|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
BUSINESS NEWS
RECAP: The Women Advisor Forum, NYC
[Bank Investment Consultant]
On July 10th some 100 high-ranking women in financial services from around the country gathered at the Rubin Museum in New York for the SourceMedia’s Women Advisor Forum. The afternoon event, sponsored TIAA-CREF and presented by Bank Investment Consultant, Financial Planning, and On Wall Street magazines included a keynote address by Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and Chairman of Citi Global Wealth Management, a talk by Muriel Siebert, founder and president of Siebert and Co., and two panel discussions featuring various industry luminaries. The atmosphere was classy and convivial, as women shared experiences, problems and advice about working in the industry.
WOMEN RAINMAKERS: SOME GEMS
This was a panel moderated by our own Frances McMorris, the editor-in-chief of On Wall Street. The four women on the panel discussed how they started out and how they acquired and dealt with their wealthiest clients.
The Panel featured Karen Altfest of LJ Altfest, a fee-only planning and investment management firm in New York; Carrie Coghill Kuntz, CFP president and co-founder of DB Root & Co., a wealth management firm in Pittsburgh. (She was in Barron’s top 100 Independent Advisors in 2007 and top Women Advisors for the past three years). Alyssa Moeder, vice president and private wealth advisor with Merrill Lynch Private Banking and Investment Group; and Margaret Starner, CFP and senior vice president of The Starner Group, an invitation-only affiliate of Raymond James.
Acquiring Clients
Altfest: “We market to our own clients first, they’re our best advocates.
Starner: “Marketing is finding out what your client wants and giving it to them.” “I was not a natural rainmaker type. I was kind of geeky. But I saw an article in the Journal of Financial Planning about a tax attorney from Mississippi, where I’m from, so I called him up to have lunch. I told him I was looking for attorneys to refer my clients to even though I didn’t have any clients at the time. I said I want ’access to your knowledge and expertise.’ He became a huge source of referrals.”
Kuntz: “You build and earn trust by showing people you know what you’re talking about. Being well educated is the most important thing. I spend a lot of time in the library. I read everything I can.” “This [the current emotional turmoil] is a great time to be an advisor. The hardest time to get clients was during the dot com boom.”
Moeder: “This is probably the best time for us as advisors. Even sophisticated clients are confused. We’ve been on the phone constantly with our clients.”
How Did You Get Your Biggest Client?
Moeder: “We had a large nonprofit with 100% of its money in cash that wanted to be invested in something more than CDs. It took years of educating and investing in the client [before they signed on]. You need to be an expert in your target client market. Educate yourself and then your client.” Moeder also was able to keep one big client by persevering in getting him institutional services, when the institutional side at JPMorgan didn’t want to provide the client with a certain derivatives transaction because the client was an individual. By following up on every objection and not taking “no" for an answer, she broke through the red tape that was largely a silo issue. The institutional side said they couldn’t work with an individual for compliance reasons, but she found out it wasn’t a compliance problem. She worked for six months, tearing down objectives and building her allies and was therefore able to keep the client.
Altfest: The firm had a call from a church that was fairly disorganized and asking for RFPs from various firms. The primary thing that won the business was that “we were the only ones to talk about investment policy statements.”
Starner: She had a wealthy family that was squabbling about money. “By taking each issue one by one in each meeting and breaking it down we were able to resolve some of them.”
Education, Education, Education
So what really works when it comes to getting your business off the ground? That’s what the crowd wanted to know.
Education took the first prize among the day’s guests. Carrie Coghill Kuntz says she built up her practice by becoming well educated and being opinionated. “You build trust by showing people that you know what you are talking about," says Kuntz. Alyssa Moeder agrees. Educate yourself first and then others, she advises. “You need to be viewed as an expert in your target market," Moeder notes.
SHATTERING THE GLASS CEILING
The second panel moderated by Financial Planning Editor-in-Chief Marion Asnes concerned barriers women face in the financial planning industry. The panelists included Mary Barnaby, executive director of Private Wealth Management at UBS Financial Services; Colleen O’Callaghan, executive director of Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management; Nancy Rooney, the national investments practice leader for the Northeast Region for JPMorgan Chase; and Jaleigh White, senior vice president of Fifth Third Private Bank.
All the women agreed that it was a barrier to them that there weren’t other women in their businesses to look up to and emulate, that they had no role models on the job.
A big barrier for Nancy Rooney early on was “looking young.” Rooney: “I would sit in front of people who had sold their companies and they would look at me and start talking about their granddaughters. I had to establish credibility. I bought and wore glasses even though I didn’t need them. I had to be unbelievably up to speed on all the stats and pepper the conversations with the index returns and movements. I would say things like ’clients similar to yourself who I’ve worked with before’ to make them think I had experience and ’we’re seeing a market similar to that in the 1970s;’ even though I wasn’t alive I could know about that market.
Jaleigh White started out as one of two women accountants at Arthur Andersen. She worked with 37 men partners. There was no pregnancy leave policy or anything. As a tax attorney, she was perturbed when she found out that her second child was due on April 14th. “ I hid the pregnancy as best as I could as long as I could," she said.
She had to learn to rely on her husband, who luckily was very supportive. That meant letting go of a lot of control and accepting the fact that her husband let their children sleep in their clothes while she was traveling. She would say: Would you please make sure they don’t go to school in the same clothes. But this same husband took responsibility for getting all the childcare and housework taken care for the first year of Jaleigh’s new job when she switched to Fifth Third Bank. Perhaps not all husbands are as supportive.
When asked by yours truly why the percentage of women in the business doesn’t change from year to year, even though women have great relationship-building skills, often considered superior to those of men, Coleen O’Callagan said “The answer is the glass ceiling has shattered in the corporate environment, but not on the home front.”
Another question from the audience concerned a sexist environment: “There are only four four women in my firm, and I can’t get past the chatter about how bad Hilary is and the endless talk about the prostitute with Eliott Spitzer, and the managers just ’turn the other cheek’ and let this go on.” The women basically advised her “to have a thick skin," “to act like your in a foreign country and don’t understand the language," and “try to joke with them.”
Mary Barnaby talked about feeling the responsibility every day to make the workplace a better environment for women and O’Callagan, who just had a baby, bought a new house and switched jobs from Lehman to Morgan, was frustrated that there were fewer women in recruiting: “Women get scared when you interview them and they don’t see other women out there.”
What Distinguishes You as a Woman?
Rooney: “I listen more and figure out what people’s biases are that they bring to the table. You have to sit back and figure that out or else you will just sound like you’re making a pitch. I’ll often say I don’t know enough about you yet to make a recommendation. So often it’s about demystifying something they believe that may not be true and then reeducating them about how to think about it.”
White: “I had one client who just sold a business for $10 million and he just kept getting frustrated with me because he just wanted a proposal. I said I won’t give you a proposal, I don’t know what you want. He went away and I didn’t sleep for four nights worrying about losing him as a client and whether I had done the right thing. And then he called back after he had talked to his wife and said ’You’re right, we have a lot of issues to work through.’ ”
|
|
|
|
|
|
