a Tuesday topic. And every Tuesday we feature a professional in our group and they get to talk for 30 minutes about a particular item. That has done so much for people speaking, because they're like, I didn't know that they did this. I said, no, because we have too many people who are glittering gold. We've got some awesome bronze and silver people. We gotta bring those people through. And that's what I'm trying to do is kind of give them that hoist to push 'em into those spaces as best as I can. And I think that's what some of these other organizations that are coming up are doing. So I think the more we're focused there, the more change, positive change, we're gonna see in financial services, because I love the profession. And the only thing I tell everybody is this, when our clients come to us and say, am I going to be okay, it is our responsibility to have an answer to that. And that's a really big question and very broad; it takes a lot of professionals to make certain that we are able to say to them, we got you. You're gonna be all right.

Lauren (32:38):
Yeah. You've got that community, that tribe, right? So fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing a little bit more behind the scenes and congratulations to all the success. I mean, you'll be cheering for you and it's gonna be fun to keep watching it all grow. I appreciate all you're doing in the industry as well.

Sheryl (32:55):
I'm really grateful for this opportunity to talk about this and the women and the male allies. They're really important to us and anything we can do to support you and others in this profession, please let us know we're there.

Lauren (33:06):
Oh, absolutely. Well, thank you again for your time today.

Sheryl (33:08):
Of course.

We talked with Bob about:

• The power of and potential issues in finding a niche as a financial planner
• How firms can use a “staff first” mentality to tackle the Great Resignation 
• The issues with cryptocurrency in financial planning

About Bob Veres

Forty years ago, Bob Veres was hired as the editor of Financial Planning Magazine. Without prior knowledge of the industry, he fell in love with the idea of financial planning and started his own publication, Inside Information. As a well-respected thought leader in the industry, Bob strives to provide financial planners with the most relevant information, resources, and strategies.

Featured Resources 

• Bob Veres LinkedIn
• Bob Veres’ Inside Information
• Bob Veres’ Inside Information LinkedIn
• Subscribe to Inside Information 
• Attend Bob Veres’ Insiders Forum
• Bob Veres’ Blog
• Pulse of the Industry Survey 2022: Start of the Year Survey by The Ensemble Practice
• “The Problem with Bitcoin, the Soaring Cryptocurrency” by Bob Veres
• “The Great Adoption” by Bob Veres

Full Audio Transcript

Lauren (00:00):
Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I feel like you really don't even need an introduction. You're so well known in the industry and have written so many amazing articles and host a conference and are just such an incredible thought leader. So I'm really excited to hear from you today, but for those who are not as familiar with the financial planning space and some of your columns that you've written, I'd love just to hear a little bit more. Do you mind just sharing a little bit more about your background and how you got into where you are today?

Bob (00:31):
Yeah. I was hoping to get a 20-minute introduction so that we don't need be talking for 10 minutes, but obviously that's not gonna happen now. So my background really is that I was a writer in Atlanta and was hired to be the editor of a financial planning magazine. And I start out in this profession with no knowledge whatsoever, which is a scary place to start, but you get a chance to see everything with fresh eyes. The great thing about it was I could go to people and I could say, I'm a dumb journalist, I know nothing, speak slowly, use words I might understand and help me learn. And the funny thing is, this is 40 years later.

Bob (01:16):
Now I'm still saying that very same thing when I do my interviews, because you're never gonna learn all of it or even even a decent fraction of it. So that was back in the 1980s. And I fell in love with the idea of financial planning and was appalled at how it was being applied. Back then, software was being introduced in the financial planning profession. That is literally how far I go back, the age of rotary phones and the way that software is being used; you would input a whole bunch of different client numbers into the software and the software would reliably come out with a recommendation that people needed to buy limited partnerships and whole life insurance. And because the computer was recommending it instead of an advisor, it had this ring of truth to it.

Bob (02:06):
And that was really the origins of financial planning. And I spent a lot of my early time trying to bring a measure of idealism to basically a sales profession and here 40 years later, we're about halfway in. We've got a lot of people who are truly idealistic about financial planning, and we have a lot of people who see it as purely a business opportunity. So, and we can talk about that if you want, but that's how I got into the business. And then eventually I stopped being the editor of the financial planning magazine and started publishing my own newsletter. So I could basically write whatever I wanted.

Lauren (02:45):
Well, you've seen the industry change so much over the years. And I think right now is especially interesting, coming out of, well, hopefully we're all coming out of COVID, right? But there's so many changes between topics like recruiting, mergers and acquisitions, technology, cryptocurrency. What are some trends that you're seeing? I know you started to allude to that a little bit earlier, but are there any key things that we should be looking out for as we look ahead?

Bob (03:14):
Yeah. Well, there's more evolution going on right now than at any other time in my career. The profession is changing and some of it is COVID-driven, some of it's technology-driven, some of it's social media-driven. Then you mentioned cryptocurrencies, which we'll get into in a minute, but so we have all these different winds blowing around in the profession. And the thing that I talk to advisors about is you need to be riding those winds in interesting ways because they're blowing us toward the future. And the first thing I would say is a lot of people are resisting change. They don't want things, some things, to change; they're my age. And they're saying, I don't want anything to change until I've retired in 15 years, and that's not a really good way to manage a business.

