Advisor details how 5-year journey involved reassessment and reflection, outlines how a more vulnerable approach can help advisors win
Filomena May could have rested on her laurels. Recognized at the 2019 Wealth Professional awards and the Women in Wealth Management Summit that same year, the Senior Wealth Advisor at Filo Financial Solutions of Raymond James could have taken that validation as an excuse to stop pushing herself. Instead, she did the opposite.
In the almost five years since her recognition, May has striven to push herself and her fellow female advisors to new heights. In doing so, she’s had to reassess and rebuild aspects of her practice, creating more resilience and better overall structures to serve her clients. She’s navigated a pandemic and unprecedented levels of market volatility, all the while learning more and more about herself and others in the industry.
“My goal is to empower other women in business and in finance, to push beyond their limits,” May says. “I really tested the waters on that and it paid off. I’ve always been a business builder so through networking, personal development, doing talks, mentorship at the university, I’ve found different ways to not just empower women in the industry, but empower men as well.”
May notes that she has recognized a growing degree of stigma around male advisors, specifically that they feel they can’t be vulnerable in front of their clients. As the industry transitions away from transaction towards fulsome planning, showing a degree of vulnerability can be helpful in connecting to clients. In her conversations with male advisors, May notices a degree of unwillingness to show vulnerability. She tries to shift that, and welcome more vulnerability, by discussing the areas where she feels she is most vulnerable.
May participates in two mastermind groups designed to encourage more open discussion. One group is mixed gender, and one is female only. In both, May says she and her fellow advisors discuss what is going well and what isn’t. She’ll be open about struggles with hiring and firing and running her practice, challenges that almost any advisor can relate to. She’ll share similar stories in her public speaking engagements, and out of those, she finds she has many thoughtful conversations with her fellow advisors — male and female — about the challenges they face and issues they want to overcome.
May is open and direct about the challenges she has faced in her practice over the past half-decade. Her team has been tweaked and changed a lot. She has had to hire and fire a great deal while dealing with a range of mental health scenarios. All the while, she had the chaos of a global pandemic raging around her. She says that now, after five years of hard work, she has arrived at her ‘dream team’ and, with that team onside, she has been able to quadruple her business.
Building that dream team took a mindset shift. She brought other advisors into her office but focused on quality rather than quantity. She expanded the physical space of her branch in Calgary, and brought in two new associates to better help with the business management side of things. May says she’s now freer to focus on client service, though she admits she had to give up a little bit of control in order to free up her time.
Building out her dream team has required some degree of personal and professional vulnerability on May’s part. She says that she’ll ask her staff where she has failed, because they know her well enough to see where her work can be improved. She asks the same questions of her clients, understanding that a more forthright conversation about successes and failures can make for stronger and more productive relationships overall.
May believes that advisors of all genders can benefit from allowing more vulnerability in their work. With their clients, staff, or colleagues, advisors can gain an advantage for their business by simply being more open.
“The first thing is self-awareness. And that goes with whether you're female or male, you have to have the self-awareness to seek something else out to better yourself,” May says. “The feedback that you get from clients is important too. I ask for that feedback. I think as women, we do have a bit of an edge because vulnerability is a key to being able to relate to people you might be meeting for the very first time.”
Raymond James Ltd. is a Member of Canadian Investor Protection Fund.
