Three financial planners have launched a firm that they say will not only prepare advisors looking for their first job, but also provide much-needed support services for advisors already in the industry.
Planning Zoo, which opened its doors in June, is a virtual organization that provides advisors with data entry services and, in the process, provides training and education for fledgling advisors coming out of college and the certified financial planner (CFP) programs.
The firm is the brainchild of Caleb Brown, Carrie Jones and Sue Chesney, who serve as the firm's directors and sole owners of the firm.
The trio say the Athens, Ga.-based Planning Zoo will address a couple of needs in the planning industry. First, it offers competitively priced data entry services for advisors. But, those data entry services are performed by people looking to gain a foothold in the advisory field. The training they get from Planning Zoo will be invaluable to them as they pursue their careers, they said.
The three founders have had long careers in financial planning with Brown starting his career in 2003 working at Plano, Texas-based Strategic Financial Planning Inc. He has also hosted podcasts for new planners and spent six years teaching practice management at the University of Georgia before he founded his own planner recruitment firm, Athens, Ga.-based New Planner Recruiting, in 2009.
Chesney has worked in financial planning since 1997 working for such firms as Jersey City, N.J.-based Pershing, Denver-based Allmerica Financial/VeraVest Investments Inc., as well as Denver-based Mike Guess & Associates, before launching her own firm in 2005. In 2011, she became the owner and principal of Denver-based Delegated Planning, which is a firm that provides outsourced services for advisors.
Jones began her career as an operations manager at Jacksonville, Fla.-based Allegiance Financial Advisors in 1999. Throughout her career she has worked as a financial planner for different firms including Jacksonville-based LBA Wealth Management and Jacksonville-based Life Planning Partners, before doing freelance planning work.
Chesney explained Planning Zoo hires experienced planners who verify the student's work before returning it to the advisor. Planning Zoo also issues detailed reports to its data entry customers that list any missing information or areas of concern that were observed in client data.
Students and career-changers are brought on board to physically input the data so they can have hands on experience using the software that most financial planning firms use. They are also compensated $20 per hour for their work, according to Jones.
“They go into doing actual cases for planners [with] real world data,” she said. “They enter it on their own, on their own time, using a cloud environment that is secure.”