Bob (04:05):
And it's not really a forward thinking way to handle things. And I might sometimes in my presentations, I'll say, raise your hand if you would like to go back to where you were 25 years ago. And very few hands go up. And I say what that means is that change has been your friend for the last 25 years. Embrace it, don't fight it. But to get to some specifics, I think the biggest and most important change has been the adoption of this technology we're using right now, this ability to meet with clients remotely. And what that means is basically that if you could meet with clients remotely, you can work with clients anywhere. You don't have to be confined to your 50-mile radius of your office area. But it also means that every advisor in the country is able to compete with you in your backyard.

Bob (05:03):
And so what does that mean? Well, it means if everybody's competing with everybody else, anywhere in the country, then there's really two strategies that could conceivably win under those circumstances. The first is you could be low cost, the low-cost producer, the low-cost provider of services. And you could be lower cost and somebody else could undercut you. And then somebody else could undercut that person. You could undercut somebody. And what we're doing is spiraling down to zero, where you offer your services for free for roughly as long as it takes for you to go bankrupt, which is not, I think, a great business strategy. So looking for an alternative to that not great business strategy, the only other way to manage that emerging competition, that emerging global competition, is to have a niche, to have a specialty, to have a specialty client.

Bob (06:01):
Niche was a pretty good idea. It was a good business idea for a while. Now it's a necessity. Now I don't say it's a necessity this very moment, because I think most advisors haven't really started marketing themselves globally yet. But those who have are really well off when they have a specialty, when they work with a particular type of client. At the last presentation I gave, I invited the audience to imagine somebody who's coming out of residency, a doctor coming outta residency, and they've got a whole bunch of questions and the questions are not confined to will I be able to retire? And do I have the right insurance coverage? Their questions are things like where should I affiliate? Should I start my own practice? What do I need in my practice? What kind of insurance will I need in specialized doctor-related insurance?

Bob (06:54):
So what's the word? Liability insurance. What should the office look like? How should it be staffed? How much money do I need to invest in it? And when can I expect to start turning a profit and what are the banking arrangements? Where can I get the loan for this? Those are very difficult questions for somebody coming out. And so I'm looking around for an advisor, right? And I find one; he's right next door, literally right next door to my apartment is this advisor. And he provides comprehensive financial planning on a fee-only basis. And he's a fiduciary, or she's a fiduciary. And somebody way over on the other side of the Mississippi specializes in doctors coming out of residency and has helped dozens of people answer all those questions this physician has. Who would you go with?

Bob (07:45):
Who would you work with? So geography means nothing anymore. And we're only now starting to figure that out, what I think is the biggest challenge for most advisory firms. There are two implications. First is that having a specialized clientele means that you are gonna be more efficient. When I've talked to business consultants—Tracy Beckes was the person who told me this years ago and she was right. She said the single most important thing that I notice for the most profitable firms in the business is that they have a specialty clientele. I said, well, wait, what if they work with not like poor people or what if they work with the homeless or something. She said it doesn't matter. She said the efficiency you get working with people who, when they walk in the door, you know their challenges, immediately trumps everything else in terms of profitability.

Bob (08:44):
And the second thing, and this I think might even be more important, is that when you have a specialty, you can deliver much more valuable advice than you ever could. When you were reinventing the wheel every time somebody walked in the office, when you offer generic financial planning and manage assets for a fee, there's a value to that. No question. But the other more specialized advice is much more valuable. And I think we're finally getting to the point. I remember, years ago, people would say nobody will pay for financial planning advice. And that was true when most of what you were offering could be done with a spreadsheet. It will not be true when you're offering that very specialized advice to specialized clientele. All of a sudden people will be willing to open up their checkbooks and pay for financial planning because it'll be that much more valuable to them in their lives.

Lauren (09:41):
So, Bob, we have some clients where we've been encouraging them to pick a niche, or even we talk a lot about firms’ structure, right? There might be that umbrella target. And then there's advisor groups, if you will, that have a specific vertical, but sometimes I see situations where leadership is afraid to be able to pick a target. What would you say to owners who just wanna kind of market to everyone?

Bob (10:09):
You know, I'm a big believer in saying, just get over it. But I don't think that's very valuable consulting advice, just get over it. Surprisingly, not everybody takes my advice when I just use those words, but you know, the danger is that you'll lose your existing clients and your existing business when you decide to specialize. I mean, the way to specialize is you find people you really enjoy working with, you find what they have in common, and then you try and replicate that client base and increasingly focus your services on those people. And, it's a tried and true method, but it does leave out the other 80% of your clients. But when you decide to specialize, they'll notice when you put in your website, we now call ourselves the doctor solution or something. You know, the people who are not doctors are gonna say, wait a minute, what was this? Your website? What are you doing again?

