My first paying work was selling livestock that I raised as a 4-H project in the Marion County (Florida) Youth Fair. It takes several months to raise a hog to market weight. I learned to be patient and work the process. I had to feed the hog, care for its health, and tame it so it could be managed in the show ring. I invested a great deal of time and money into my animal before I could sell it at the fair and earn a profit. Sometimes, even after all of my hard work, my hog didn’t make weigh-in. I had invested all that time and effort into something that didn’t pay off at the end. I learned those are the breaks.

Financial advising is very much a long game. I sometimes communicate with prospects for months or years before they become a client. I strive to serve as a resource for others. Sometimes they become clients and sometimes they choose someone else. Those are the breaks. But just as I treated my livestock as though each one would make the grade, I invest the effort into everyone as though they ultimately will choose to work with me.  

My first paying work was at a Shell gas station in the early 1970s. I earned $1.75 per hour. Gasoline was around 75 cents per gallon and customers would get full service. When a car pulled up to the pump, a team of team of gas station attendants would spring into action. One would clean the windshields; one would check the tire pressure; another would check the oil; I generally would pump the gas.

I’ll never forget the sign on the gas station. “Service Is our Business.” Because gasoline is regarded as a commodity, the gas station had to rely on good customer service to build goodwill so motorists would bring in their cars for the higher margin tune-ups, oil change, etc. This truth about service is equally applicable today. Financial services is a service business, and we must rely on client goodwill and provide a holistic wealth management approach to gain client loyalty.

My first work was as a telemarketer at my university's alumni center, where I cold-called alumni to solicit donations to the university. There were many, many more rejections than wins. But that work taught me the importance of persistence, dealing with rejection, and staying focused on a goal—lessons that I still practice in my career to this day. Building a financial advisory practice is often a game of numbers. As with the telemarketing work, building an advisory practice invokes many more rejections than wins. As I learned from that first paying work, the more people you get in front of, the greater are your chances of success.

My first paying work was as a babysitter. At some point, I put the children to bed, leaving idle hours to myself before the parents came home. I figured out how much the parents appreciated coming home from their night out to see that I had washed the dinner dishes. I decided to take it one step further and used the hours after kids were asleep to tidy the house. I noticed immediately that parents were extremely impressed and grateful. While the other neighborhood babysitters spent those idle hours watching TV, I did light housekeeping. Soon parents started calling me first, along with higher pay and better tips.

This early work experience taught me two important things that have stayed with me throughout my career: 1) Using idle time to be productive is a great way to differentiate your services, and 2) Finding ways to provide added value makes you stand out among competitors.

My earliest paying job was clipping hedges during the summer. I had gotten good at clipping our home’s hedges and so I thought I’d take my hedge shears on the road in my neighborhood. The first skill I learned that it wasn’t difficult to identify which households needed their hedges clipped. These days, although I cannot identify just by looking whether a prospect’s financial house is in order or not, I know the questions to ask to find out.

The second skill was knocking on doors of people I did not know and offering my services. I never knew how I was going to be received, but I saw that people, in general, understood that I was there to help. To this day I am not afraid to ask if someone wants my help.

During my elementary and middle school years, I offered a garage decluttering service for my neighbors. I noticed that garages often accumulated things that were never used. Items tended to pile up and they rarely got organized. Soon neighbors saw the value of my annual garage decluttering service and my summers were busy. In helping neighbors sift through their belongings each year, two things became clear: 1) people buy things they never need or use and 2) emotional attachments to things they never use can be very real.

Much later, I learned this is also true when it comes to people managing their financial records. Based on the lessons I learned from the garage decluttering days, I have a process that I now use with all of my clients to ensure their financial records are kept in neat order and reviewed annually. I help them create and maintain a binder with all their up-to-date financial documents. Once a year, I recommend shredding the files that are no longer relevant. My work organizing garages taught me the importance of scheduling a “spring cleaning” of documents, because much like cleaning out the garage, most clients don’t get to this important task without a little help.

I’m the oldest of 12 brothers and sisters. My first paying work was caregiving for my 11 younger siblings. Here’s where I learned the importance of differentiating between individuals and their unique needs and  gifts. I learned the importance of communication and listening to the needs of others and I quickly caught on to the fact that I loved helping people and providing guidance, especially to those who don't have the knowledge, skills, or time to learn themselves. Overall, I learned the importance of human empathy, a skill I hold to be of utmost importance in my career as a financial advisor. I’ve found that in order to be successful, I’ve had to become more than just a financial advisor to many clients – similarly to how I needed to be more than just an older sister to my 11 younger siblings. It has been important for me to become a trusted confidant and sounding board for any life issue that my clients face. Today, I continue to focus on caring for each of my clients under these same principles of individualization and catering my support to their specific circumstances and needs.

