One of the few woman-owned independent brokerages in wealth management is changing its name in an effort to further distinguish itself in a competitive industry.
Conway, Arkansas-based Trutoro found its new brand and bull logo after co-founders Gail Murdoch and Debra Shannon discovered at least 41 different FINRA or SEC-registered firms with the Latin word for “truth” in their names — a similarity with the company’s former brand of Veritas Independent Partners that concerned the childhood friends and career-changers. Murdoch, an ex-journalist, and Shannon, who was once a nurse, launched Trutoro’s predecessor firm in 2013, and it now has 29 financial advisors and clients in 23 states.
The firm remains small as the No. 46 firm on
Murdoch and Shannon picked the name to refer back to the word “truth” and the bull markets associated with investing, they said in an interview, noting that the firm has switched its SEC and FINRA registrations and is currently sending letters to its clients about the rebranding.
“We weren't as unique as we once thought we were, and so with a more national footprint, we really wanted to have our own unique brand. We worked very hard to find something unique and to do that we had to make up a word,” Murdoch said. “We wanted to just make everything so simple and transparent and be that for reps but also to the end clients as well.”
The annual spring rebirth of the season and its flower blossoms has spawned quite a few new names in the industry and adjacent professions. In a three-day span earlier this week,
Shauna Mace, the managing director of practice management solutions with Independent Advisor Solutions by SEI, often tells independent advisors “not to put too much weight” on the name of the company, she said. Any new labels should further “your ability to amplify who you are and what you do” as a firm, she said.
“Make sure you don't change your name just to change your name. There's a lot of work involved with changing the name,” Mace said. “There's just cost and effort, and so if you're going to change your name, make sure it's aligned to some larger goal that is meaningful. Otherwise, I don’t think it's worth the time or effort.”
Trutoro began with one practice and five advisors in Murdoch’s practice, Cardinal Investment Group. She and Shannon grew up together in the town of Atkins, which has a population of about 3,000, and they broke into the industry as assistants after their prior careers in different fields. Murdoch’s family once owned The Atkins Chronicle and The Dover Times, small weekly newspapers tracing their roots from 1894 until the pandemic’s impact on advertising wiped out the last vestige of them. She served as a managing editor for a dozen years.
At their wealth manager, Murdoch says she acts as the “lobbyist for the advisors” while Shannon, the chief compliance officer, is the lead on all regulatory topics. The two of them “wanted to see this type of growth,” but they’re trying to expand “very strategically and carefully” to ensure the same level of service to advisors, Murdoch said.
She and Shannon launched Trutoro to “create the work environment that would work for us” after not finding it elsewhere in the industry, Shannon said. With the
“We are pretty selective about the advisors we work with. We got a good taste of that right at the beginning. We learned that there are certainly advisors that are not a fit for us. We have a pretty intensive interview process,” Shannon said. “The majority of the time, it's a service issue. They want to be able to pick up the phone and call and get a solution to their problem. If you have thousands and thousands of advisors, that can be hard.”