Bob (11:05):
And so what you do is you go back to them and say before you put that on your website, you say we're creating a specialized service for doctors, and we're hoping to do a really good job with this. But you've been really valuable to us. We really enjoyed working with you. And would it be possible for you to continue working with us as we go through this process forever. We don't ever wanna lose you as a client. We just want to be working more and more and more with this specialization. The danger really is when clients say they're gonna leave me behind. And so I'm gonna break up before they break up with me, and everybody who's ever been in a relationship understands that dynamic. What you wanna do is preempt that dynamic. You wanna say you are a special client. We want you to work with us before the suspicion grows that there's gonna be a breakup. Yeah. And then you maintain your client base.

Lauren (12:06):
Yeah. Honestly, in the firms that we've worked with where they've decided to specialize, and while it does not align with their current base, it hasn't necessarily turned away current clients because there's that trust that's already been built. But I think that you make a very valid point about that transparency upfront that helps to set the tone moving forward. 

Bob (12:26):
Here you've noticed in your consulting that advisors never have as much confidence in the actual solidity of those client relationships. Clients always underestimate the power of their relationship with their clients.

Lauren (12:42):
Yes. That's fair. I think very accurate as well. Now we also have some firms we've worked with where you mentioned earlier, right? We're in this virtual world. And so I've had some firms we've worked with, especially those that work with more of an ultra-high-net-worth client. And they talk about the onboarding process and they've entertained buying iPads. They wonder if they should send those out with all of their firm information. We talk about the metaverse and how that could be changing the future and even potential engagements. I think we've all been surprised about Zoom, right? And how we've been able to have these kinds of conversations like we're having now. What do you think as we move forward will be that kind of dialogue if we are kind of flattening the field and it's not so geographic specific?

Bob (13:28):
I'm gonna give you an out-of-the-box answer. But my facetious answer is I really think this social media thing is gonna go away pretty soon. And, I said that about the internet and I think I was pretty much right about that, right? The internet was gonna go away and not be the out- of-the-box answer. I think the communication technology, if you will, the social aspects of the technology, are really more of a marketing thing than they are a client relationship thing. I mean, the Zoom meetings are a client relationship thing, but what I think that the big change right now is it's not how we'll meet with clients. I mean, we'll meet with clients on Zoom, we'll meet with clients in-person. They'll probably wanna meet in-person the first couple of times if they can, if they live in a proximity; if not, you know, we're communicating just fine at this very moment. The big change, I think, is that most advisory firms, they put on their website a picture of themselves. And it looked like a walk-in bank and they put pictures of their staff and their head shots, very professional. And the old paradigm was we wanna look professional and the paranoia of advisors was we're not professional enough. People don't think of us as a real profession. I think we've passed that hurdle. And now what I think the paradigm is we wanna be accessible.

Bob (15:03):
And accessibility is posting things on social media that show who you are and what you're about and where you live and what you're doing. And maybe some children, maybe some dogs; I’m not opposed to a picture with your family and a dog looking proudly into the horizon. So candid shots. The firms that seem to me to be the most effective marketing right now are using these candid pictures on their website. And they're also inviting people. Each one of their profiles invites people to follow them on Twitter or Facebook or something. And if I'm a client, or a prospect I should say, and I'm looking around at different firms, I find this one firm. And they look like walk-in banks, they have suits and ties. And they look a little bit smug and professional, and I'm thinking, wow, those guys look really impressive. They could steal my money and I'd never know it.

Bob (16:02):
And this other one, boy, that person looks like a lot of fun. You know, I'm gonna check 'em out. And then the first one that looks like a walk-in bank, they're not on social media. What are they hiding? They're out there. This is who they are. This is what they do. And that may turn off an occasional client. But if you've got everybody on your staff promoting themselves in their own way and being out there, there's gonna be a point of connection with just about everybody, I think.

Lauren (16:30):
Yeah, I agree. It comes down to trust, right? Because as you mentioned earlier, it can be the only fiduciary, comprehensive financial planning, all these kinds of things. And then if you've got a niche, your differentiator could be that particular target, but what it is at the end of the day, it's about that relationship and that trust and how you can build that authenticity through being you, right? 

Bob (16:55):
Yeah. Authenticity is trust these days, I think.

Lauren (16:59):
Yes. I agree. And I think, especially in this digital world, where people are checking you out before they're gonna make that phone call. They're gonna review your website. They're gonna look at LinkedIn, these kinds of places. And that's a little bit of an indicator of who you are and what you'd be like to work with. 

Bob (17:17):
Philip Palaveev of The Ensemble Practice just did a research study. And I talked to him on the phone about it. And the first thing they asked clients was where did you find your advisor? And many of them say through a referral of one sort or another, my accountant, or my friend or my family or whatever. And so you would think that it was all referral marketing, right? But then when you got deeper, there were follow-up questions. How many people did you consider? And the answer, I think the average answer was four. And they checked every one of them, and then another answer was they work with people like me or they couldn't find those things out without doing a web search. And so, maybe they did get a referral. Maybe they were told, go see my friend Joe, he's a great financial planner, here's his number. But there was a certain amount of checking out for every one of those referrals. And so people who ignore social media and say I do referral marketing, people who ignore the value of their website are probably not getting the value of those referrals. It’s probably much more hit and miss referrals they're getting.

