Wanted: Certified financial planners with at least 10 years of experience who can cover any financial topic, and can do so in a variety of settings from corporate offices to factory floors, and from online to over the phone. You must be willing to sever ties with your existing clients and planning practice, and be able to travel frequently to deliver workshops and on-site financial planning sessions to companies around the U.S. The base salary is $80,000 with full benefits, plus bonus and equity-based programs that can boost your income significantly. You must also give up your existing securities licenses, because the firm doesn’t want the conflicts of interest that come from selling products. And you can work from home.

Interested?

So far, 20 CFPs have said yes. They’ve bid adieu to their prior clients, ditched whatever securities licenses they held and passed a rigorous training program to become financial educators with Financial Finesse.

Founded by former hedge fund manager Liz Davidson in 1999, the El Segundo, Calif.-based company sees itself at the vanguard of the financial wellness trend, specifically as it pertains to workplace financial education programs. With company pensions going the way of rotary dial phones and many American workers scratching their heads wondering how to handle their defined contribution plans (provided that their employer even offers one), financial literacy—or the lack thereof—increasingly is seen as a major societal problem.

Corporations realize this, and more of them are willing to pony up for companies such as Financial Finesse to visit their workplace and educate their employees on vital concepts such as debt- and tax-related issues and to review insurance coverage and asset allocations in their retirement plans. The basic premise is that financially stressed workers can be a drag on production and on a company’s bottom line, and that investing in their financial well-being via workplace financial education programs could be a win-win for everyone.

Davidson says Financial Finesse works directly with 47 Fortune 1000 clients. The roster includes Aetna, Nestlé, General Mills and Viacom. They also work with a lot of professional athletes, and have a client relationship with the NFL Players Association. In total, the company reaches more than 600 clients—partly through its partnership with GRP Advisor Alliance. This network of retirement plan consultants provides access to Financial Finesse’s online financial learning center and financial help line to smaller companies that typically couldn’t afford the fully customized programs it provides to larger organizations.

“I think we’re at the forefront of building a movement,” Davidson says with enthusiasm and conviction.

Frequent Flyer Miles
The financial planners who work at the company mirror Davidson’s exuberance. Or, at least, that’s the case for those who were interviewed for this story, all of whom expressed zeal for their work and for Financial Finesse’s mission.

“When we’re in meetings, we have an internal saying that’s sort of our rah-rah message: ‘We’re here to change F’ing lives!’” says Linda Robertson, who lives in the Philadelphia area and is the company’s director of planner operations. “We say ‘F’ing.’ We don’t say the actual word. We’re still clean internally.”

Robertson holds a bevy of financial designations—CFP, ChFC (Chartered Financial Consultant), CEBS (Certified Employee Benefit Specialist) and MSFS (Master of Science in Financial Services). Before she joined Financial Finesse in 2005, she marketed 403(b) plans to teachers in Delaware. “I worked for an insurance agency and sold their product, which was a high-fee, high-surrender variable annuity, and sometimes I came home and thought, ‘I did this in the best interest of me and not of the clients,’” she says.

Bothered by that, she eventually searched for another job. “When I saw the opportunity to provide financial coaching and to help people reach their goals without that hidden agenda or conflict of interest, I thought it was almost too good to be true,” Robertson says. “And so 11 years in I still pinch myself because it’s everything I love to do without having the pressure of sales quotas for products I sometimes didn’t believe in.”

Back when Financial Finesse had fewer planners on staff, Robertson was known as the Road Warrior because of a busy travel schedule that sometimes had her out on assignment for two weeks at a time. “For planners who do have children at home, we have a travel cap so we don’t ask any team member to travel more than 50% of the time in any one calendar year. I’ve reached that cap just once in my career here,” she says.

Even with her duties as director of planner operations, she still travels as much as one-third of the time. “Because of my tenure here and that I’ve worked with all of our clients on implementation, and I do a lot of our curriculum development, I’m probably our pinch hitter,” Robertson explains. “I could go to any of our clients and be comfortable. I just came off the road a couple of weeks ago from doing some HSA workshops at three factory locations in the Corn Belt. I was there when the workers were coming in with their white smocks and hairnets; I’m there at 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. to catch the shift work as they’re coming in and out.”

Fortunately, Robertson likes to travel. “All of our travel expenses are covered,” Robertson notes. “I like to collect points, so I get to decide what airline I fly and I can manage my own travel.”

From the sounds of it, Robertson has a busy schedule. As do all of the other Financial Finesse planners. “This isn’t a place where you can just sit back and relax,” she says. “We are a small team and we leverage that. There’s never a dull moment, and we’re expected to give 110%, which we do willingly because we all have a passion for this.”

Unbiased Education
Liz Davidson, 45, was an investment banker at Smith Barney Harris Upham before she attended business school at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She had a friend on the brokerage side who shared her Warren Buffett/Benjamin Graham value-oriented, buy-and-hold investing philosophy, and they started a hedge fund after she graduated from UCLA.

Even when dealing with hedge fund clients, Davidson noticed there was a big knowledge—or at least behavioral—gap when it came to appropriately diversifying their portfolios. She concluded that if the top 1% are making serious mistakes, what about the rest of the investing population?

Davidson did some basic financial planning workshops “for fun” for Anderson alumni, and came to realize there’s a huge need for financial education and guidance. “I fell in love with this—to have people walk out of a room and feel empowered and send thank-you notes, she recalls. “That didn’t happen at a hedge fund. When we had a bad quarter we got called, and when we had a good quarter it was like, ‘You’re doing your job.’”

But that realization put her at a career crossroads. “I had to decide whether to stay in the hedge fund business or take a risk and start Financial Finesse,” she explains. “I was going to regret more not trying it than I would taking a safer route.”

Financial Finesse initially focused on providing financial education to women, but Davidson quickly realized she needed to branch out if she wanted to build a national network. She also realized a couple of other things. First, just because there’s a need for something doesn’t mean there’s demand. And second, despite vetting financial planners to deliver these workshops and having them sign non-solicitation agreement contracts saying they would just be delivering educational content and not doing any sales or marketing, a few of the planners crossed the line.

 

“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.”