Women Build Leadership Networks at RIA Edge LA
At RIA Edge LA, more than 40 women gathered for a high-energy breakfast focused on real solutions. The conversations centered on negotiation, non-linear career paths, defining meaningful performance metrics, and building stronger networks that help women rise into leadership. The morning made one thing clear: progress happens when women support women.
Read the full raw transcript below:
Recently at RIA Edge we hosted a breakfast for women, our FAB breakfast. I think it’s our 3rd or 4th annual one, but it was great. We had a room jam packed, 40 women. The noise levels were off the charts, but it was just so fantastic to talk about women. And what we really wanted to get out of yesterday wasn’t just talking about what women’s issues are, because we’ve been doing this for 15 years. It’s time for us to figure out how do we make those changes.
So we had a lot of really great conversations. We started out with a panel of women business leaders and then we moved on to roundtable topics and talked about things like negotiation, because when we think of negotiation, we always think about money. It’s not always money. How do you negotiate for the resources you need to do your job? How do you negotiate for your way out if it didn’t work out? We talked a lot about non-linear career paths because women don’t just go into their career and then zoom up to the top. Sometimes they have to pivot a little bit to care for family members or parents. And so how do you make sure that you are expressing what you’ve done in ways that people can understand that you’re still bringing value to the firm?
I think one thing that trips up women is they don’t always have the metrics to show why they should get paid and so talking a lot about how you can. And switch the metrics of what you do. Maybe it’s client retention. Maybe everybody thinks that’s a nice to have. Well, it’s not, and that’s a hard number that you can assign to a compensation plan to get yourself closer to equity. And so really trying to help women figure out how we get them into these leadership positions and how we get them paid for it.
We’re seeing trends in this industry. We still talk about the lack of women and we still have a lot to do, but I will tell you some of it’s a denominator problem. We still have so many men that are over the age of 65 and 70 that are in the industry that they, they kind of skew the rankings. If you go back and you look at who’s entering the industry, we’re seeing 30% women pass the CFP exam, right? So that’s a lot more advisors than when you look at the total number, which is still 23%. So we are seeing those improvements and things like the FAB breakfast and the FAB programming is what brings women together to build their posse. We’re building strong networking connections there so that when we get into positions of leadership, we can reach back down and help people get there. And when we have issues and questions, we’ve just met 40 women in this room who are all excited to get us to that next level and we could reach out to them.