When Lauren Oschman, partner and CEO at Vestia Personal Wealth Advisors, was expecting her first daughter, she was the only female advisor at her firm.
“The culture and the infrastructure were set up in a way where I struggled to see myself being successful—not necessarily successful as a financial advisor,” she said. “I’d already demonstrated success in building a practice. It was more thinking about the mom that I wanted to be, and thinking about having to show up in an environment where I was effectively being measured against people who had stay-at-home spouses who were supporting them, who were not the ones who were going to have to drop everything for the kids.
“I was immediately facing limitation—in my mind—that the environment I was in was not set up to support me,” she added. “I knew that if I was going to continue to have the career success I wanted to have and be the kind of mom I wanted to be, I needed to change the environment I was in.”
So when her daughter was 10 days old, she decided to leave that firm and start Vestia, where she could build the infrastructure she needed to succeed as an advisor and a mother.
For example, Vestia has a policy of being in the office three days a week, with flexibility for those who need it. “If I don’t have the flexibility to come in later than others so that I can take my daughters to school, then my family is not thriving the way we want it to be,” she said.
Oschman’s experience led her to launch an Advisor Moms Group, a private Facebook group with over 250 participants. She also recently conducted a study in partnership with The Ensemble Practice to better understand the experience of moms in the industry.
“We talk a lot about advisory firms hiring women, and certainly motherhood is something that’s very important for the life of many women professionals,” said Philip Palaveev, owner and CEO of The Ensemble Practice. “Not every single woman becomes a mother, but certainly it’s a big part of the experience of many. And it certainly is something that impacts profoundly their professional lives.”
The study, which was based on a survey of 137 moms in the group, found the majority of them were highly satisfied with their careers, with 52% rating their satisfaction at a 9 or 10 (on a scale of 1-10). Another 41% scored their satisfaction at a 7 or 8. About 7% had a score less than 7, suggesting neutral or negative experiences. Palaveev called this the “challenged” group, and although it’s a small percentage, their dissatisfaction is “profound and profuse.”
Perhaps the No. 1 indicator of happiness was ownership, with 53% of respondents having equity ownership and 8% having synthetic equity. Owners’ satisfaction was in the 9s and 10s. Lead advisors who were non-owners also had pretty high levels of satisfaction.
“Mothers that are part of the ownership team, they feel well-supported by their firm,” Palaveev said. “They still feel the pressure of motherhood and an ambitious career. So everyone who is raising children is feeling that pressure, but they tackle that pressure better, and they feel better supported by their colleagues in their firm. Those that are not involved in ownership experience more challenges.”
Firms with female leadership or owners tend to have higher satisfaction rates, as these practices are more likely to have work-from-home, flexible policies and more paid time off, he added.
The happiest moms work an average of 40 hours per week and tend to work for smaller firms (with a median AUM of $230 million). They’re more likely to be on a career track and have a mentor.
Oschman said this is an indicator that it’s not necessarily the industry that is causing moms to be challenged, but rather the firm environment.
“Moms who are struggling, which there are those out there, it’s probably not the industry. It may be that the setting they’re in is not the one for them to be the most successful. But there’s a way to do that within the industry,” she said. “If your infrastructure is set up such that, the relationships that maybe some of the mid-level supervisors or leaders have with their direct reports is one of open communication, of trust, transparency, then I still think you can get those benefits, even if your firm is bigger.”
That said, smaller firms tend to have more flexibility to meet moms’ needs.
“They don’t necessarily have to point to, ‘Well, here’s the policy,’ and it’s a yes or a no,” she said. “Or you have to go through red tape to request an exception to have flexibility in your schedule or to be able to work from home, things like that. Smaller firms are able to be more nimble.”
Christy Raines, a mother of four and founder and president of Azimuth Wealth Management, said she designed her firm from the ground up around having kids, even before she became a mother. The key, she said, is having the ability to control your schedule. She grew Azimuth from about $15 million in AUM and no employees when she was 30 years old to over $100 million and two employees now at age 42.
Christy Raines and her family.
“There is no better job for a professional, ambitious woman who wants to have a family than owning and running your own investment management and financial planning firm,” Raines said. “The beauty of personal finance is that you’re working with other families, other humans, other people, and it lends itself to have that flexibility that you don’t have in corporations.”
Raines designed her firm and client service schedule to make it work for her clients and her team, who are all moms.
“I have intentionally designed the firm to turn something that has historically I feel like been treated like a liability of being a working mom with young kids into our firm’s superpower,” she said.
Now, she works an average of 25 hours per week, to align with her kids’ school schedule.
Having the flexibility to work from home was another factor in happiness; the 45% of moms with that flexibility scored nine out of 10 on average for career satisfaction. Those women also strongly recommended their firm as an employer.
Karly Rizzo, a mother of two girls and director of marketing operations with Adams Wealth Advisors, said the shift to working from home during COVID-19 was a game-changer. It allowed her to move to Texas from New England, manage her schedule and be more efficient, not having people dropping into her office.
“I do miss the hallway conversations that I clearly am not part of being remote, but my conversations and my interactions are very directed, intentional,” she said. “And I make very good use of my time. And I feel like it’s a constant balance. And maybe sometimes I’m definitely getting it wrong a lot of the time, but it at least allows me to find my own balance because I don’t think that a company can define what’s going to work for one for a whole group of women.”
But Rizzo said the RIA space offers a sweet spot for mothers because of the flexibility to create what works for you.
“You’ve got this entrepreneurial type feel, and I think that’s what really sets it apart,” she said. “In that sense, the firm is very dependent on the leadership style of the person at the helm. If you’ve got a guy with no kids, his experience shapes the culture of the firm much more differently.”
The data points to the fact that firms with female leadership or owners tend to create more motherhood-friendly policies.
“This is one thing we learned from the survey is, men designing policies for mothers doesn’t work very well,” Palaveev said.
The study also asked about paid time off, with 41% of participants saying they have unlimited PTO. But that policy was not correlated to happiness; in fact, unlimited PTO was more common among the “challenged” group. And 40% of that group said they felt pressured not to take it.
Unlimited PTO, Palaveev said, has turned into a marketing scheme.
“Ambiguity does not work well when managing people,” he said. “People want to know what’s the answer, what’s the rule? And an environment where the rule is, ‘Well, we can’t really tell you, but you’ll find out after the fact,’ that’s not a good way to manage and lead people. You take time off and then you come back to the office and you see a line of frowns, it’s just not a good way to do it.”
Overall, the moms interviewed for this article struggled with motherhood being seen as a limitation when it should be viewed as a strength in this profession.
“If you think about the life experience you have as a mom—you have incredible time management skills, attention to detail, the ability to be empathetic, to be patient,” Oschman said. “All of these things are actually really great skills to be a leader, to be a financial advisor. I think there are a lot of strengths we develop as mom that translate really well into the workplace, if we choose to look at it that way.”
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