I was a grocery bagger at a Winn-Dixie supermarket. My big takeaway was knowing how to listen, not just to what is said but what is not said. One would think bagging groceries is fairly straightforward work: canned goods on the bottom, cold stuff together, etc. However, everyone has slightly different circumstances. “I have to walk up two flights of stairs; can you keep the bags light?” “Keep meats separate from other cold items.”

We all want to be listened to and we want to make sure that we are being heard. What I took from grocery bagging gig is that while I may have been trained to assist the customer in limited ways, there are additional factors, more specific to that person that I needed to consider. This insight inspires me today as a financial advisor. While my training and experience help to form the key responses to meet a client’s needs, there are additional factors, sometimes unique to a specific client that I need to consider.

In high school, I had a summer internship at a major post-trade financial services company providing clearing and settlement services to the market. My responsibility was to reconcile paper stock certificates all day. The reality that the daily reconciliations frequently topped tens of millions of dollars cemented in me the weight of responsibility and stewardship for other people’s money. I quickly understood that that there are real dollars on the line here and that I had better not screw it up. But instead of paralyzing me, I leaned into the responsibility. The work sparked a commitment to detail and a passion for finance. I determined to understand how these ornate certificates fit into the larger world of finance. At the end of the internship, my manager gave me a letter of recommendation I submitted with my application to Rutgers University. I graduated with a degree in finance. Today, it’s easy to link the high school internship to my responsibility as a fiduciary helping my clients not just with investments but every detail that matters to their financial lives.

My first paying work was coaching children’s gymnastics. My job description called for me to set up the gym, lead classes for children of various ages, and demonstrate new skills. The real learning was appreciating that each child arrived with a different level of experience, had different skills they wanted to master, and responded best to different types of instruction. Some were more fearful than others and needed more encouragement and extra demonstrations to slowly work up to mastering a new move. Others were more eager to try something new and needed coaching on how to stay safe. I did my best to get to know each student by asking thoughtful questions so I could tailor unique coaching instruction to what they needed to be their best little selves. This experience paved the way for how I approach working with my clients. I took away two important lessons. First, each person has different needs and goals, Second, it’s important for me to engage with each individual in a way that meets their individual needs and goals. Coaching gymnastics helped me as an advisor to understand individual differences and to help each client be their best selves and to achieve their goals.

My first paying work was a summer job pumping gas on a lake in upstate New York. I was a 14-year-old curious kid, who became intrigued about the story behind the people who were bringing their boats to get filled up. I would always ask the boat owners what they did for a living and probe—for as long as it would take to fill up their tanks—about what they were enjoying that day. You could say it was my earliest client discovery activity! The experience had twofold benefits for me. First, it emphasized the importance of being in control of my own financial future so I, too, one day could own one of those boats. Second, it taught me that engaging with people on a human-to-human level and learning about their backgrounds and goals is critical to achieving those dreams.

My first work experience was my sophomore year in high school washing dishes at a local restaurant. The lesson that stands out most is the importance of remaining focused and active in my duties. I quickly learned that the dishes piled up if I wasted time and I would have to stay past my normal shift to catch up. While I enjoyed the social time with both my fellow employees and patrons, I did not like the feeling of work mounting up. I decided that a timely response to my duties would be my number one priority. Because of this dedication and offering to take on more work whenever possible, I was eventually promoted to a cook at a higher wage. I apply the same lessons today as a wealth advisor. I’ve found that a timely response and that going above and beyond what my clients expect is the best recipe for creating long-lasting, trusted relationship.

I’m the oldest of 12 brothers and sisters. My first paying work was caregiving for my 11 younger siblings. Here’s where I learned the importance of differentiating between individuals and their unique needs and  gifts. I learned the importance of communication and listening to the needs of others and I quickly caught on to the fact that I loved helping people and providing guidance, especially to those who don't have the knowledge, skills, or time to learn themselves. Overall, I learned the importance of human empathy, a skill I hold to be of utmost importance in my career as a financial advisor. I’ve found that in order to be successful, I’ve had to become more than just a financial advisor to many clients – similarly to how I needed to be more than just an older sister to my 11 younger siblings. It has been important for me to become a trusted confidant and sounding board for any life issue that my clients face. Today, I continue to focus on caring for each of my clients under these same principles of individualization and catering my support to their specific circumstances and needs.