Burke, a mentor for the CFP Board of Standard’s Women’s Initiative (WIN), has found some women are apprehensive about starting their own businesses. “There’s not the support or resources out there to make them feel like they can do it, and so I’m a huge proponent of ‘you can do this’ and I want to empower these women.”
The platform has attracted interest from sole practitioners, advisors at large wirehouses looking to transition to independence and firms looking for succession planning.
Burke and Grimes said Equita will provide one CFP scholarship a year to new member firms. And they are “in talks” to form virtual study groups to further assist women seeking the CFP designation or guidance on best practices.
“This type of firm did not exist in our industry, and it is a solution that we firmly believe will change the landscape of the financial services industry,” said Burke.
Burke is the founder and president of Method Financial Planning based in Fountainville, Pa., with a satellite office in San Diego, Calif. Her fee-only practice offers financial planning and investment management to busy professionals and young families.
Burke started her finance career at Bernstein Global Wealth Management before moving to Delphi Private Advisors in San Diego. While at Delphi, Burke had her first child and said things changed for her personally and professionally, inspiring her to start her own firm. Method Financial serves young families and busy professionals like herself.
Grimes is also a fee-only advisor and president of San Diego-based Wealth Choice, which has mostly women executives as its clientele. She, too, worked for larger firms, including Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and Hoyle Cohen, before stepping out on her own in 2016. Grimes has been in the industry since the late 1980s and said over time she began to want to run her business in a way where she could do the work that she wanted, on her own terms.
The two women connected in San Diego at a local women’s networking group. In the early days of Wealth Choice, Grimes said, she reached out to Burke to team up for a few client cases. They found that they liked and respected each other, enough to form Equita together to help other women practitioners.
“We thought, wow, how lucky are we that we know each other,” said Grimes. “There are other women we know who have other small firms out there that could benefit from this collaborative relationship.”