In her more than two decades in the financial services industry, Clara Sierra hasn’t had many sponsors. “I’ve had many, many, many mentors,” said Sierra, who is a senior director at Moody’s Analytics. “But I would say I have only had two sponsors.” As a woman and as an Afro-Latina, sponsors are few and far between for her, she said. And in her time in the financial services industry, she’s never come across a formal sponsorship program.

This year marked our second State of Women in Wealth Management study. While we initially wanted to do a benchmarking study to track the sentiment of women in wealth management, recruitment and barriers, this year we decided to explore more aspects of the persistent problem of the underrepresentation of women in our industry. We know that tracking progress is important, but we wanted to understand the problem even better in hopes of identifying additional avenues for improvement and growth. B

I recently saw a tweet pleading, “We need more minorities in journalism.” As a minority former journalist, this struck a nerve. I remembered when I was five years into the business working in Boulder, Colorado, one of the state’s more expensive cities. At that time, SalaryList.com reported the average salary for an associate editor was $43,975. I was making just shy of $30,000 with a similar title. I worked long, odd hours. I traveled extensively. I couldn’t afford anything but rent, leading

Jacqueline “Jaq” Campbell’s first mentor in the financial industry was a middle-aged white man. He showed her the ropes, he introduced her to high-net-worth individuals, he helped her study for her Series 7, and when she passed it, he presented her with a briefcase at a celebratory dinner. Campbell, a Black woman who’s CEO and president of Alexander Legacy Private Wealth Management in Detroit, said her mentor even took the time to get to know her family and told her father, “If I don’t have her

On June 17, President Joe Biden signed a law making Juneteenth, which falls on June 19, a national holiday. This recent trend of powerful people taking a proactive role in promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging is also happening in the advisory profession, with programs and profession-specific courses to help you on your own DEIB journey popping up more over the last year. Brookings reported that the U.S. is diversifying faster than predicted, with the most recent census data...

WHAT'S ON HIS MIND: “There has never been a more important and critical time for financial planning than there is now.” VIDEO: Click or tap below for a YouTube video with additional questions and answers with Patrick Mahoney. How has financial planning impacted your life? A little story about me that goes back to my childhood when I was introduced to financial planning early on: My father was a child of the Great Depression. His family grew up in very modest circumstances, so he was very thr

WHAT'S ON HIS MIND: “We’re not going to become a profession recognized in 2021, but we can continue to move the ball down that field.”

WHAT'S ON HER MIND: “Servant leadership is so important. That’s who we are as human beings—we need to help others.”

Financial planning is a tough profession for anybody to navigate, says John Eing, CPA, CFP®. But it’s a bit tougher for diverse professionals to navigate. The Journal of Financial Planning surveyed diverse members in the profession across diverse sectors—women, Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), disabled, and LGBTQ+—to learn about their experiences and identify common problems they’ve faced in navigating the profession. We then interviewed diversity and inclusion experts on ways to address those common problems.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about challenges for you, your employees, and your clients alike. In a recent call in FPA’s Planner-to-Planner conversation series, powered by TD Ameritrade Institutional and Vanguard, host and past FPA President Elizabeth Jetton, M.Ed., CFP®, led a discussion with FPA members on how they’ve been taking care of their community of clients and employees.

There’s a hairdresser in Arvada, Colo., who likely knows more about her clients than their doctors. She listens to them and makes them feel valued. She’s honest with them when pixie cuts aren’t right for their face frame and her referral business is booming. Getting to know your clients and making them feel you are in tune with their needs is key to more referrals and more business growth, according to a 2018 study. Also key is being comfortable with tension. The “Know Your Client” benchmarking study by FPA, Capital Preferences, and T. Rowe Price found that clients might respect and like you more when you are a “behavioralist”—someone who tells them in a diplomatic way when they say one thing yet do another. A behavioralist, the study noted, is a planner who has “will, skill, and means” and can handle tension productively. This leads their clients to appreciating their honesty, referring them to more people, and it results in more business growth, the study found. But planners have to know their clients well in order to pull this off. “The better we know and understand our clients, the better we are at providing financial planning services,” Frank Paré, CFP®, chair of the FPA board of directors, told InvestmentNews. “Having a deeper understanding of our clients helps us to point out where there might be some inconsistencies in terms of what they do versus what they say. I’ve seen that where clients are looking to the future but still going to Vegas on a regular basis.” He added that clients want to be called out when they are not acting in alignment with their goals. And although that might be tense, if a planner is a behavioralist with will, skill, and means, they thrive in that situation. “In identifying behavioralists, we’re looking, for example, at how planners deal with the tension that creeps into a client relationship. Behavioralists are comfortable with that tension,” said Pat Spenner, chief marketing officer at Capital Preferences. The takeaway is to put in the time to get to know your client, their partner, and their families—including pets (ever talk to a 30-something millennial with only fur kids? Hello unsolicited dog pictures.) A Financial Planning article reporting on the survey noted that the sweet spot is to spend around six extra hours working to know your client and their loved ones in the first year of the relationship. That six-hour commitment led to a referral rate of 27 per 100 clients and a net growth rate of 24 percent.

