TITLE: My business turns 10 today.
SUBTITLE: Holy shit, where did my 40s go.
When I launched, I was 40. Now I’m 50.
When I launched, my daughters were 2 and 6. Now they’re 12 and 16. (Math…it works!)
When I launched, we had no dog. Now we have Julia.
When I launched, I had two boobs. Now I have one. (Well, technically two. But one is an example of fine human craftsmanship.)
When I launched, my mother had two God-given hips. Now I just got home from living with her for a bit after she had one of them replaced.
When I launched, I looked for and could find only one other financial planner who focused on women in tech. Now I can barely keep count.
I still have the one, gently used husband and the one, mildly improved home.
What have I learned over the last decade?
Business Lessons from 10 Years in Business
Growing your firm is much harder than maintaining your firm.
New clients are so much more time consuming than existing clients.
If you have 30 clients already, and you’re starting with one new client every month, wondering how the hell you’re ever going to serve 50 because you’re So Busy…let me reassure you that once you get to 50 and all you have to do is serve 50 existing clients (plus one or two new clients a year simply to make up for attrition), your workload will drop dramatically.
If you don’t have “perpetual growth” goals, the end of your Constant Grinding will come! (And if “perpetual growth” is your goal, then… vaya con Dios, my friend. You’re a better woman than I.)
Shifting from growing to maintaining is hard.
I started this firm with Zero. Zero clients. Zero revenue. Growing was a necessity. Grinding was a necessity.
Over the years, as I found clients and revenue, growth became less of a necessity. And at this point, I don’t need to grow at all and, for personal reasons, I don’t want to grow.
(Why do I not need to grow? Because I made a point of figuring out what my Enough is, and I reached Enough. More than Enough, really.)
That shift from “must grind!” to “just hold steady” is discombobulating. Maintenance is an entirely different mindset. It involves different processes, habits, schedules, etc. I’ve been undergoing it for about 1 ½ years now and am making progress.
Want a higher profit margin? Charge higher fees.
As I learned from JD Bruce in year 2 of owning my firm, you can focus on growth or on profit. Then experience and Michael Kitces taught me that, if you want to focus on profit, charging higher fees is the simplest, easiest, most expedient way to get there.
Hiring more people and buying new tech tools to leverage you…that might help. But tech only helps a little, and hiring people is a huge commitment.
I know that planners worry about raising their fees. They worry that they won’t get any more clients. What I have learned is that you might not get the same clients, but there are always good-fit clients at whatever price you charge.
“It’s your business, Meg. Why have you given yourself a job you hate?”
I had never run a business before Flow, so I didn’t have much intuition about how to run it. I therefore relied on external messages to guide my choices. This resulted in me doing a lot of work that I didn’t enjoy or, in some cases, outright despised.
You know that exercise where you draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper, and then on one side you write “things that give me energy” and on the other “things that drain my energy”? Over the years, I did that exercise many times (sometimes on paper, sometimes in my head, sometimes in conversation).
What gives me energy? Meeting with prospective clients, meeting with clients, creating a financial planning strategy, creating an investment strategy, and writing. (You might summarize this as “being a financial planner.”)
What drains my energy? Compliance, investment implementation, bookkeeping, hard core tax analysis, managing people, IT. (You might summarize much of this as “running a business.”)
Over the years, I’d find myself doing something I really didn’t enjoy and then chastise myself, “Meg, it’s your business. Why have you given yourself a job you hate? Not so smart, are ye?” Bit by bit I outsourced, delegated, or simply didn’t do those bits.
Do these choices sometimes mean I make less money? Probably. I’m okay with that. I’d rather have a job I thoroughly like than maximize my income (which is plenty high). And also, purely from a financial perspective, a job I like is a job I’m likely to stay in longer, which means I’ll earn more money anyways.
Financial Planner Lessons from 10 Years in Business
“So that’s why I’m so good at this.”
I’ve always been good at a lot of things. All the school subjects, all the sports I tried, etc. But I’ve never been truly excellent in any of them, in part because I’ve never been interested enough to pursue that excellence to the exclusion of other activities. I’ve often considered this a failing on my part, because it means I never stand out.
But financial planning is the ultimate liberal arts profession. It requires you to be good at a wide variety of things, know a wide variety of information, learn new things, and integrate all sorts of disparate inputs into a coherent whole. Which it turns out, I am perfectly suited to.
My job is to be there when my clients need me.
If you consume enough industry content, it’s really easy to feel that you will never be, do, or know enough for your clients. That other planner has a better process. Oooh, this planner managed that scenario better than I probably would have. Ah damn, that new service might be useful to my clients.
Thankfully, I’ve got a pretty robust sense of self (thanks, Mom and Dad!), but even more powerful is simply observing, over time, that the thing I can do for my clients that serves them best is simply being there when they need me. This is a relationship of trust, and part of what clients are trusting us to be is reliable and present.
