At SER Summit, financial advisors share complicated paths to success

Trailblazing planning legend Louis Barajas says he no longer provides planning or advice.

"I do 'financial doing,' because for Latino communities, what happens is that when I meet with a client and I give them advice, did you know that only, like, 10% to 11% of people ever implement any advice?" Barajas said in a speech at this week's SER Summit for Latinos in Financial Services. "We stopped giving advice. We just started doing it."

Barajas delivered a keynote on the topic of the past, present and future of Hispanic professionals in wealth management called "Where We Were, Where We Are, Where We Can Go." It and other sessions at the third annual SER event, held this week outside Chicago, reflected the difficult trade-offs for planners who are seeking to boost access to advice and wealth-building while at the same time running successful businesses and lifting up aspiring professionals.

And that is even tougher for many Latino financial advisors and other minority professionals who are, on the one hand, breaking through barriers that had historically excluded them into a predominantly white field and, on the other, trying to explain that field to families and convince people that their advice can help them advance economically. That's why discussions of entrepreneurship, networking and mentoring at the SER Summit take on added significance. And the conference took place with nearby Chicago bracing for an influx of federal troops.

"Every conference that I go to, somebody stands up here and says, 'We are $4 trillion in spending power, the fifth largest economic power in the United States, yada yada, yada yada,'" Barajas said. "We're the poorest community. Us and the Blacks are the poorest community, and the reason why we're going through all this turmoil, they're coming after us because we don't have any wealth. And we need to focus on building wealth, because at the end of the day, I'm tired of hearing how much we spend; let's talk about how much we save. You guys are the reason why we can change this world, all right, you guys are the reason." 

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Latino advisors drive change while jumping hurdles

As a member of the CFP Board who is the co-founder of Irvine, California-based International Private Wealth Advisors, the CEO of Business Management LAB and a financial coach to families building wealth in the PBS series "Opportunity Knock$," Barajas minced no words even as he had just unveiled his most recent launch. He and business partner Daniel Guillen launched a financial coaching firm called Corazón Financial Advocates this week, with a goal "to empower 1,000 Latino business owners across the country to help change the financial trajectory of their communities — shifting mindsets, breaking cycles of poverty, and building and protecting wealth for generations to come," the announcement said.

Barajas and others trying to drive systemic change through their professional careers face challenges specific to Latino advisors as well as general challenges that apply to anyone trying to find success in an industry with a massive failure rate among novices. Four planners who discussed their entrepreneurial odysseys on a panel spoke in depth about those struggles.

For instance, Luis Rosa, founder of Henderson, Nevada-based RIA firm Build a Better Financial Future and the co-founder of the BLX Internship Program, cited what he and others view as a key shortcoming of traditional fee models that focus on charging 1% of assets under management. One firm earlier in his career required newer advisors to bring in a minimum of $500,000 in net new AUM from clients each month, which was "not my network," Rosa said.

"I didn't know anyone with half a million dollars to put there, but I knew people that could afford to pay me $5,000 a year in financial planning fees, which is the equivalent of a half-million dollar account," Rosa said. "So I was trying to explain that to them: 'Look, I just don't have people with assets, but I have people with money that could pay a monthly or quarterly retainer, and they're happy to do so. They could afford it, and we can still give them advice. And, yeah, there's no AUM per se, but there's still revenue. I understand you've got to run a profitable business.' None of them seemed to grasp the concept at the time. I know a lot more firms are doing that now."

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Tobias Salinger

Rosa later launched his own firm with XY Planning Network, an early adopter and facilitator of alternatives to the AUM fee at RIAs. Aspiring entrepreneurial advisors should also identify a client niche with a set of needs that they know well through deep research or, even better, firsthand experience, he and the session's moderator, Anna N'Jie-Konte, founder of Baltimore-based RIA firm Poder Wealth Advisors, said.

Sometimes, early-career advisors "walk around with this idea of, like, 'Oh, I don't have the network, so I'm not going to be successful at this,' or I have some sort of disadvantage, instead of looking at it as a strength," N'Jie-Konte said.

"In my own journey, one of the things that I recognized pretty early on was, the more I shared about my own journey, my own progress, my own learning, mistakes, family experiences, the more people were attracted to me," she said, recalling a client who joined her firm five years ago. "She's still my client today. She's the daughter of Peruvian immigrants. Her mom was a housekeeper. Her dad is a handyman. They don't speak English. They don't have any savings. And she said, 'I read your website and I cried, and I said, "this is my person."' Until you actually share more of yourself, people are not going to resonate with you."

Part of that process entails rejecting the idea that advisors from certain groups should only work with those of the same background or sell them the same type of products, said Freddy Garcia, the first vice president of investments with Naperville, Illinois-based Left Brain Wealth Management. These days he can look back at building an advisory practice that has enabled him to put his kids through college, buy his parents a home and even consider retirement at 50 years old. But he began his financial services career selling life insurance for a firm that sent representatives to his college career fair who told him, "'All you have to do, just speak Spanish, and you'll sell lots of life insurance,'" he said. That was not the case.

