From a small circle to a powerful network

Off in a side room of a conference in 1994, fewer than 20 women gathered for a little over an hour for the first Network for Women Advisers Women’s Symposium. They sat in a circle.

Compared to the highly polished event it would become, the first Women’s Symposium was an earnest, simple affair with just 20 women in a conference side room in 1994. But its content set the theme that would carry forward and touch the lives of thousands of women advisers.

“In the network, we weren’t there to talk about products, that’s why we have branch meetings,” says Margaret Starner, one of the founding leaders of the group. “It was a place where we could discuss the things only another woman could understand. It’s hard to describe the excitement of those early meetings. We could be silly and laugh or share our fears – it was all absolutely OK.

Those first meetings showed the network could be a place where women were open about both their ambition and their challenges, Starner said, without worrying first about how they would be received. Candour and comfort. Support and catharsis.

It was a sisterhood.

As the network and the Women’s Symposium grew, sisterhood would be its bedrock.

A career in three parts

Before Starner became an icon of the financial planning industry, she was a fresh graduate. Coming out of Stanford University in the early Sixties, she joined United Airlines as a business analyst and planner. She was 22 and the only woman in the office who wasn’t a secretary. To be taken seriously, she knew she needed to do more than her colleagues – a theme she would find consistent throughout her career.

“That’s something they used to say to women: ‘You better be right.’ They never told the guys that,” she says.

“It turned out I was good at it. I would come up with the numbers it would take to support the jets and they wouldn’t believe them. It was so much more money than they expected. I told them, ‘I have no clue if the data you gave me is accurate, but my analysis is correct.’

“I became known as ‘the woman who was right.’”

Starner married, and with the birth of her first child, her priorities changed. She left the workforce to raise her family.

Fifteen years and two kids later, she was interested in resuming her career. But she didn’t want to start over. Eager to build on her business planning experience, financial planning seemed like a way to use her skills to directly help real people and their families.

At Raymond James, she was told, her second career as a stay-at-home mum wasn’t going to limit her opportunity. She’d be able to start her own business, find her own clients – she’d have the freedom to make her own opportunity.

“When I met [Raymond James founder] Bob James he said, ‘You will have the opportunity to fail if you join us,’” says Starner. “Who would want that? But what he meant was that if you have a dream and come to Raymond James, you can try it out, no one is going to stop you – as long as it’s legal.”

So at age 43, Starner started her career as a financial adviser.

She worked alongside Bob at Raymond James for two years. She shared her thoughts about financial planning with him, and “He was very encouraging,” she said. “He made complex things seem more practical, simpler. I don’t think I would have been as successful if I hadn’t met him.”

A Request

In 1993, Bob’s son, Tom James, who Bob had named CEO in 1970, set a new goal. He wanted to hire more women as advisers.

Women had held critical roles in the head office from the earliest days of the company – Raymond James was one of the few finance companies in the Tampa Bay area to hire women in the 1960s and early ’70s – but for some reason, advising was a tough sell.

“There was no reason women couldn’t work in finance,” James said of the company’s uncommon openness. “I think women have a natural aptitude for advising. It wouldn’t have made sense to exclude someone on the basis of their gender, race or some other trait.”
“I think women often make exceptional planners because they understand how the pieces fit together,” James added. “But soliciting new business was harder for them. So I went to some of the women who were doing well and asked if they’d take part in a network for women.”
James approached Starner and a small group of others with his request. As trailblazers, he hoped they could be examples and mentors to others.

“The way TJ [James] explained it to me was that he liked the characteristics of women advisers – they tend to deeply understand their clients, they don’t jump firms, they have fewer compliance problems,” Starner says. “But what women need to succeed is very different from what men need. They often need to feel more confidence in the product, so the lead time to be successful may be longer for women. You need more time and patience to give her the chance to come into her own. So it’s important for people in leadership and mentorship roles to understand that to ensure women will succeed in your firm.”

Instead of recruitment, sheer numbers, the network founders had a bigger goal: to make Raymond James a place where women could thrive and grow. With three sisters, Starner knew the importance – and power – of sisterhood, but at the time, if a woman was working in a branch as an adviser, she’d be the only one.

So Starner and the others agreed to start a network, as long as it would be designed by women, for women and led by women.

Tom agreed. The Network for Women Advisers was created.

A community of shared purpose

Starner is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Unlike the vibrant diaspora communities in New York or San Francisco, hers was the lone Chinese family in her small Mississippi town. So they, and other Chinese families from across the region, would regularly gather to support one another.

“And that’s what this women’s network was like,” Starner said. “You can’t know how important it is to just encourage someone when they’re at a hard point in their career. That’s one of the things unique about Raymond James, we know how important it is to help one another. The culture is collaborative, not competitive.”

Over the next 15 years, the Network’s message became an increasingly potent differentiator for the firm. Branch managers and recruiters began inviting prospective advisers to experience it for themselves at its founding event, the Women’s Symposium.

“Once a woman came to our symposium, they could feel the difference between where they worked and Raymond James,” Starner says.

From fewer than two dozen attendees in 1994, the symposium grew to include more than 700 attendees in 2023. Even more are expected for the event’s 30th anniversary this year.

A future not yet written

Much has changed in three decades. The adviser workforce is much more diverse than it was, Starner says, both demographically and in manner. These days, a woman can be a hard-driving, straight-shooting, sharp-tacked financial dynamo without being told to soften her approach. Likewise, advisers serving the market for intimate, holistic financial planning in spa-like settings aren’t told they need to slap on some shoulder pads to be taken seriously.

“Candidly, we exceeded my expectations. Our network is the envy of the industry. We actually underestimated the power of sisterhood,” Starner says. In some ways, the Women Financial Advisers Network and other pioneers have suffered for their success, and Starner has run into a fair share of sceptical women. Is the network still necessary? It’s not 1994, who still needs the pep rally?

“I tell them they should check out the network, and attend the symposium,” Starner says. “It’s a professional group, and a professional conference, but it’s also like a group of girlfriends – a sisterhood – dedicated to helping women do better at Raymond James than they would anywhere else.”

In fact, Starner believes that the business’s evolution has made the network’s camaraderie and collaboration even more relevant. In our post-industrial, service-based economy, clients are more accustomed to paying for professional services, making the art of client prospecting much more nuanced. And as technology has grown more complex, so have the tools needed to succeed.

In this new world, the business has become more team-oriented and mentorship is of utmost importance. Also essential, alongside a space that welcomes you, is one that challenges you. As Starner puts it, financial advising will always be a prime career for goal-orientated, success-driven women who likewise want an “opportunity to fail.”

“I can’t think of a better business for women.”