Lauren (18:40):
That's fair. So I'm gonna shift gears a little bit here. So, we'd like to talk a little bit about the Great Resignation going on. There's also a huge trend. Well, I shouldn't necessarily say trend in this industry cause it's been a long-term challenge about recruiting and hiring, all of these types of things. And we've talked just recently about really positioning of the structure, the target market, if you will, and marketing terms and all these things, they basically tap up to the big picture business strategy, right? Are we gonna merge, what does our recruiting structure look like? Who do we wanna hire? And I'd love just to hear your thoughts about what's happening in the industry with those pieces that are a little bit louder now perhaps than they were even a few years ago. 

Bob (19:29):
The big picture, your story of course, is that advisors who are on staff and operations people on staff have a lot more options now than they ever did before. And when you give them options, they can work remotely. They've been working remotely and had time to consider their current firm. And they got to see the character of their current firm: Are they trying to micromanage me at my kitchen table? Are they gonna force me to come back in the middle of the pandemic? And having those options and having more data and more concern about, I've got a life and this is part of my life, a big part of my life. What am I gonna do? So what everybody's calling the Great Resignation is really a great reassessment.

Bob (20:17):
There's a lot more reconsidering where I am right now and noticing that I have a lot more options. And so the obvious solution, once you frame it that way, the solution is obvious. You need to create an environment that people will enjoy working in where there's a commitment to the career development of your people, where everybody is treated like adults, like valued members of a team and where there's a certain willingness to let people do their jobs without being told what to do and how to do it, if that makes sense, a certain autonomy that needs to be. And don't forget the salary thing, the pay and compensation studies and the money; the salaries really haven't moved much in the last five years.

Bob (21:16):
And now that we have raging inflation and people have more options, there's probably gonna be a demand for higher salaries. And the firms that refuse to pay that are the ones that are gonna lose out on the best talent. So I've been writing about firms that have a staff-first mentality. And that sounds like heresy. The first time I wrote about that, people were saying, well, Bob, the clients come first; don't you understand that? And the truth is the clients don't always come first. If a client is an asshole to your staff, your staff comes first. So what the staff-first mentality really means is we are first and foremost committed to our staff, people being the best people they can be in the context of the profession, and when they are that, and when they're allowed to excel, they will deliver exceedingly good service.

Bob (22:12):
One of the firms I talk to, they take five hours a week of training and moving your firm forward, coaching, mentoring. Instead of a 40-hour week, it's a 35-hour week. And I said, well, that probably means production goes down, right? And he said they work harder in those 35 hours than they ever worked in the 40; they get more done in the 35 than they did before. And I tell people, I get more done by noon every day than most people by 12:15, 12:30 or so, maybe 12:45. So the point is, people respond to certain things that I think we all know about. The question is, are you willing to offer those things?

Lauren (23:00):
Yep, that's fair. If you can take good care of your people, they're gonna take good care of your clients and help everyone to flourish. 

Bob (23:07):
And you will win the Great Resignation environment. People will leave other firms and come to you and they'll be good people.

Lauren (23:17):
Yeah. That's fair.

Bob (23:17):
Because you're only hiring good people, right?

Lauren (23:19):
Yeah. I think it comes down to values. You're upholding those firm values and that pulls through to your team and then that will pull through to your clients and all of that. 

Bob (23:30):
I know that a lot of advisors are much better at technical stuff than they are at people stuff. And they sometimes fail as a manager. I tell people two things. One is, if you're a really good technician, you need to hire somebody who's a really good business manager. There needs to be the visionary and the implementer. And the implementer is the person who handles that staff environment. And the second is you need to turn over a lot of the decision-making to the next generation and let them create the firm that they ultimately want to inherit. Don't stand in their way. And guess how many people take my advice? There was that one guy in, I think he was in Iowa, and I'm not sure about that person in Rhode Island. You know, it tends to fall on deaf ears because a lot of people are just not willing to change.

Lauren (24:22):
That's easier said than done, right? I think that's right. And contextually, you don't always realize how intrinsic that can be into just the day-to-day and minute-to-minute decisions. 

Bob (24:35):
It's change. And it sometimes goes against the mindset that brought somebody into the business to begin with. I wanted to be a technician. I didn't wanna be coddling all these damn people.

Lauren (24:46):
That's right. But it's important to recognize that. And then delegate or die if it's not the right fit. How I sort of like to describe it to people is, if you've got an orchestra, each person has their own specialty and it's the music that comes together where you see you've got something brilliant. But without the delegation, without building the team, it can fall flat.

Bob (25:11):
So that's a good way to do it. If you're in your consulting area, you're getting people to change. You're doing better than I am with my writing, I have to tell you.

Lauren (25:18):
Well, it's one of those things where I think you can all throw things out there, but it ultimately connects to the business strategy. And that decision-making and the buy-in from the team. So it's like I said, easier said than done. So, I can't let you off the hook without one more question. So cryptocurrency has been a trend. I feel like when we talk with firms, it's more of a shiny object for clients. And so they are having a lot of inbound requests around crypto in general. And, I’d just love to hear your thoughts on this. What does cryptocurrency mean for firms in the future and what are you hearing and seeing?

