“That makes the model unworkable,” Davidson says. “We realized we’d have to bring everything in-house even though it’s more expensive and is greater risk. They needed to be full-time employees, to be full-time educators who give up their licenses to sell securities, and to have their CFP designations and 10 years of experience. And we monitor quality via surveys.”
It also became clear to Davidson that she needed to keep acquisition costs down by selling her program to companies willing to offer this as a benefit to their employees, rather than marketing Financial Finesse’s services to individuals.
“When we first started, I did a lot of cold calling saying to companies that I run a financial education company that delivers education to employees around all sorts of financial issues, and it’s completely unbiased,” she says. And they’d say, ‘We have Schwab or Fidelity and they do that, and they’re pretty unbiased.’ That was where the market was at then. Since then there’s been more of an awareness of the importance of what’s truly unbiased, and the difference between real education delivered by full-time educators.”
Basic, Yet Individualized
The broader education delivered by Financial Finesse via webcasts, workshops or the financial writing center has certain themes in common, says Cynthia Meyer, a CFP, ChFC and chartered financial analyst in Gladstone, N.J., who joined the company in 2015. But everything is personalized to the employee of the client company.
“Sometimes you work with the same person over time, and sometimes you work with somebody with a specific question for just 20 minutes,” Meyer says. “We have a behavioral change model that puts the employee in the driver’s seat, with the idea being we’ll listen deeply and present them with options and then coach them through the process of figuring out what’s the next manageable step they can take to move their financial situation forward. The most frequent users of financial wellness programs make the most progress, particularly people who have debt and cash management problems.”
Meyer worked in journalism and in national politics before she joined Merrill Lynch in the mid-1990s. She went through the company’s financial advisor training program and subsequently attained her CFP designation. She worked as a financial planner as part of a team at Merrill, but left that practice when her husband was transferred to Bermuda. While there, Meyer got involved in a volunteer program where she taught financial education mainly to high school students, and sometimes to teachers.
After returning to the U.S., she became a CFA and explored various options, including whether to build another book of business as a financial planner, to put her CFA designation to work on the investment management side, or to pursue entrepreneurial ideas. “It was in the process of exploring those entrepreneurial ideas that I found Financial Finesse,” Meyer says. “I think we all found Financial Finesse because we all have this interior social mission of wanting to become certified financial planners so we could provide financial guidance to people who needed it most. We’re all entrepreneurial in that we wanted to be able to express our own opinions on the subject.”
Teig Stanley, a CFP in Parker, Colo., also took a circuitous path to Financial Finesse. He started in the business with Merrill Lynch in 1995 after having worked jobs in the entertainment field and in government. He worked at Merrill for six years before leaving to form his own firm that was a mortgage and insurance brokerage, as well as a financial planning practice. He did that for 14 years before joining Financial Finesse.
Stanley did planning work for owners of small, growing businesses, and that expanded to helping some of them with their company benefit plans. “In the process I found myself educating a lot of employees on basic financial concepts and financial planning, which I did for free because it was good for my business and I fell in love with the idea that everyone needs to have some good financial education and guidance,” he says.
Then one day Stanley found a post for Financial Finesse on the CFP Board’s then-new job board. Stanley says he wasn’t looking for a job, but was just checking out news about the unveiling of the job board when one of the first items that jumped out at him was the Financial Finesse listing.
“The more I read about this company it was like, ‘Oh my god, they do what I do,’” he recalls. “And they’re able to do it unbiased, whereas I was still in the mode of having to sell something. That was intriguing, so I reached out to them. It took three and a half months between the time I reached out to them until they offered me a position. It’s a very intense recruiting process.”
Stanley says joining Financial Finesse was the best career move he ever made. “It lets me focus on what I’m happiest doing as a CFP—which is sharing my knowledge with others and getting people to a better place without some of the other distractions or incentives I previously had to deal with.”
That said, he does miss the long-term relationships that were inherent at his prior planning practice. “There is a bit of a loss with that,” Stanley acknowledges. “I’ll work on the financial help line every day, knowing that of the five or six people I talk to during my few hours on the help line, maybe one of them is someone I’ll maintain a relationship with through the years. With many of them, it’s just a short-term transaction thing.”
Formidable Rivals
Financial Finesse isn’t the only player in the sandbox. Goldman Sachs, through its Ayco division, is a formidable competitor. And both PwC and Ernst & Young have financial education divisions. But Liz Davidson believes her firm has carved out its own strong niche.
“We are the only firm with a model where 100% of our revenue is completely unbiased financial education guidance, paid for by the employer, delivered by full-time, on-staff certified financial planners,” she claims. “We believe we’re setting standards for the industry. We could be growing at an even faster rate, but we’re careful not to overextend ourselves and compromise our quality standards.”
Davidson says the company has a process called “ABR”—always be recruiting. That means having a full-time recruiter, and all of the company’s planners are engaged in different areas of recruiting. She notes that finding planners who are interested in working for Financial Finesse isn’t a problem; rather, the problem is finding planners who are a cultural fit for her company.
The company’s vetting process probes both the attitude and aptitude of applicants. “You can be a great public speaker, but that doesn’t necessarily entail interacting with the audience or listening or creating this whole [learning] environment,” Davidson says. “That’s a different skill set. It’s how you read and react and engage an audience. Planners have the talent to do this, but they don’t have the mastery when they come in.
“Everything you’ve learned you’ll have to put through this process of questioning whether you’ll use that here, and maybe substituting some other skills,” she adds. “That’s hard for people.”
Very few have passed the test to date, and Davidson isn’t sure what it will take to up the success rate of potential recruits. “We might see a shift regarding the types of people who gravitate toward the planning profession,” she says. “I think long term, that those who are applying for our jobs will have the skills we want at a higher percentage rate.”
Meanwhile, she believes Financial Finesse is in a growth industry. “There’s been a big movement of this [financial education] as a company benefit,” Davidson states. “We wouldn’t have this job opportunity for CFPs if there wasn’t a big demand on the corporate side.”