From a small circle, a powerful network with Margaret Starner
To celebrate 30 years of the Women Financial Advisors Network, we look back at its origins and get to know three “generations” of advisors who’ve grown through its ranks.
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 Advisors 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, but its content set the theme that would carry forward and touch the lives of thousands of women advisors.
“In the network, we weren’t there to talk about products, that’s why we have branch meetings,” said 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.
“Four of us gave presentations. One woman talked about how she had gone through a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, but never got the support she felt she needed from her all-male colleagues. It was eye-opening to me – I didn’t know much about breast cancer – but when I went through something similar later, I had support in this network.”
Others talked about the bias they had experienced as women in the profession.
“We were helping women find their voices. If you weren't as direct or assertive as a man, they didn’t think you had enough confidence. But if you did have the confidence, you were seen as some sort of witch. In those early years, it was a challenge to be a woman in finance.”
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. Candor 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, full of talent and promise, but at the whims of a mercurial market.
Coming out of Stanford University in 1961, Starner joined the workforce in the midst of a recession. After finding success, but lacking inspiration, a chance encounter on a train led to a position with United Airlines. At the time, the airline industry was facing its own transformational moment with the dawn of the jet age. Compared to the piston era, jet service was more complex, had longer supply chains and demanded greater capital.
Starner joined 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 said.
“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. Starner was eager to build on her business planning experience. Fortuitously, as she was weighing her options and considering new ways to apply her expertise, the modern ideas of personal financial planning had begun to take root. Financial planning was a way to use her skills to directly help real people and their families. Her interest piqued, Starner began attending financial planning conferences on her own dime, which is how she was introduced to Raymond James.
At Raymond James, she was told, her second career as a stay-at-home mom 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 and told him what I wanted to do, he said, ‘You will have the opportunity to fail if you join us,’” Starner said. “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.”
At age 43, Starner started her career as a financial advisor.
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 advisors.
Women had held critical roles in the home 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 advisors – they tend to deeply understand their clients, they don’t jump firms, they have fewer compliance problems,” Starner said. “But what women need to succeed is very different from what men need, and it’s important for people in leadership and mentorship roles to understand that to ensure women will succeed in your firm.”
Compared to men, “Women needed more confidence in the product,” Starner said. “A man, you tell him it’s a good investment, he’ll go out and sell it. Women need to be confident they’re doing the right thing, so the lead time to be successful is often longer for women. You need more time and patience to give her the chance to come into her own.”
Instead of recruitment, sheer numbers, the network founders had a bigger goal: 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 advisor, 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 Advisors 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, her family 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.”
For several years, the Women Financial Advisors Network grew in lockstep with Raymond James as a whole, numbers rising as more women entered the profession.
Under subsequent generations of leaders, the network continued to develop its identity, growing larger and more sophisticated. And after about 15 years, its message became an increasingly potent differentiator for the firm. Branch managers and recruiters began inviting prospective advisors 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 said.
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.
Over time, numerous women have stepped up to guide the network, each shaping it to an evolving vision and adding to an enduring legacy. But a strong mission and connection to the advisors who comprise the network have ensured its energy and culture remains steady, Starner said, supported through the years from the highest levels of firm leadership.
A future yet written
Much has changed in three decades. The advisor workforce is much more diverse than it was, Starner said, 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, advisors 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 said.
In some ways, the Women Financial Advisors Network and other pioneers have suffered for their success, and Starner has run into a fair share of skeptical women. Is the network still necessary? Or worse, is it a step back? It’s not 1994, who still needs the pep rally?
“I tell them they should check out the network, and attend the symposium,” Starner said. “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 the ways the business has evolved have made the camaraderie and collaboration the network fosters 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 an advisor must leverage to succeed.
In this new world, the business has become more team-oriented and mentorship is of utmost importance, as is continuing education – the traditional strengths of the Women Financial Advisors Network and its programming. “The network is as essential now as it was in 1994.”
Also essential, alongside a space that will welcome you, is one that will challenge you. As Starner puts it, financial advising will always be a prime career for goal-oriented, success-driven women who likewise want an “opportunity to fail.”
“I can’t think of a better business for women.”
This piece was featured in Aspire Magazine, a biannual publication from the Women Financial Advisors Network. View the latest.
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