Welcome to the second installment of
There was a moment in Angie Herbers' career as an entrepreneur when it wasn't
"Actually, the fear of success was worse than the fear of failure," said Herbers, the managing partner of Texas-based Herbers & Company, a consulting firm that she started in 2003. "I feared being successful because I believed it would separate me from my passion."
It's an emotion that many financial advisors or wealth management professionals may feel at some point in their own career trajectories, and one that Herbers knows well, both from personal experience and from listening to clients' struggles over the years.
A well-known leader in the world of financial advisors, Herbers is frequently sought out for her firm's support growing their practices. Investment Advisor magazine
The business Herbers founded two decades ago has
While Herbers is not an advisor herself and cautions that the work of growing a consulting firm is not the same as growing an advisory practice, wealth management professionals can still glean valuable tips from her career journey.
Filling an industry need and investing in herself
Herbers grew up the middle child between two brothers on a 10,000-acre ranch with cattle and horses in western Kansas. She credits that upbringing for helping her later navigate the male-dominated industry of wealth management.
"The greatest blessing that I had was that I was never treated differently," she said. "If the boys were out scooping snow, I was out scooping snow."
Her mother was a stay-at-home mom and a teacher, and her father a rancher and commodity broker.
Herbers attended Kansas State University, where she studied business and got her degree in personal financial planning, graduating from a CFP-registered program. While a student, she entered a national financial planning competition, traveling with her team to New York to present their financial plan in one of the former World Trade Center towers. Herbers' team won, and the experience gave her an enticing taste of the industry.
"I just fell in love with the idea that consumers were at the forefront of the independent RIA space. And the goal was to work in their best interests, and that suited me very well," she said. After graduating and getting her first job, she realized she could better assist consumers by helping the financial advisors who served them.
"I didn't want to give my talent away to another organization," she said. "I believed that I was talented enough to capitalize on my own talent."
At the time, financial advisory firms were having a hard time hiring young talent, she said, and she saw an industry need that she could fill.
"I had this unique skill and this unique experience that I could consult on," Herbers said. She decided to focus on "incorporating young talent into advisory firms, for the benefit of helping more consumers get what I believed every consumer needed — which was personal financial advice."
Her business launched from there, with a phone and a house that she had bought through a first-time homebuyers program, her first client coming through a referral from Moss Adams. Her first project was helping a firm build a training program for young advisors coming out of CFP programs. "There wasn't really anyone else in the industry doing that." Over time, Herbers expanded to many other consulting services — but she still operates with a phone out of her home.
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Relying on her community — and on self-confidence
At the start of her career, Herbers often feared failure, she said. When doubts arose, she called family and friends, whose responses split into two camps. The first group of people couldn't imagine themselves taking the risk of launching their own business, and therefore suggested that if Herbers had doubts, she should play it safe and just take a job working for someone else.
But the other group — "This small group that I was so blessed to have in my life" — cheered her on. "They would say, 'Tell me what your fear is.' Well, my fear is that I'm going to fail." In addition to the support she received from her community, Herbers' confidence in her abilities also helped. "I had an inherent belief in myself. And that's what I chose to manifest."
Many entrepreneurs experience fear of failing, she said, adding that this stems from fear of what others will think. "There's a book out there called 'The Courage to Be Disliked.' I always recommend that book," she said. "But I didn't do it alone. It takes a village, and I didn't keep those fears inside. I think keeping those secrets is one of the most damaging things to entrepreneurs."
Filter advice and take accountability
Early on, Herbers often took advice from others on how to build a consulting business (no easy feat in an industry with a low success rate for consulting firms, she said).
But a day came, in 2016, when she realized she could instead focus on her own vision for the company — and take the risks that came with standing by her own decisions.
"I remember the day that I said, 'This all information is great, but I'm going to build it the way I think it needs to be built, to serve our clients in the best way.'"
She was at a co-working space in Austin, and one of the firm's new initiatives had stumbled. Although she had green-lighted the project, "It didn't feel good to me. … I knew it at the time, but I didn't listen to it."
Herbers realized that she could listen to her gut and say no. "I basically said to myself: You can do this. You can stand behind decisions whether or not they succeed or they fail. But what you can't live with is making decisions that you don't feel good about."
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In that moment, she said, "the business was really born. Because the business had a leader who was responsible and accountable."
As often as advice is given, Herbers said, it's up to the listener to filter it for what applies to them. "Get very good at that. Ask for help, receive the help or filter it out — and do it fast."
Hire for trust, not skill
Herbers remembers a moment, mid-career, when she didn't want her firm to get any bigger. She feared if her business grew, she would miss being in the trenches helping advisors directly. "But as you grow in success, your role changes, and you have to take steps back. You have to be more strategic."
Stepping back to allow that growth has paid off for her, but it wasn't without growing pains that involved finding the right talent.
Growing any firm, whether a wealthtech startup or an RIA or a wirehouse practice, can be tough; the question of talent acquisition remains tricky across the industry, Herbers noted.
When she began hiring her first employees, Herbers brought on support staff but quickly learned that's not what she needed. Yet hiring standard consultants who came in with experience didn't work either.
"It was very, very difficult to un-train them and retrain them," she said.
She turned to advice from her grandfather. "He said, 'Don't hire based on skill, hire based on trust.'" Given her working relationships with CFPs and those working in advisory firms, she realized if she hired those highly skilled professionals, she could teach them to become consultants.
"I didn't need them to understand consulting, we could train on that. I needed them to understand financial advisors." This change in focus helped her business stand out in the marketplace, she said.
"The toughest challenge today is the same challenge that I launched the consulting platform on, and that is capacity," she said. Ultimately, what a firm can achieve remains a function of whether it has enough talent to help it reach its potential, she said.
"The more great people that you have in your organization, generally the faster your organization will grow, and the faster it can expand capacity." For her part, Herbers is no longer afraid of steering her business toward growth.
