General's Daughter Transitions Her Billion-Dollar Firm

Susan Fulton has always been ambitious. After working her way up in the radio broadcasting business, she abandoned that field because she hated it to tackle the financial advisory industry, which she loves.

Now, she is getting ready to celebrate her 78th birthday and the financial firm she started as part of her second career is turning 30 and has just crossed the billion-dollar mark in assets.

She has now passed her firm, FBB Capital Partners in Bethesda, Md., to the successor whom she groomed to take over.

Fulton says she and her sister, Dr. Xandra Breakefield, were raised to be ambitious and had “the burden of being useful” instilled in them by their father, Army General Durward Breakefield, so she was always a high achiever. Her sister is a leader in the field of genetics and a professor at Harvard University. Married to Richard Alsina Fulton, a lawyer, Fulton does not have children.

She was raised as an “Army brat” living all over the world, including in Vietnam and The Philippines, growing up, before settling down for most of her adult life in the Washington, D.C., area. Because she had connections through family and friend in various aspects of media, she started in newspapers and then switched to the business side of radio broadcasting.

“I’ve always had men who were very kind to me as mentors,” she says. “I’m not sure why.”

She worked her way up in broadcasting from sales to general manager of WASH radio in Washington, but decided at age 40 that she no longer liked the business and needed a drastic change. She remembers she did not even own a radio when she started in broadcasting and seldom listens to it now. 

Financial planning was in its infancy but it appealed to her, she says, “because there was always something new happening, it was challenging and it let you establish relationships with people while helping them.”

Fulton started in 1983 at a small brokerage firm, Linsco (which in 1989 merged with Private Ledger to become LPL Financial), but decided the world of commissions had an inherent conflict of interests. Now she tells young people who are new to the financial industry to “be generous, be kind, and don’t get involved with a brokerage firm! Find a good advisory firm to intern with.”

She started FBB Capital Partners in Bethesda, Md., in 1987 and has now passed it on to a person she groomed for the position. FBB Capital was one of the first fee-only financial services firms in the Washington area, and she was among the first Certified Financial Planner licensees in region.