4 ways to make financial advisory work more fulfilling

Some financial advisors are disillusioned with 'making the rich richer.' Here's 4 ways to pursue more fulfilling work

A somber businessman walking up a staircase to a bag of money

"Is that it?" That's the question one financial advisor asked on the r/CFP subreddit. The advisor, seeking advice from peers, said they are "getting tired of helping another millionaire pay a little less on taxes and have a little more in exchange for a bit better pay."

For Anna N'Jie-Konte, the co-founder of New York-based firm Re-Envision Wealth, which launched in June with the goal of being the first Black owned-RIA with $1 billion in client assets, this disillusionment with helping high net worth clients simply accumulate more wealth is a familiar feeling.

N'Jie-Konte, a first-generation American with parents from Puerto Rico and the Gambia, said it was "completely accidental" when she first entered the world of wealth management. After growing up in a one-bedroom New York apartment with her parents, her first job as an assistant for a large team of advisors exposed N'Jie-Konte to a new world of wealth.

"I remember, our standard practice was that whenever the phone rang we would answer it and pull up the person on our CRM system so that you could see who their lead relationship manager was," she said. "So I pull this up, and I see the name, and it says that there's 200 something million dollars in this person's various accounts. I remember feeling as though I was not seeing things right. Like, there can't be that many zeros in this. I've never even imagined that somebody could be that wealthy."

For five years, N'Jie-Konte kept her head down, learning as much as she could about the industry, earning her CFP certification, and moving up the ranks of advisory firms. After all the work, she found herself working on a wealth management team serving clients with $20 million-plus liquid net worth.

Despite her success, the work was losing its luster.

"I was just having all of these same conversations, all the same processes . . . And I remember just feeling like, 'These people don't need me,'" she said. "It wasn't a personal animosity that I had towards them. It was just like, this 85-year-old who has $30 million dollars, I'm not doing anything impactful here. Like he's just leaving it to the grandkids and the kids, and they're already well set in life. So what's the point of this?"

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Answering that question can be difficult while operating under the restrictions of a bigger firm, so N'Jie-Konte ultimately decided to build her own practice, one where she could give "women like her — black women, Latinas, daughters of immigrants — the blueprint for leveraging their incomes to build and protect family-changing wealth."

For many socially-conscious and underrepresented advisors, finding meaning in their work is an essential part of operating in the industry.

"I was similar to that poster. I was just like, if I didn't figure out this piece, I was just going to be done," N'Jie-Konte said. "I just couldn't do it anymore, because it really grates on you after a while."

Whether a financial professional is further along in their career or just starting out, advisors say there are important options they can explore to drive meaningful work as a financial planner.

These are four important options to consider for advisors who want to make work more fulfilling:

Be selective with your clients

When an advisor is under the pressure of meeting growth goals at their firm, being selective with clients is easier said than done. But, for those advisors who practice it, they regard it as one of their most important steps in creating more satisfying work.

"I've said for a while I'm tired of working for clients who just want to make their first million and after they do it the number becomes $2 million, then $5 million, etc," said Mitchell Kraus, the owner of Capital Intelligence Associates in Santa Monica, CA. "After our second son passed away, I realized he was never going to continue this legacy and felt a calling to do more in my life to make the world a better place."

By spending more time screening prospects, Kraus said he has turned down large accounts over recent years, opting instead to work with lower net worth clients who he can work with to make a difference.

"We have a tendency to look at folks as walking portfolios, like, 'Oh, that person has $20 million dollars, that's gonna get me a $200,000 fee, that handles my production for the year, oh good,'" said N'Jie-Konte. "But the problem is, that person is not a nice person or doesn't care about what you care about, and is not focused on a lifestyle, for example, that you like, it's just not going to feel great to interact with that person on a daily basis."

Other advisors take a different approach to the same destination.

"I specialize in high net worth client households," said Patrick Dougherty, the founder of Dallas-based Dougherty Wealth Management. "Their reasons for wanting to make more money are many: setting up foundations to help the less fortunate; serving on nonprofit boards, some of which require large donations from the board members . . . I also have clients who grew up poor, have made a lot of money, and now do good things for those less fortunate."

Find a firm you align with

Being selective with clients is only the first step, but for some employee advisors, company performance goals might make such selective business nearly impossible. In that case, advisors recommend finding a firm that better aligns with your own goals and values.

"If an advisor wants to work with less affluent clients as opposed to 'another millionaire,' that is easy to do," Dougherty said. "Many planning firms have a niche and/or focus on less affluent households."

N'Jie-Konte's own firm, Re-Envision Wealth, takes a two-pronged approach to its mission.

First, the firm serves high net worth clients who want to utilize "impact investing" to advance causes around environmental sustainability and gender and racial equity.

"That allows us to have an economically viable practice while also feeling like we're interacting with people who understand that . . . not everybody has the same shot in life," N'Jie-Konte said. "They appreciate the fact that on the other portion of our client book we're working with what we call first-generation wealth builders."

That half of their client book comes from people who are often the first in their family to attend college or receive a professional degree.

"We are working with those folks to help close the racial wealth gap and help them have access to excellent financial advice and do better financially, because we know that the odds are stacked against them," she said.

Niche advisory firms across the country are focusing on traditionally underrepresented clients as a means of closing historical wealth gaps in communities of color and LGBTQ communities.

Offer alternative fee options

To serve a more diverse clientele, advisors say that firms need to expand their focus beyond just assets under management fees.

"There's a lot of people out there that maybe don't have a ton of assets to invest, but they still could afford financial planning fees," said Luis Rosa, the founder of Build a Better Financial Future in Los Angeles. "I have clients that pay me monthly and quarterly financial planning fees that don't yet have a lot of money to invest, and that tends to be younger people and also people from underrepresented backgrounds."

At Spark Wealth Advisors, a niche advisory practice in Jacksonville, Florida focused on serving gay men, founder Christopher Johns still uses traditional AUM fees for clients with over $250,000 in assets, but also offers a flat quarterly fee of $625 for account balances under that mark.

"We kind of wanted to do that for people who maybe are still growing their balances, but they still need access to financial planning," Johns said.

Early in her journey building her RIA, N'Jie-Konte said she offered flat retainer fees, similar to what Johns and Rosa offer, as well as what she called "short term engagements," where clients would pay a one-time fee to receive help getting their finances in order over one or two months.

Such approaches can be hard to scale on their own, which is why having traditional AUM fees from high net worth clients is helpful to supporting alternative fee structures, according to N'Jie-Konte.

Consider pro bono work

Of course, a financial advisor's education and skills do not have to be limited to their paying clients. Many advisors find meaning through offering their skills in their free time to pro bono services.

Advisors interested in pro bono work can easily start by connecting with organizations such as the FPA's pro bono division or the Foundation for Financial Planning, but some prefer to create their own offerings.

Advisors on the r/CFP subreddit listed everything from advising small nonprofits and low-income households to teaching local financial literacy courses.

"I've found that most parents rarely touch the topic of money, probably due to insecurities they have," said one user who teaches a few high school financial literacy classes every year. "In one instance, I had one kid ask how he could set up offshore LLCs to hide from taxes. I asked him how many millions he had stashed away, to which he replied 'I've got about $1200.'"

With financial literacy worsening across the country for younger students, advisors can have a significant impact by offering pro bono classes and workshops.

"I've cried when reading papers on their relationship with money, money memories and what they learned from an assigned interview with a money mentor," the user said.