Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
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Dear Bev,
I was able to leave an advisory team and set up my own RIA about 5 years ago. My husband has a good job, but I am the primary breadwinner. We have three small children. The firm is doing very well. We have close to a dozen team members and several hundreds of millions under management. I like the staff I have handpicked, our processes are sound, and our client satisfaction rate is high. I feel good about what we’ve done.
But I cannot get away from the feeling of guilt that I am sacrificing time with my children to run this business. Some weeks I put in 70-90 hours, staying up very late after my children have gone to bed.
I don’t feel I can talk to my team members about this because only one other person in our firm has children and he is the father. His wife stays home, and he often works until 8 or 9 at night because we are so busy.
I don’t believe working mothers in our profession have the freedom to talk about how hard it is to be professional and competent and be a good mother, trading off one for the other all the time. My own mom (a single mother) worked, and I am so proud of how well she did and how my brother and I were taken care of by her during our growing up years. It’s not that I want to stay home; my career means a great deal to me. It’s that I want to have the freedom to talk about the difficulty of managing it all without being seen as someone who is weak or longing to quit work and stay home. My children seem happy, and our live-in nanny is like a member of our family. I don’t think anyone is getting ripped off by my career, and it allows us to live a very nice lifestyle.
Is there something wrong with me that despite the success I’ve had and the results I’ve been able to achieve that I feel I am a failure? It’s not exactly “imposter syndrome” because I take full credit for what I have been able to accomplish. I know I am good at my job. I also know I am a good mother, and my children are safe and happy. But it is the almost constant nagging that I’m not living up to everything I need to be.
B.S.
Dear B.S.,
Can you hear my “sigh” after reading and re-reading your note from wherever you might be? There is so much in what you have written, and I want to be respectful and address much of it. I appreciate that, with everything you have shared, you did not tell me you are striving for balance. For years I have written about the fact that working mothers ought to strike the word “balance” from their vocabulary. It’s a fantasy that you will get to a place where you feel in balance. It’s more about focus. When you are at work, give your career, your clients and your team all you have to be the best you can be. Then when you are with your children, put away emails and the cell phone and give them all you have to be the best you can be. It is hard not to be distracted but the only real solution is to be in the moment and focus on only what’s right in front of you.
I have had many similar conversations with clients and colleagues about the issues you are raising. One of my favorite clients started her own firm, had two children during the early years and on a recent call with me was lamenting just how completely exhausted she was feeling from being up all night long with two little ones. She is one of the smartest, hardest-working people I know, and she was completely drained of energy from lack of sleep. Working mothers everywhere (and some fathers, too) are figuring out how to put the pieces together as best they can but some days are very, very trying.
The difficulty comes from the fact that it is so hard to talk about what you are experiencing. If you complain about it, it sounds like weakness and your inability to manage it all. If you don’t acknowledge it, there is an assumption you can do it all, and no one needs to help you. For many female advisors it is a lose-lose situation where you are just doing the best you can do and staying as focused and committed to everything that matters as much as you can.
I don’t mean to sound defeatist. We need more women advisors in our profession, and they need to be able to have families and lives outside of their career, and we need to embrace this. But, we also need to talk about the challenges openly and allow women (and men) to be honest about how hard it is some days.
I don’t have an answer for you except to say if you reached out because you wanted to know you weren’t alone in your experience, I can fully validate you are not! It’s easy to say, “Take care of yourself,” and, “You can’t care for others if you don’t care for yourself.” But some days this isn’t as easy to implement as it sounds. There are only so many hours in any given day and when you are running a business and raising children, the demands are never ending.
All you can do is what you are doing. Catch yourself berating yourself about not being or doing enough and change your self-talk. I developed a mantra when my children were young and I was running my own business, “I can do one thing at a time and for now, this is what I will focus on,” to keep my attention from running into all the things I needed to do. Truth is you can only do one thing at a time. Try to keep your mind focused on whatever that task is rather than using it to talk to yourself about what you should or should not be doing. And I know it sounds corny but be kind to yourself. You have a successful business and you care about your family. Both of those things are very admirable and take effort and fortitude.
Dear Bev,
I’m an older (female) advisor, always single now in my late 60s. My clients are asking me about retirement, my sister is asking me when I will stop working and my friends are all taking senior trips on cruises and to exotic places and begging me to come.
I’m afraid of retirement. I’ve been doing this for over 45 years. My work is my life, and sleeping in late is not on my list of things I strive to do. I know it sounds crazy because I counsel clients about retirement. But with my own staring me in the face, I’m scared and hopeless about what comes next. I have a successor, a woman in her early 40s who has been with me for about 12 years. She is talented, smart and does well with all my clients. The concern isn’t leaving my clients – although I will miss them terribly – it is what’s next when I don’t have a spouse or children and have essentially been married to my work for most of my adult life.
C.V.
Dear C.V.,
Your honesty and bluntness struck me. I have written on the topic of the emotional side of succession for advisors for a long, long time, but your candor so beautifully spells out how tough it can be to make a transition from something you have done for decades, is a major focus in your life and keeps you motivated and engaged. We know it’s a dilemma in our profession: the aging of the advisor population coupled, in many cases, with the refusal by many to step aside and let the younger generation take over. Your heartfelt note speaks to a lot of the resistance to stepping aside.
I have worked with many people transitioning from full-time work to retirement. To create a plan that could be meaningful to you, there are a few things I recommend:
- Find something else you are passionate about. If you enjoy your work, is it because you like to help people reach goals, or you enjoy the markets, or you like putting the puzzle pieces together to create a strong financial plan? Think about what specific things you enjoy and why, and then consider how you could translate those skills to a non-profit or part-time work. One of my former clients, a CPA, was having a hard time leaving his firm, and we found a place he could do tax planning and returns for indigent people. He is having the time of his life giving back – using professional skills he developed over years, but in a more meaningful way. You might not be an altruistic person, which is fine, but consider how you could do part-time paid work using your skills.
- Think about something you always wanted to do but didn’t have time for. Not just travel – taking trips is so much fun, but they can be over quickly and then you are back staring at your four walls wondering what’s next. Think more in terms of hobbies, learning a new language, taking a class (or two or three), joining a club, or taking up a sport. Many people I know who are retired or semi-retired are into the pickleball craze. It’s not just good exercise, but you meet people and create a social group. It’s not for everyone so consider what would be fun and engaging for you.
- Reframe your thinking – instead of retirement feeling like an end-state and the conclusion of a great career, think of it as entering the next phase. You accomplished so much over your 45+ year career; what can you be open to next? Rather than a stop to all you’ve done, change your thinking to say “It is a start to something new.” While you still might not know what that new thing will be, shifting your thinking can open your mind to new ideas.
- Consider whether you are ready to transition to a new phase or are feeling pressured by your sister and friends to make a change. In my view, while often well-meaning, people should mind their own business! I know advisors in their 70s and even a couple in their early 80s who are going strong. If you have a successor, which you do, if God forbid something health-wise were to happen to you, you’d have someone to step right in to take care of your clients. Maybe you would like to keep working for another few years. If you don’t feel ready, don’t feel pushed. No one else is living your life but you.
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry, in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. The firm has won the Wealthbriefing WealthTech award for Best Training Solution for 2022 and 2023. Beverly is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. She is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.
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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here. 
