Karen Scanlon

I attribute my success to hard work, perseverance, and persistence. Nothing good in life comes easy, and it takes a lot of time. I truly believe that in a world where we have social media and AI, everybody's looking for the shortcut, looking for the easy way out, asking how can I make passive income quickly. But nothing beats hard work and dedication to what you're working on, to your career, because AI can't replace something like that. Perseverance and persistence, coupled with hard work, will take anybody who wants to do anything very, very far.

The best career advice I've received is to stay disciplined and not compare yourself to others. It's easy in our work to get caught up in what other advisors are doing, how much money they're managing, and to worry that you're not building your business fast enough or big enough in a short period of time. But our work is so heavily based on trust and relationships that nothing great comes very quickly. Everything takes a lot of time in order to build that trust and really build the relationship with your clients that is going to make them comfortable and confident. It's hard to wake up every day and hope that you close a huge client today, but it just takes a lot of time, and it's so worth it in the end. You just have to stay the course and stay disciplined every single day.

My advice to young women entering this industry is to be curious and remember that you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. It's our human nature, especially if you're in a sales role, to want to talk about yourself and how you can help, the things you offer, and the services you can provide. But you want to make sure you're listening to your clients and the people you're speaking to more than you're talking. The whole point of a financial plan is to make sure your client can achieve what they want to achieve, but how do you know what that is without asking them and having that conversation? You need to dive deep into their goals and what they're looking for in order to provide the right services and investments for them. It's our human nature to want to talk and connect and share information about yourself, but really, you need to just ask open-ended questions and be curious about the people you're working with.

The biggest challenge in my field right now is that the stock market changes day to day and is very dependent on the world, the economy, and politics. There's so much that goes into it that it's really hard to stay on top of everything and convince your clients and the people you work with that yes, they're making the right moves and yes, we're investing their money properly. When it's somebody's whole life savings in an account, it's really important to manage the psychology behind that. If somebody's looking at their life savings in an account and it fluctuates every day, you have to educate them on why that's okay, why everything is going to work out, and why their financial plan is still on track. It's easy to see those numbers, open your screen and it's red, and to get really nervous. So a huge part of our work is just educating our clients and helping them stay the course when it might be really, really hard. Definitely staying in touch with the markets and the economy and everything that's happening, and being able to articulate that to the people you speak with day to day, can be challenging.

The most important value to me in my work is doing the right thing for your client. Our industry used to be very transactional and commission-based, where if you convinced a client to buy a stock, you'd get a huge commission on that. But it's very much changed to where if you're doing the right thing for your client, if they're happy and you're investing their money properly, both of you are going to be happy. My partner and I say this a lot: our client has to sleep at night, and we have to sleep at night. If we know we're not doing the right thing for them, we're not going to be able to sleep, we're going to be worried and stressed out, and we know that our client's going to be the same way. So whether it pays us a lot or not, we don't care about that. We just care about making sure that our client is comfortable and confident in what we're doing for them.