Bob (26:00):
I really think cryptocurrency is the most vexing issue facing financial planning right now. So of course I've been asked for my opinion and you really have to look at what cryptocurrency was intended to be. Let's start with Bitcoin, because I think that's kind of where clients are asking. Where in any of the manifestos written about Bitcoin, where in any of the intentions for what Bitcoin was supposed to be, did it say that it would be an investment? Or did it say that it would be a get-rich-quick investment? Bitcoin was created to be an alternative currency that could not be debased as a medium of exchange. And the idea behind it was to replace what is a very effective but very inefficient system of fiat currencies and nowhere in there was there any mention, and I don't think there was ever any intent, for Bitcoin to be a 15% allocation in an investment portfolio.

Bob (27:13):
Now, the reason Bitcoin and some of their cryptocurrencies are being discussed in that light was because Bitcoin unexpectedly became incredibly valuable for no reason anybody I know has ever explained. And so the first thing I would say is that I don't think we're talking about an investment. So we'll start with that. I think we're talking about something that could conceivably replace the global banking system, but isn't there yet. The second thing about it, though, is that I think we all know about investments where all the money that was going to be made has been made. So, a mutual fund takes off and it rockets and it gets great five-year returns, and it's got about 12 billion in it right now. And people pile in expecting it to go to the moon the next five years.

Bob (28:06):
And it's become an index fund. It's the same thing with Bitcoin. I think most of the money that is going to be made has been made. The Johnny-come-lately who comes in after there has been a huge windfall, never experiences anything remotely like the initial windfall ever; in all the time that I've been watching investments that has never happened. And I'm just guessing that it won't happen with Bitcoin. So then the third issue, and I think it's an important issue, is what is behind any of these cryptocurrencies? Who stands behind them? And of course the answer is nobody. And so you have a question of will these go down to zero. And I think that it's such a really interesting idea that I suspect that some cryptocurrencies will survive and will become some kind of a standard, but the question is, do we know which ones? I go back as far as Lotus 123, which was the standard in spreadsheets, and everybody assumed that would be the survivor.

Bob (29:14):
And it wasn't. There was Ashton-Tate that had its own database program that was the market leader for years. And the company disappeared. So if you own crypto as an allocation, you probably should diversify. So what does that mean when you diversify? Well, there's a non-trivial chance if you own nine or 10 different currencies that seven or eight of them will go to zero and disappear and no matter how much return you get from the other one, two or three, it's not gonna make up for the other investments going to zero. So I would suggest that if you wanna speculate, if you wanna go with it, the play money that advisors are allowing their clients to do, maybe that's all right. But if you're giving advice on something that probably shouldn't be considered an investment in the context of their overall financial plan, where does this fit? It's three times as volatile as any stock. It's not backed by anything. And so if you’re set with your financial needs now, we talk to you, then maybe this is something that you can consider, but if you're not, then a little more safety might be called for. That's the sum total of what I think about the cryptos. 

Lauren (30:44):
Wow. Well, thank you so much for your time. I feel like we could, as I said before we started the call—we were chatting and discussed that we could probably be here for a very long time. 

Bob (30:56):
I think it’s good that we finish this asking. I'm pretty sure they're ready to get on with their lives.

Lauren (31:01):
I could keep poking you with more questions, but, I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for sharing a little bit more about not only your background, but insights on the future of the industry at large. I appreciate your time.

Bob (31:14):
All right. Well, thank you for having me.

Lauren (31:15):
Absolutely. Thank you, Bob.

‍We talked with Wendy about:

• The gap between financial planning and mortgages
• The critical need for education in the reverse mortgage sector
• Tools and resources for staying on top of reverse mortgage trends 

We talked with Wendy about:
Despite not “growing up” in the mortgage industry, Wendy Peel joined the sector in 2015 from a technology and marketing perspective. However, she quickly found an interesting challenge in the lack of education regarding reverse mortgages in America. Through her work with BlackFin Consulting and the newly launched Age in Place Coalition, she’s embracing that challenge and working to make reverse mortgages more accessible. 

Featured Resources 

• “2021 HW Marketing Leader: Wendy Peel”
• “What is a Reverse Mortgage?”  by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau  
• BlackFin Group
• BlackFin Group LinkedIn
• BlackFin Group Facebook
• BlackFin Group Twitter 
• BlackFin Group YouTube
• ReverseVision
• National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association
• Reverse Mortgage Self-Evaluation: A Checklist of Key Considerations

To learn more about our On Purpose guest, please visit Wendy’s LinkedIn page. 

Full Audio Transcript

Lauren (00:00):
All right. Well, Wendy, thank you so much for joining us today. We're so glad to have you here. So I was just getting ready here, and goodness, you have such an incredible background. So just looking at some of your 20, 21 awards. You've been selected as one of the most powerful women in FinTech, which is incredible. Mortgage Woman magazine, looks like you're featured there, and you are a HousingWire Marketing Leader. The list just goes on and on. So we're excited to hear more about your background, but also dig in a little bit more into some of the changes you've been able to make in the industry. So I'll just pass it over to you. I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you got to where you are today.

