Originally posted on Kitces #FA Success Ep 347 with Cary Carbonaro
My guest on today’s podcast is Cary Carbonaro. Cary is the Senior Vice President & Director of Women and Wealth Services for Advisor Capital Management, an independent RIA with offices around the country and headquartered in Ridgewood, New Jersey, that oversees more than $6 billion in assets under management for 1,700 client families.
What’s unique about Cary, though, is how she navigated selling her practice to United Capital and after several years of establishing herself in a leadership role, she then had to navigate the sale of United Capital itself to Goldman Sachs, and the complexities and challenges that followed as she found herself in a very different kind of culture that wasn’t aligned to her media-driven approach to advisor marketing.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how, in 2001, Cary left her Director of Marketing role at Lord Abbett selling mutual funds and in the face of the tech crash realized that mutual fund companies were so cutting their marketing budgets that she may as well just launch her own advisory practice instead, how after years of growing successfully on her own, Cary realized her gift was bringing clients in and that she needed help with scaling her back-office and consequently decided to sell her practice and tuck into United Capital and their support systems, and how Cary dealt with the sudden sale of United Capital to Goldman Sachs that virtually overnight forced her to change the way she’d been marketing herself as an advisor for nearly 20 years because of the new corporate policies of the buyer.
We also talk about how Cary tried to navigate the 2-year non-compete clause in her contract and even offered to buy back her practice and undo the non-compete, how Cary ultimately reached a compromised path with a 6-month non-compete and decided that was good enough to be able to make a transition and not have to totally start over, and how, after the 6-month non-compete period was over, Cary was ultimately able to retain nearly 90% of her and her lead advisor’s clients and decided to move her practice to a new RIA where she could go back to serving her clients as she wished and continue her work in the media that she enjoyed.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Cary shares how she faced a messy divorce while also navigating the 2008 financial crisis and had to move her practice to smaller firm so that she could prevent her husband from seeking retribution and give herself time, how, in the early years of launching her practice, Cary dealt with feelings of inadequacy because she felt she needed to have all the answers to her clients’ questions but over time and by teaching CFP courses herself was able to overcome her confidence issues, and how Cary’s definition of success is evolving as her career grows from ‘just’ increasing the size of the practice to now finding the freedom and time to pursue her passion of speaking, writing, and appearing in the media… with the focus on influencing and changing the financial services industry to create better opportunities for other women to succeed in their careers.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about how, prior to the United Capital sale, Cary’s practice was a diamond tier practice and ranked as one of the best performing practices of the firm, how Cary walked away from 2 $500,000 a year jobs so that she could manage her practice the way she saw fit, or how Cary is working on her second book detailing her challenges with the sale of her firm and her vision for making the industry more female-friendly, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Cary Carbonaro.
