Shay C. Delaney

I attribute my success to being stubborn, hard-headed, and resilient. In this business, you cannot succeed unless you're very comfortable failing forward. There's going to be a lot of things that you do, especially when you're trying to build a business and figure out who your ideal client is, and there's going to be a lot of stumbling along the way. You have to be comfortable with that. It's a huge mindset shift to take it in stride and to just pick yourself back up and keep moving. That resilience and willingness to keep going despite setbacks has been the key to everything I've accomplished.

The best career advice I ever received was to never stop learning. I had a wonderful manager when I worked in retirement plans, and we always used to joke how we were both lifelong learners. She would always say to me that being a lifelong learner would be the thing that would set me apart from everybody else - my willingness to continually learn and to essentially be a student for life. I think where a lot of people go wrong is once they get that certification or once they get that degree, they kind of just dust their hands and put up the books, thinking they've done what they need to do. But there are so many niches and avenues that you can go with really any job, and as long as you are committed to your craft, it's going to require you to be constantly learning and adapting.

I would say definitely have an experience of being a client first. See what it's like to work with an advisor who's different than you, and pull and take note of the things that you really enjoyed about the experience and the things that you didn't enjoy. Use that as your starting board for when you are going to eventually sit down with clients, and it will help frame how you want your own practice to run. That firsthand experience of being on the client side will give you invaluable perspective on how to serve your own clients well.

Some of the biggest challenges in my industry are definitely around making services accessible to everyone. Sometimes we're just limited by what platforms we have available to us and cost constraints. If there's one thing I could try to fix about my industry, it would be to make it more accessible and to allow there to be more options to work with people in all stages of life. As far as where I think we're excelling, I feel like we're finally at a point in financial services where we're moving less away from a cookie-cutter process with everybody. We're understanding that people come from different backgrounds, different cultures, and different life experiences, so there's been more flexibility in the way that we can work with clients. We can conduct things virtually, and there's freedom to just kind of meet people where they're at. I like that we're recognizing the human element more.

The values most important to me are adaptability, authenticity, integrity, and dependability. I believe in being comfortable with change and with an ever-moving target. Authenticity is crucial because people can absolutely smell and sense when you're not being true to them and to yourself. Integrity is huge - you only get one first impression, and your persona that you put forth is something that you have to treasure and keep sacred. You have to be so careful of how you interact with people, no matter what room you're in. You have to always be ready because you never know when you're going to meet that next client. Dependability is essential, not only to your clients but to your team. You need to be someone who does what they say they're going to do and keeps your word. You constantly have to be someone who can put themselves in the client's shoes and think about the service that's being delivered. There are lots of people in customer service, but the experience is average at best. You have to constantly be thinking about how you can push the envelope and be unique, be different, and be dependable.