This is not the stuff that catchy social media posts or conference presentations are made of. But I strongly believe that it is more important than almost anything else you’ll hear about in catchy social media posts or conference presentations.
Practicing as a financial planner has made me a better conversationalist.
Remember the last time you got into “conversation” with someone who clearly didn’t care that much about what you were saying and was more or less just waiting for their chance to talk, and instead of a conversation, it was just a sequence of disconnected sentences?
Yeah. I hate that. Because I loooove a good conversation.
Practicing as a financial planner and being trained in “life planning” has made me a much better conversationalist. I ask more questions of clients (and everyone else in my life). And then ask follow-up questions to those questions. I am genuinely curious about who people are, what they do, how they feel, what their aspirations are. Conversations are instantly more enjoyable as a result.
Sales isn’t what I thought it was.
Early on in my financial planning career, I doubted that I’d ever be able to make it because I couldn’t “sell.” I couldn’t bear the thought of having the gruff handshake and the forceful personality and wearing a blue blazer and loafers and going to the country club. (Or whatever the female equivalent is.) That was my vision of what successful sales required.
Eventually I discovered that, at least for my and my firm’s needs:
Successful sales = Useful content marketing + Empathy + Trying to be helpful
I’m not trying to convince people whom I don’t have the skills to help to work with me. And for those people whom I can help, the “sale” is usually very natural. There is no need for me to ever feel “salesy.”
Metrics
Flow consists of me and the stalwart Janice, our Client Services Associate.
We have 49 client households. (I plan to stay here, maybe slightly lower. I wouldn’t want to have more than a handful more clients. Yes…I measure clients by the “handful.”)
We have juuuusst shy of $100M AUM.
Thoughts about the profession
I hope that all us planners start from an understanding that this is first and foremost a helping profession. Yes, we can make a good living at it! We can run a profitable business with saleable value!
But we’re not investment advisors. (I mean, legally we’re called Registered Investment Advisors, but functionally we do a different job.) We’re not selling software. This isn’t a very scalable business, assuming our goal is to provide human-centric, comprehensive financial planning.
Our primary goal, as financial planners, therefore should not be profit maximization. (Again, profit is good! Yay Gordon Gecko! Capitalism rah! I just don’t believe it can be priority #1 and still provide real financial planning.)
I believe this kind of work requires a planner to have no more than 80, maaaybe100 clients. (I mean, I only serve 49 and would rather not go higher.) If you’re a financial professional of some sort directly serving meaningfully more clients, I infer from that that we simply don’t do the same job.
It is because I have such strong beliefs about what true financial planning looks like that I have become a bit grumpy about the industry (or profession) recently.
For one, all the news about VC/PE-funded mega firms that are out there hungrily gobbling up smaller shops like my own. I hope this rollup/acquisition spree goes away. I don’t know enough about those investing models to say they’re bad or good in general, but the incentives are fundamentally at odds with real financial planning.
If you can 10x profits (or more, which is presumably what VC/PE firms target) in an established financial planning firm, then I don’t see any way that client relationships don’t suffer in the process. (10xing or even 100xing growth is just a matter of spending enough money to buy enough firms. It simply reflects the size of your wallet.)
And for two, are we financial planners or technologists? I am a financial planner who uses technology. I will likely hire someone eventually to help me make my business run more efficiently, blah blah blah. But I’m not spending my precious time exploring the depths of Claude. I’m just not. I’m spending my time learning things and improving skills that directly make me a better financial planner and that I can’t productively outsource. Maybe I’ll look back and conclude this decision was foolish, but I didn’t get into this profession to f*ck around with software; I had enough of that in my previous career. I got into this profession to help people.
Looking Forward
At the end of 2025, when all my cancer treatment was basically done, and I’d physically recovered, my psyche hit a wall. My soul was tired. So, with the help of my fellow PNW women financial planner friends, I declared 2026 to be my Year of Nope. Or, less glibly, my Year of Recuperation.
Maybe, after a sufficient period, I will feel like growing my business or my involvement in the profession again. For now, though, what I have is enough. Enough income. Enough work. Enough clients. Enough recognition. Enough giving back. Enough challenge. Enough time.
Some time in the near-ish future I will hire a consultant to help optimize my business. Someone who already knows the tech and processes and so can allow me to improve all such things without having to do the heavy lifting myself.
In the meantime, it’s gratifying (and easy) to continually grow as a financial planner. Yes, there are webinars and articles and designations and professional forums. All of which I love. But I grow the most as a financial planner simply by being in relationship with my clients. The more experience with humans and their finances I have, the better a financial planner I become.
Personally, I want to spend time with my far-too-quickly aging daughters, my husband, the rest of my family, and dear friends. Throw in some yoga, weightlifting, and hiking, and maybe a trip here or there. I’m trying to “live my values”—using money as a tool, not a purpose—in the same way I hope I can help my clients live theirs.