The financial industry has been good to Erin Botsford. What started in 1989 as high hopes for a secretarial job at AG Edwards turned into a lifelong advisory career that rewarded her drive, adaptability and smarts.
And now, five years after selling Dallas-based Botsford Financial Group, which had close to $1 billion in assets under management at the time of the sale, Botsford said her latest expression of those attributes is now rewarding her in a truly virtuous cycle.
“Lots of intersections happen in life,” she said. “One thing always prepares you for the next thing.”
That next thing for her, Botsford said, is using much of the revenue from her advisory training business in McKinney, Texas, to support an orphanage, school, farm and community in Africa, and other similar endeavors.
The primary focus of her charitable work is Ebenezer Foundation in Livingstone, Zambia, where the mission is to save, raise and educate impoverished and orphaned children through four structured initiatives that lift the entire community in different ways.
The Ebenezer Children’s Home, which is the only area home accepting newborns, cares for 48 orphaned children from infancy through high school. The home employs 13 local women who act as “mums,” plus another 30 local staff who run the facility.
Ebenezer School is 100% donor supported and always filled to capacity. It has 427 primary students and 48 middle school students who are taught and fed two meals each day. In addition, there are 38 high school students, and 11 university students receiving partial assistance. The school employs 21 teachers and staff.
Ebenezer Farm’s 40 acres represents food security for many people in Livingstone and is working toward being self-sustaining. Here 13 workers farm seven varieties of produce and tend to lemon and orange trees while hatching 1,200 chickens annually to be sold locally. And finally, Ebenezer Community Food Assistance provides emergency food assistance to the poorest local families and supports 16 families with monthly assistance for cornmeal, oil and sugar.
The cost of this support is what many would find shockingly low by American standards—$400,000 a year.
“My husband and I heard that, and we thought, ‘We could make a huge difference giving our money here,’” Botsford said. “So in 2009 we decided that would be our primary charity.”
Finding Meaning And Purpose
From title insurance agent to stockbroker to financial advisor with Barron’s Top 100 status to an advisor’s advisor, Botsford has had a knack for leveraging one opportunity into what seems like a half-dozen more. Within three months of landing her first securities job in 1989, she brought $25 million in assets to the firm through a local company’s retirement buyout of 900 employees, she said.
Most budding financial advisors would be very happy about that.
“I wasn’t. I later found out $792 million had been up for grabs, and I got only $25 million of it,” she said.
One of the perks of working at a large broker-dealer was the travel that top producers would be awarded as additional incentives. One year she went to France, another to Spain, she said. But it was an award trip in 1999 that ended up being one thing that prepared her for the next thing.
It was a luxurious trip and a really good time, she said, spent mostly in the teeming, elegant city of Capetown.