Wendy (00:45):
Oh, thank you, Lauren. Thank you for having me with you today. I'm very honored to be here. And, yeah, I get a little embarrassed with the awards, I have to say, because I feel like I'm just doing what I'm passionate about. And the fact that people are noticing is really kind of icing on the cake. I go back to financial services. I am not someone who grew up in the mortgage industry where a lot of executives go back generationally. I came into the space, really in a more of a tech way; a recruiter found me and there was this company called ReverseVision that was looking to take reverse mortgages more mainstream. 

Wendy (01:41):
And I'll be honest with you. I did not know that much about them or the industry, but from my marketing and communications background and sales background, I dug into some research and I was fascinated by the demographic and I was fascinated that not more is understood. And so I found this to be a really interesting challenge. And the more I learned, the more passionate I got about honestly, retirement in America. And at this point in my career, I'm with a consulting firm called BlackFin now where I'm really out there, helping companies mainstream reverse mortgage lending, from how they think about talking to a borrower to why they should have this as another lending program within their ecosystem of technology. So it's near and dear to my heart at this point. And if somebody would've told me 10 years ago this is what I'd be doing, I don't know that I would've believed them, but I'm loving every minute of it.

Lauren (02:53):
And how were you able to level up to what's happening within the mortgage and lending sector? Just to fast forward to where you are today? 

Wendy (03:05):
Well, I was very fortunate that I had a CEO and president who really did give me the license to go learn, to do things differently. He really inspired people to think differently. So when I came into this sector, it was very siloed and it is still more siloed than it needs to be, but I had the ability to go and study what was working, what wasn't working and more importantly, the changes that have been happening inside of the mortgage industry. As we all know, 2008, the big financial crash, all of banking and mortgage had pretty much a negative connotation. So why was it in 2015 that reverse mortgages still had somewhat of a negative connotation, but the rest of mortgage and lending was starting to be seen as a little more favorable when both sides had a lot of regulatory change? And what I found was there just was no education out there. So, marketing can take the shape of many forms and education became really critical, which led us to starting to have user conferences. Part of it was for software, but another big, big part of it was just educating the people in the industry on what a reverse mortgage is, and more importantly what it isn't. So that's kind of how I got to where I am now, I guess.

Lauren (04:56):
That's fair. Half the battle sometimes is just that awareness. I feel like in working with other financial companies, part of it is not just educating internally, but externally the end client as well. So that's fair. I'd love to actually talk a little bit more about your time at ReverseVision. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and what you were able to do there within the space?

Wendy (05:28):
Yes. So one of the things I'm most proud of is our user conference. We did three years of those and the first year was as anything new, we learned a lot and the content was king. Everything was, the content was gonna be king. And honestly, my marketing director at that time, Kelly Callier, I couldn't have done it without her. The two of us rolled up our sleeves and put this on. And people were very, very happy to have a space where they could talk openly and still learn. By the second year we were sold out and in the third year, we were sold out. So it was exciting to start thinking differently and getting feedback from loan officers and executives on how do we move the needle in retirement? So we have this financial tool that is in the mortgage market, but it really does tie to retirement or even insurance products.

Wendy (06:39):
It’s a bigger financial bubble. I would call it a financial bubble where you wanna leverage your mortgage. Maybe if it makes sense to you, how would you go about doing that? And there's what's called sequence of returns risk, which is one of the ways that you could leverage your equity. Financial planners talk about that all the time, but there's still a gap between financial planning and mortgage. So it's an education both directions, for referrals, for the loan officers. And now I'm gonna go to the tech part of all this, the very cool thing was technology was changing in leaps and bounds every year. Gone are the days of paper. We have digital mortgages. And what I found was everybody had a different definition for what the digital mortgage is, which is exciting. Point of sale solutions, what’s gonna happen to loan officers?

Wendy (07:45):
There was just a lot of change and anytime there's a lot of change, it can be scary, but there's always opportunity. And so what I really got to focus on with our product team was how do we take a reverse mortgage and mainstream it, and it has to happen at truly the tech level, because the way loan officers work, they work with pricing engines. They work with loan origination systems. So how do we go from taking a reverse mortgage origination system and making it aligned within a traditional mortgage system? So there's only a couple of key differences. The document sets are different, but the way the tech works to generate the document set isn't necessarily different. The calculations are different, but it's public data math. So why is it being siloed over?

Wendy (08:47):
And so going through, I would say a solid year and a half of really investigating this, what I came to see is the tech is there. And there's a couple of companies now that have built out the tech. And one of the reasons I shifted from a tech company to consulting is because at this point, it's how do we get this into lenders or the financial institutions to be able to mainstream it from an operational perspective? We've got all the building blocks there, but you need to have some expert help. You put those building blocks to just have a reverse mortgage show up like any other mortgage if some is 62 or older, and they're trying to refinance a home. Why isn't that being offered? I know that when I purchased my home, I had several different types of loans.

Wendy (09:49):
So the technology is now there, but what isn't there is the training and the actual internal, I would say, consulting of the different stakeholders to just understand how to do it, and then train the loan officers. It's an FHA loan. How come it’s an FHA loan? There's FHA guidelines. You do other FHA guidelines. It's not as unusual as people thought it would be. And the regulations have changed so much to where it's so safe for the borrowers and so safe for the lenders from a reputational risk. I mean, it used to be okay, what is this, right? It's where the bank owns your home or you're gonna take the house away once they pass away or the heirs don’t get the property. All of that is myths. It's very much a loan on your home, but you still own the home. You can make a payment or not make a payment. It's been around since the ‘80s, the Reagan administration. It's safe. It's a way that a lot of people could have a better quality of life and retirement, and most people really do wanna age in place. So I don't even know if I answered your question on that. I just kept going, cause I get very passionate.

