To demographers, she is an anomaly. Statisticians would label her an "outlier," too far removed from the norm to count in sampling. To her clients, she is the woman with the wisdom. Her husband, however, knows what her favorite title is: "She answers to 'Mom' more readily than anything else."
She is Frances "Frannie" Gardner, CFP, the financial planner who has just about cornered the women's market in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. She has done it without directly selling anything but her professional skill and her empathy for the special financial concerns and perspectives of women. But that's only part of what makes her story unique.
At 44, she is at the age when many "career women" are just starting families and plunging into motherhood with the same determination that has powered their professional lives. Frannie, however, has followed the career-woman trajectory in reverse. Married at 19, she had three children in three years, delivering her youngest just two weeks after she earned her degree in business from the University of Texas at Dallas. That youngest child, her son Andrew, age 20, is a sophomore at UT-Austin, while older brother Michael (23) and sister Jacylyn (22) are through college and away from home — which means Frannie and her husband Robert Gardner are, demographically speaking, early-stage "empty-nesters."
It also means Frannie can devote more time than ever to her business life, which has flourished in her most natural habitat — the oftentimes frustrating and confusing world of personal finance for women.
The tool of her trade is the educational seminar, and in her case the term "educational" isn't marketing hype. Her two-session, six-hour "Taking Control" seminars take place at local community colleges (Collin County and Dallas County) and earn the attendees continuing education credits, for which they pay $59. She never mentions products and does not hand out business cards. The content is strictly generic and focused on women's financial needs, from the basics of budgeting to taxes, risk management, investing, estate and retirement planning, and decision-making in divorce and widowhood.
Attendees turn in a financial data sheet at the second session, and from that Frannie develops a personal, comprehensive financial plan that culminates the course. The plan's recommendations usually lead to sales of insurance products and transfers of assets to manage — but those are choices the clients make; Frannie lets the plans do the selling. "I tell the ladies that if they bought one of these plans off the street, so to speak, it would cost $1,500," Frannie says. "Nine out of 10 women who attend sign up for an appointment to see me after they get their profile."
Gaining Recognition
Frannie writes life insurance, disability income, and long-term care insurance and handles investments and retirement planning for her clients, all within the framework of full financial planning. After 15 years in the business, she is winning recognition from her peers, including two years of qualification for the Million Dollar Round Table at the Court of the Table level and recognition in 2002 and 2004 as the best financial planner in Dallas by D Magazine.
If there is a moment in a producer's career when he or she can finally say, "I've arrived," that moment came for Frannie last year, when Penn Mutual named her the company's 2004 Financial Professional of the Year. She is the first female producer to win the honor, which recognizes not only sales achievement but also a commitment to education, ethics, and client service.
The award also validated the faith and patience invested in her by her mentor and general agent, David Ayres, CLU. David is president of the Ayres Financial Group, one of the larger, well-respected career agencies in Dallas. He had a simple reason for hiring Frannie as a rookie agent in 1990. "I wanted to attract some females into this business," David says. "An interesting phenomenon that has evolved over the years is that women have become the chief financial officers of the family. Who understands them better than a woman professional? And our business is great for women because of the flexibility it offers."
Flexibility was vital to Frannie early in her career, when she had to balance the demands of parenthood with her dream of succeeding as a financial professional. "David told me, 'I'll take a shot with you because you'll grow up as your kids grow up,'" Frannie recalls. "David understood that my husband did well financially and I didn't have to make a lot of money right away. He also knew I wanted to leave at noon every day to pick up Andrew after kindergarten."
The first career milestone for Frannie was earning her Series 6 and 63 securities licenses in 1991, followed by the Certified Financial Planner (CFP) designation in 1992. In those child-rearing years, however, parenting took top priority. "I was always a room mother for each of my kids when they were in school, all the way through eighth grade," Frannie says. "I was there every day to pick them up after school or see them when they got home." Robert, who is also a member of the Ayres agency, remembers those years with a simple summation: "In every activity our kids were doing, she was always there."
A Slow Start
While parenting came naturally, her early professional efforts were mostly trial and error. She struggled with the traditional prospecting routine, starting with the list of 100 family members and friends. Seeing prospects at their homes didn't work, either. "One time I walked into a prospect's house, and the guy must have been involved in making porno movies; he had a cheesy shag rug and a camera setup," Frannie recalls. "I walked right out of there and told myself I was never doing that again."
