Michelle Connell, a CFA and founder of Portia Capital Management, a Dallas-based investment manager, agrees. She hopes it’s a regional difference, but she still finds too many of her women clientele are disconnected from their own financial lives.
“When I go to family wealth conferences, I see a lot of men, sons, third and fourth generations, interested in building their wealth,” Connell says. “And men say, ‘I want to chase that.’ Meanwhile, women have all this great intuition that they use with their children, that they use socially, and it’s that same gut response that they could use with investments. But they don’t. If you’re an advisor, you can’t wait for them to come to you; you have to reach out. And it has to be more than a tea.”
David Macchia, founder of Wealth2k in Boston, wholeheartedly agrees that the male-dominated industry has failed to increase that connectivity with women. For this reason, he has partnered with advisor coach Marcia Mantell on a new initiative, called Women & Income, designed to give an advisor better training and stronger differentiation when serving older female clients.
“The industry has done an awful job in listening to women’s needs,” Macchia says. “The research has revealed the value and scale of the opportunity, and everything that’s wrong with the industry. But when it comes to what to do, there’s nothing. Advisors are just left wondering, ‘How do I integrate change into my business? What are my actionable steps?’”
He cites one alarming statistic that has made the rounds—that 80% of men die married, and within 12 months, often within six months, their surviving widows have fired the advisor they used. And it’s not necessarily to find a female advisor, but just to find someone who listens.
Mantell says she’s often spoken with jilted advisors who surprise her with their naivete. “After losing a woman client, an advisor will say he never realized there might be a problem in the relationship,” she says. “That’s not accurate. What he never realized was there wasn’t a relationship.”
What likely happens is that an advisor who serves a couple for a time gradually and unintentionally alienates the woman, enough for her to sever the relationship. And as hard as it is to keep these clients, it’s even harder to find new clients, so advisors should take what advantage they can from the pandemic and use it to develop their own better habits.
This means learning how to ask probing questions and then follow-up questions, says Susan Black, senior vice president of private banking at Cambridge Trust in Boston. “It used to be women wanted to save for an event—a hike in Europe, a Viking cruise. Now they really want to know if they’re going to be OK,” Black says. “But that alone is not enough. We really have to dig down to, ‘What does “OK” mean to you?’ The pandemic has presented a much clearer picture of how personalized this industry is and should be.”
That question should lead to even deeper conversations about the specific aspects of planning, she says, so that the advisor can then move the conversation from long-term goals to the cash flows required to support those goals. “Those are the buckets of needs, wants and wishes,” she says. “The absolutely have to have, nice to have and want to have.”
That’s where the advisor, male or female, can really add value by dropping the talk of ROI for a moment, sources say, because women clients would rather know they’re three-quarters of the way toward their goal than hear that their portfolio made 12%, even if the outcome is the same.
Without doubt, the pandemic has inspired more women to take stock of their lives—and take charge of more aspects of those lives. These consultants note that women are listening more, asking more questions and directing the conversations more, even if they’re happily married and their spouse usually leads the discussion with the advisor. And sometimes the results are surprising.
“With all my clients, both male and female, the pandemic really has forced them to think about what fulfills them. To stop running on the hamster wheel and think of priorities,” Seeber says. “Some certainly have retired because they want to do other things. But others are thinking of going on, just with renewed purpose.”