Lauren (11:11):
No, it's good. You can see the passion too, and you've hit it at so many angles, right? It's the foundational level of just what it is, but then how is technology gonna keep up with what's happening today and what does that actually mean? And how does that actually hit the end user for how they would interface with that offering too? So, where are we now? What do you feel like the status is of things now? What's kind of the pulse on being able to dial up the education within the industry, and outside, and then what's sort of the status on the SaaS side of things. 

Wendy (11:52):
Well, there's a several pronged approach right now that I'm putting forth. I'm working on a state of reverse mortgage report that I'll be putting out in the next three to four weeks. It gives financial institutions a deeper dive of what we just talked about at every end. Secondarily, like I said, there are tech companies now who have put the technology in place to where, with the right guidance, we can actually mainstream this from a loan origination standpoint. And then from the public relations and education endpoint I'm launching with the BlackFin Group what's called the Age In Place Coalition. And you'll appreciate this, Lauren, with your background. The most relevant campaign that I have seen over my years, as far as people coming together for education would be Got Milk?

Wendy (12:57):
Everybody knows Got Milk? It wasn't from a specific dairy farm. It was from a dairy farm coalition and it was to educate and they had a three-point agenda on what they needed to overcome objection-wise. So I've taken that and I've modeled it into what's called an Age In Place Coalition. We will have information for the end users and we'll have information for accountants. Yes, you can put a reverse mortgage in a trust. Most people don't know this, so there's attorneys that need to be educated, financial planners and loan officers. But most importantly, the consumer really needs to be educated. In 2021, I was looking at the HMDA data and this is very disturbing to me, 46% of the denied loans. So we take that 46% and move this into another little bubble; of those, more than 70% were in the demographic who got denied of HECM. Now in originations, HECMs were less than 1% of all originations.

Wendy (14:17):
So we had people trying to refinance because they probably wanted a lower payment or they wanted to leverage their equity. Right? And they didn't qualify. And nine outta 10 times they weren't even shown another option. And so lenders, financial institutions looking for the opportunity to serve their customers for life, they have that right in front of them with interest rates rising. This isn't a rate-sensitive population. There's very different needs. A lot of times they say, think of it like a first-time homebuyer. The first-time homebuyer really needs flexibility in a different way to buy their first home. When you wanna age in place, you need flexibility in a different way. You want to be able to access your equity to use it as you see fit. And that equity actually is tax free.

Wendy (15:18):
But when you're leveraging it, it's actually worth more than if you were to take it out of some other asset, because you're not paying taxes on it. So there's so many advantages that people just don't understand. And what makes me really sad is, there were quite a number of Americans that really were looking to do something differently and they didn't even know they had an option because the only place they can get that option is from lenders who lend money on housing. And so there's this Catch-22 right now. And I think there's a huge opportunity. It's the largest cohort in America, people retiring. We're getting into the biggest wave right now with COVID and with what's happening in the world and everything else. We have to start looking at things differently as a society.

Lauren (16:18):
That's absolutely fair. And you're leaning on those trusted allies, right? Your financial planners and others that are gonna be able to help guide and be able to provide that advice. I can see the why in it, right? Like the opportunity for a better life by being able to provide that knowledge and access. 

Wendy (16:41):
I have one group of people that I work with where unfortunately there's a lot of divorce happening in this demographic right now. So what do they do? How do you split that asset? And then go and try to buy something new? This is a simple thing. My people need to understand you can actually purchase a home with a reverse mortgage. So this gives the equity to purchase a home and they both get to keep their lifestyle. So there's so many uses that again, it's the education component. At first, it was the technology component. Now it's the education component. And interestingly enough, this demographic uses technology more than any other demographic when it comes to banking and tying their assets and things together from some of the point of sale technologies that are out there. They have been studying this and this demographic will tie their assets through an online application. They're fine doing it. I mean, my mother's 77 and she banks online, she uses Venmo. She knows what she's doing. I mean, some of the myths that we think about the demographic just aren't there anymore.

Lauren (18:00):
Yep. That's absolutely fair. So I feel like we work with a number of wealth management firms. And so many of them are moving or trying to move away from paper and all of that. And so, I think just with COVID too, it's just a trend. And I think sometimes we don't give folks enough credit. So, are those conferences still happening that you had had put together before? 

Wendy (18:25):
They are not happening now. I have had some folks ask me if we would be willing to do that again. And I would do that again. It was fantastic. Right now, my sleeves are rolled up to get the Age In Place Coalition up and going, but it would be something that we would look into doing, probably in 2023, and kick those back off again. And I think we'd have a much more cross-functional group of folks that would come in, because again, the agent place is for all types, it's not just for lenders, it's for attorneys, it's for financial planners. And get more folks together and get more again—Got Milk?—get more information to the consumer. Because at the end of the day, the consumer is the one who really benefits from understanding if leveraging equity makes sense for them in retirement.