"The bigger connection I didn't ask myself at the time is: Are these people ready and willing to work with someone?" Garcia said. "Regardless of their ethnicity, regardless of what they did, are they a suitable client? And I let myself get pigeonholed, and I will never do that again. And that's one of the biggest lessons I want to give to everyone here is, our level of expectation should be higher. I'm not saying don't work with the Latino community, but don't pigeonhole yourself and say, 'I only work with Latinos.' No, you can work with anyone that is workable, regardless."

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First-generation challenges

Other advisors at the earlier stages of their career may begin to feel that they're "living between two worlds" in assisting wealthier people or when they didn't come from money themselves, said Valerie Rivera, the founder of Chicago-based RIA firm FirstGen Wealth. And that could turn more complex when explaining the decisions to immigrant parents such as those of Rivera, who said she has "very old-school Mexican parents, and I just turned 40, but they're still very much in my ear, and in my head and in my heart."

She wanted to start her own firm to guide people like her who are "the first in their family to go to college, who are all professionals, and they don't know what to do," she said. But she was simultaneously hearing from her folks that she was making an unsafe choice.

"I've had to fight, mentally," Rivera said. "The people who love me the most — I realize that it's because of their love for me that they're pushing their fear on me. And so it's been a lot of unlearning along the way about what I'm capable of and being able to dream big. I think a lot of it has to do with the power of financial planning in my own life."

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Mentorship and community support

A similar topic came up later in the day, when organizers set up a dating game-style challenge matching four experienced planners with four upcoming professionals to start a mentor-protege relationship. To laughter and applause from the audience, the speakers quizzed each other at length without knowing each other's identity.

One of the incoming mentees shared that he had switched careers and recently completed an undergraduate planning program. And that led to an observation from one of the hosts of the program, Vanessa Martinez, the CEO and founder of Chicago-based RIA firm Expressive Wealth and a co-founder of the SER Summit.

Tobias Salinger

Trying to discuss wealth management careers with family can be complicated for Latinos in the industry, Martinez said. To many people, something that appears to them to be a sheet of paper or some kind of an award doesn't seem like an important step toward a great profession. And that makes the network the advisors develop at the conference more important, she said.

"There are accomplishments that we get, but our family doesn't understand them, because it's not normal," Martinez said. "They don't really understand the magnitude of all of those accomplishments. … Please reach out to celebrate together. It's not that our family doesn't love us as much. It's because they don't fully get the whole picture. But we do."

Some of that support could come from counterparts aiming to take the same steps some day. Mentors "have to be conscious that the mentee is going to allow us to learn and get better ourselves with the process," said Christian Mundy, a senior wealth manager at Beverly Hills, California-based RIA firm LifeLine Financial & Wealth Management Group who became a mentor to LPL Financial advisor Edgar Gonzalez at last year's SER Summit. This year, he acted as the co-host to the matching program alongside Martinez. 

"Anytime I have a mentee, it's important for me to give them information that I wish I would have known, something that can put me ahead of the game," Mundy said. "That's extremely important. And also it's understanding that, as a mentor, you're going to also learn a lot about yourself, right? It's not one way."

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Harsh truths about the industry

Those relationships loom especially large in an industry with lagging representation. Barajas recalled his experience attending his first Financial Planning Association conference in the '90s as one of three Black or Latino professionals among about 2,500 attendees. He recalled a speech around that time given by an outgoing FPA board chair who said, "What this industry needs is diversity. We need more bankers, more insurance people, more estate planning attorneys." That industry landscape looks much different today, albeit with some similarities.

"What you guys are doing here is unbelievable, and I see how you guys are helping each other out," Barajas said. "But I want to share something with you. We are preaching to the choir. You will see the same faces every year from here on out. We are sorely misrepresented in this industry, right? Less than 3% of CFPs are Latinos in the industry. There should be 3,000 of us here. I know we want to stay small, but we still have to encourage other people that you know to attend. I'm currently on the national board of the CFP Board, the first Latino ever on the national board. But that's bullshit. No, I'm not proud of that. It's 2025 and I'm the first Latino on the national board. That's sad, isn't it? I'm not proud of it."

Barajas' wide-ranging address started with him telling the story of filling out his father's tax returns at the age of 13 and sharing key moments in his career such as seeing the comedian George Lopez deliver jokes about Latino money habits, his chance meetings with "The Purpose Driven Life" author, Pastor Rick Warren, and the story behind his own first book decades ago.

Sometimes, advisors pursuing their professional calling just need to understand some harsh truths, he said.

"We all here have eyes for people who are in need, but you cannot help anyone who's not ready to be helped or doesn't want to be helped," Barajas said. "You need to move on. There are plenty of people who need your help and want your help."