She discovered her niche when several local hospitals eliminated their pension plans in favor of Section 401(k) plans, and she found some partners to put on retirement planning seminars for nurses and hospital staffers. Seminars have been her only system ever since. Frannie is the only financial planner in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who uses the "Taking Control" seminar package produced by Emerald Publications.
The inherent educational aspect of seminars made them a natural tie-in with community college continuing education programs. Frannie started with the Trinity Valley Community College, well outside Dallas, and worked her way closer to home, constantly pitching her strategy to college administrators. Once she proved to them the seminars were generic and had no sales element, they incorporated them into the curriculum.
Frannie promotes the seminars by blanketing the area twice a year (January and August) with direct mail seminar fliers bearing the names of the schools — up to 40,000 households per mailing. The response levels are routinely almost more than she can handle. In fact, she doesn't handle a lot of the details but entrusts them to Lindsay McGinley, a young associate she and David recruited into the agency. Lindsay, age 24, shares business with Frannie and looks to her as a mentor the same way Frannie has relied on David's experience.
"Lindsay does some of the follow-ups with the attendees, and she's actually helping people carry out the plans we develop," Frannie says. "I am training her to be a 'Mini-Me.' One day, she'll train somebody as a junior partner. I've opened my books of business to Lindsay, and every year I sit down with her and point out the clients I'm not able to get to who need to be called for their review. It helps her build her practice and perpetuate our work."
Help Inside and Out
Lindsay is one of two junior partners whom Frannie regards as indispensable to her success. Christina Copeland, 34, is Frannie's tireless internal administrator, the "Ms. Inside" to Lindsay's "Ms. Outside." "Christina loves this industry and loves doing back-office work," Frannie says. "She doesn't like to do what I do, and honestly I would have a nervous breakdown if I had to do what she does."
Now that Frannie can go full-throttle with her planning services, she is contending with the wide spectrum of financial problems her clients bring. She readily acknowledges that many of her clients aren't "high society" or ultra-wealthy; most come from the vast middle market that remains seriously underserved by the financial planning profession. In this group, women have become the predominant decision-makers. They are more educated and have more work experience than any generation before them, but that doesn't mean they've "got their act together" financially. One of her client couples had a single income, the husband's, structured as a small base salary and a large bonus — a challenge for year-to-year budgeting. Frannie sold them a large term life plan along with disability income and a Section 529 plan, and carved out money for them to start monthly saving. "The wife will go back to work when she can," Frannie says. "We just did real basic planning.
"Another couple I'm working with is about to have their third child. The husband makes $100,000, and the wife is not working outside. They're living in a half-million-dollar house, and the payments are killing them. They can't stay in the house. They asked if we had some magic idea that would let them stay in the house. I said to the wife, 'Yes, we do — you can go back to work. But if you want to stay home with your kids, you've got to get out of that house.'"
The Widow's Perspective
In a recent class, Frannie had four women who had each become widows within a few weeks prior to the class. She also worked with another widow whose husband had died suddenly of a heart attack. The woman had trusted all planning to her husband and was, as Frannie describes her, "frozen with fear" at all the decisions facing her. Frannie helped her carry out her husband's detailed instructions, which the widow did not even know he had left for her. "It was a great learning experience for Frannie, just to understand what a widow goes through," David says.
Learning is a non-stop process for Frannie, who is studying for the Chartered Life Underwriter, Chartered Financial Consultant, and Certified Divorce Financial Analyst designations. She's active in the Dallas chapters of the Financial Planning Association and the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors. She also serves on the executive committee of Penn Mutual's Producer Advisory Council.
Among her near-term goals is requalifying for MDRT. She has steadily built her life production over several years using a simple sales technique tailored to her female clientele: a one-page summary of life insurance options — term, universal life, and variable universal life — with premiums and cash values displayed side by side in five-year intervals. This form of illustration summary leaves the choice to the client. "That's what my clients want," she says. "Just give them options and let them choose."
Frannie has chosen the ideal profession for a "working mom" who has a lot to offer women of all generations and their families. Now that she's a veteran of the business, training her young associates, she has one paramount piece of advice: "Tell the truth. Don't candy-coat anything. If the client is going to run out of money, you have to tell them. When the investment markets fell apart a few years ago, it was the biggest learning curve I'd ever been on because I had to get in front of my clients and tell them they had lost money.
"In this business, you have your name and your word, and that's it. There's nothing more."