Senior advisors may be walking away from money if they are unwilling to connect with their clients’ children, according to Townsend Financial’s co-founder, Heather Townsend, who recently shared her thoughts at Financial Advisor magazine’s 2018 Invest In Women conference.

“What I’ve noticed in the industry is that [the] sentiment is kind of like, ‘We don’t really want to get involved with the younger generation—they don’t have money.’”

Before launching her own practice in Washington state serving mostly millennials, Townsend worked for a firm that had many baby boomer clients.

Since many of the adult children of those clients were around the same age as Townsend was, she wanted to talk to them more and get them more involved in financial planning with their parents. But when she made attempts, she said she got the impression from the industry as a whole that those types of clients weren’t wanted.

That sentiment was confirmed when Townsend’s clients shared with her that their parents’ financial planners didn’t ask them about their goals and didn’t try to get to know them.

Townsend, however, believes advisors should want to on-board their clients’ children, especially if those children stand to inherit their parents’ wealth. That’s one of the reasons she decided to create her own firm for millennials and the youngest cohort of Generation X.

Winnie Sun is the co-founder and managing director of Sun Group Wealth Partners in Irvine, California, and she has a millennial-minded practice as well. While moderating the Invest In Women panel discussion, she also doled out her own expertise in attracting and working with millennials.

“They want you to paint that picture of what it would be like if they were working with you,” said Sun, who uses platforms such as YouTube to keep up with her millennial clients.

“They want to see who they are dealing with,” added panelist Helen Ngo, the chief executive officer of Capital Benchmark Partners and Made Modern Money in Atlanta. Millennials want to know if they can trust you, Ngo continued. She and Townsend are both members of XY Planning Network, a turnkey financial planning platform catering to investors from the X and Y generations.

To tell a trust-building story, the panelists said social media is their marketing tool of choice. Townsend doesn’t have official social media accounts, but she said she doesn’t mind clients following her personal Instagram account.

All three said their practices are practically all-digital, because their clients communicate, make payments and arrange their lives through online platforms. Sun's phone barely rings anymore, she said, since clients have the option to reach out to her on whatever social media platform they feel comfortable with.

But more accessibility doesn’t necessarily mean frequent direct communication, said Ngo. She uses the virtual assistant application Schedule Once to set parameters around her schedule. Sun said chat bots are a way to handle minor things such as frequently asked questions.

Not only is Sun’s practice almost all digital, she’s also a part of the growing group of location-independent advisors. She told attendees at the Invest In Women panel that she’s partnered with the shared workspace company WeWork to meet with clients wherever the company has an office building.

Toward the end of the panel, the discussion drifted onto the desires of millennial professionals like Townsend and Ngo. Townsend, who works from a home office, said, “Millennials want to leave this corporate 9 to 5; they want to be free and they want to travel.”

She’s not shy about sharing pictures of her travels and out-of-office excursions on Instagram, and that’s attracted clients who enjoy travel as much as she does.

“Many of us feel guilty for traveling and taking time away from our busy practices in order to sort of unwind, and we’ve just learned [from Townsend] that actually you can do so and be profitable,” said Sun, bringing the discussion back to the importance of being present online and telling one’s own story.

Outside of social media, the three women said they attend conferences in the industries that they want to service the most. For Sun, it’s the television and press industries, while Ngo said she loves the women in tech, and Townsend said she meets many people from her involvement in events focused on women.