The profession’s recent focus on racial and ethnic diversity isn’t quite so new. Then-associate editor Nancy Opiela wrote in the pages of the Journal of Financial Planning about the need for racial and ethnic diversity in the planning profession in 2002. “The growth of racial diversity in America is staggering,” Opiela wrote. When she called several minority planners to ask about increasing diversity in the profession, the collective response was “It’s about time.” Reading this article from 2002 gave me déjà vu. Ideas for how to address the lack of diversity suggested in the article include recruiting at colleges with a high number of minorities. Creating awareness about the profession. Surveying minority FPA members and asking them what types of programs they’d be interested in or if they had speaker suggestions. Trying to incorporate practices from other professions that have successfully recruited minorities. Mentoring. Seventeen years later, those ideas remain valid. “Our profession is very late in coming to grips with the need to increase diversity,” Connie Chen, CFP®, AMP, said in the article. In 2002, just under 22,000 CFP® professionals indicated their ethnicity in a survey, indicating 2.4 percent were Asian, less than 1 percent were Black, and 1 percent were Hispanic/Latino, Opiela reported in the April 2002 Journal. Four years after Opiela’s article ran, at a session at the FPA Annual Conference, Lee Baker, CFP®, realized he was the only minority in the room. Ed Gjertsen, CFP®, realized it too. Gjertsen asked Baker if this was something that bothered him, and the pair started a conversation about the lack of diversity at the conference and in the profession. Gjertsen and Baker connected with Trudy Turner, CPA, PFS, CFP®, and later Saundra Davis, APFC®, FBS®, and Louis Barajas, CFP®, EA®, to establish what would eventually become the FPA Diversity Committee, which has helped to make strides in the arena of diversity in financial planning, including establishing the FPA Diversity Scholarship. Even though we seem to be having the same conversation about increasing diversity 17 years after that 2002 Journal article was published, Turner said there’s one key difference today. “People are listening,” Turner recently told me. However, “What’s not different is that people don’t know how to implement this. That’s still the challenge. We’re getting closer to the cusp of there being some breakthroughs, but that’s still very much the challenge.”

Marketing is never easy—especially when it’s not your specialty. But successful marketing is essential to grow and maintain your business. Marketing doesn’t live in a silo, and it’s not going to be a quick, overnight success story. “There is a tendency to believe that success is going to happen overnight,” Zoë Meggert, founder of Perfectly Planned Content, told the Journal. “You have to be willing to throw some stuff against the wall and see what sticks. Patience is a factor.”

They’ve been described by some as the wild, wild West. Others have compared them to the Beanie Babies craze in the ’90s. Some say they’re a fad; others are champions of them. No matter where you fall on that spectrum, there’s no doubt cryptocurrencies have shaken things up in the past year. Though cryptocurrency has been around since 2008, launching with the white paper by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, interest in them peaked at the end of 2017 when the value of Bitcoin exploded and subsequently crashed early 2018.

Such reviews are rampant in the fitness industry, and all too often the folks writing them don’t know exactly how a piece of equipment is supposed to perform. “Consumer reviews carry a fair amount of weight,” said Andy Leshik, director of sales and marketing for Leisure Fitness. “If you got [rated] 'best' by a consumer review, your sales will blow up on that SKU. They definitely have an impact.” That’s why it’s such an issue when those reviews are scathing and done by people who are not expert

There’s a shift going on in the outdoor industry, and today’s customer wants more than just a product that performs. Consumers are increasingly concerned about the environment and the impact the products they buy have on it. Not every company can be Patagonia, but any manufacturer can take steps to improve its track record with supply chain management — or sustainability. To reach this customer on a deeper level, it’s not enough to focus on supply chain management after the fact, when business

OIA urges outdoor industry to encourage members of Congress to tell them to end the shutdown. There’s no good time for a government shutdown, but Congress chose to shut things down during the primetime for fall outdoor recreation. Leaf peepers and wildlife viewers are being shut out of their favorite national parks, and the flood-ravaged communities surrounding Rocky Mountain National Park, in particular, are finding it even tougher to recover.

This is part of a series of stories previewing Rendezvous, the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) annual leadership forum, which will be held Sept. 30-Oct. 2 at the Loews Coronado Bay Resort in San Diego, Calif. This year's line-up will feature three tracks to help attendees tackle their business challenges: Innovative Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion and The Consumer Revolution. Register for the event here. Attendees must register by Sept. 6, to secure discounted lodging. The demographics o

We admit: We tend to cram our not-so-feminine man feet into high heels and inappropriately sized samples far more frequently than we should. When we slipped those evil stepsister feet into the Altra Lone Peak 1.5 trail runners (MSRP $115) we were pleased at the absence of discomfort. Our immediate thought was, “We could get used to this.” We follow Altra on Twitter. We like it on Facebook. We’ve interviewed its folks at trade shows, but until this past winter we’d never tried a pair of its shoes.