Lauren (19:24):
Yeah. That makes sense. And also what's exciting to me about what you're sharing is sometimes there's conferences that are just segmented with a particular type of person or type of industry, right? Just bankers or just this and just that. But you're bringing together folks that are gonna be able to refer business and then have that shared knowledge base, which is exciting. I think about everything—this my marketer hat going on—but being so digital, right? You know that for consumers there's so many options for just communicating through various pathways, whether it's ads or video or all kinds of things, to be able to help reach them. 

Wendy (20:02):
It's an exciting time right now. I mean, technology and social media have come to a place where it's very mainstream. It's not scary. And it's not just for the young. And I think that right now, the next couple of years could be really exciting. I know that your viewers and your customers know this, Lauren, the greatest transition of wealth in the history of the world is happening over this next 10 years. So things are gonna change and you can be a leading indicator in the change or you can kind of wait for it to happen. And I like the thought of thinking differently about things; it's exciting to me. I get excited every day thinking differently and to your point, bringing different people together to solve some of these problems because there's a lot of people that need to and want to retire, but don't think they could afford to. And truthfully as an economy, we need people to retire. You need the younger groups, the millennials, to get into the higher paying jobs so that the cycle of the economy continues. So this is complex things we're talking about right now, and the more people that want to talk about 'em the better. I certainly don't think I have all the answers or anything like that. I do happen to have a little niche that a lot of people haven't really thought about before. 

Lauren (21:42):
Absolutely. So I know you had talked about some of these kinda white papers you're working on, to be able to look for those that will be rolling out. What other things or what other resources have people wanted to learn more either that are upcoming or perhaps, places that people could go to learn a little bit more either about the work you're doing either now or previously, or just in the industry at large?

Wendy (22:08):
For the industry at large, I'm a big fan of NRMLA, the National Reverse Mortgage Lending Association. They have a lot of articles that they've done with the Council on Aging and studies and things like that. My group, the Blackfin Group, definitely please come take a look there. That's where these kinds of papers are if you'd like to see them, or you can email me directly. I'm an evangelist. I will talk to anybody who wants to talk about reverse mortgages, which is just funny right now, cuz I did not expect this to be my passion in life and it just so much is my passion in life. And most of the lenders out there that offer a reverse mortgage that are reverse-centric only have really good information as well.

Wendy (23:04):
I definitely challenge people to look at some of the articles out there because there's more and more. And when I started in this vertical, a little interesting fact is more than 70 to 80% of the ads or stories or anything written about this industry were pretty negative. And these days, if you go look and you were to measure it between being agnostic or positive, it's about 80 to 90%, either agnostic or positive and agnostic is fine with me. Cause that means it's just fact based. There's still some fringe misinformation out there, but there's gonna be that with anything. So the tide has turned; I will say the tide has turned.

Lauren (23:59):
Yeah, well you know, all things take time, right? And sometimes it comes down to education, or there's a bad headline or this and that, you know? And so you're right, it all shifts. So, anything else we should be on the lookout for as far as trends or resources or anything else you'd like to share too?

Wendy (24:20):
Age In Place Coalition. Definitely look for that. There'll be a launch like I said in the next three to four weeks. And again I think that's gonna be the big thing over the next year, that education component and we will be out and about everywhere we can be talking about it. And thank you Lauren so much for letting me have a platform with you and the work you're doing. Thank you so much.

Lauren (24:51):
Oh no, absolutely. Thank you for sharing your passion with us and also helping to educate folks that are tuning in to learn a little bit more about the work that you do and providing some resources to stay on top of the trends and also have some context for where it's been, where it's going, and all the important work that that's being done. So we appreciate all that you do. And thank you for your time today.

Wendy (25:13):
Thank you.

Lauren (25:15):
Thanks again.

Jimmy Lim was intrigued by marketing before he even had a word for it. As a young boy, he always found himself examining products, fascinated by the wording of advertisements and affected by the way brands made him feel. 

When he got older, he could finally put a word to it: marketing. This fascination stayed in the back of his head as he attended college in Singapore to pursue a bachelor’s degree in sociology and English. After graduating, he was finally able to pursue his passion in the marketing world and now steps into the role as the Out & About marketing director. 

From Consulting to Finding a Team

When he started his career in Singapore, Jimmy worked in public relations before eventually transitioning to the marketing world. From there, he was involved in several major brand launches. He decided it was time to take what he learned working with major corporations to instead help small businesses reach their goals. When he moved to the United States in 2018, he launched his own marketing consulting service. 

Through his consulting work in the industry, Jimmy kept hearing about Out & About. In fact, he heard about the team and its positive energy before he knew much about the company. When the time came, he felt it was the best possible fit to make the transition from private consulting to working on a team. He’s excited to contribute his knowledge and skill set to develop strategies for clients and Out & About to reach new levels. 

What You Can’t Tell Just From Looking at Him

Jimmy started his career in the fashion and beauty industry. That experience fueled one of his personal passions: fragrances. Now, he owns over 60 bottles of different perfumes and colognes. Jimmy enjoys exploring different scents and plans to keep growing his collection!