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Dear Bev,
What do you do when you believe your morals and ethics are being tested on behalf of your career? I am a junior advisor at a well-known RIA. We are growing quite a bit every year. I finally “qualified” this year to start taking the lead on clients for one of our senior advisors. My advisor is a great guy, very affable and supportive. The problem is with the clients. He has assigned me to three men who are not very nice (in my view).
I am a 31-year-old female. In one case the client is a trophy hunter, something I loathe with all of my being; in another case the client uses the most derogatory language you can imagine for women (he actually referred to the woman at our front desk as “Chickie”). The third is politically “right” and lately has been talking about how thrilling it is to see “the dark-skinned people get gone.” I don’t enjoy giving direct quotes, but I need you to understand how completely disgusting it is for me to have to smile and be professional when, in any other circumstance, I wouldn’t even be staying in the same room with people like this.
I tried to bring some of this up with my senior advisor, and he literally told me that “boys will be boys” and not to get upset by it. He asked me if I wanted him to say something to them, but I believe that would diminish my professionalism in their eyes. In one case, with the trophy hunter, I told him I didn’t believe innocent animals should be killed when they are unarmed and living their lives, and he exploded on me. He told me I didn’t understand wealth and what money could do, and that I should basically mind my own business.
I’m so torn. I love my job, and the other 97% of clients I have been given are charming and receptive — truly delightful to work with. My fiancé really wants me to quit and look for another firm, but that seems like I am giving in and giving up. Can I manage this, and if so, how? Or should I use the opportunity to walk away and start over? I’m just worried I’ll run into the same thing somewhere else.
Anonymous
Dear Advisor,
It can be hard to live by that old adage, “the customer is always right,” when it comes to behavior you find deeply upsetting and that conflicts with your own moral compass. I remember, especially early in my career, dealing with institutional clients that went far beyond anything I could have imagined (and most of which I won’t go into in this column). Suffice to say I often had the experience I was selling my soul to get my job done. My boss would just tell me to take it or leave it. I either had to go along with what the client requested (within certain bounds, of course) or find another job. For a woman in our business, I think this is particularly hard because there is no “old girls club” like there is an “old boys club.”
To be clear, that isn’t to say women are better by nature, or all men act in ways that are offensive. It is a very, very few who are disrespectful, but those are the ones who make it particularly hard and can force you to question what you do for a living and whether it is worth it.
Bottom line: You don’t want anyone to force you to make a career decision based on their bad behavior. I don’t agree that you should quit the firm, but I do encourage you to ask your senior advisor if you could quit the clients. In fact, depending on how extreme and egregious their behavior and comments are, you might want to pose whether they are the kind of clients the firm wants to be working with at all. These might be large clients — and I don’t want you to lose respect by suggesting something your firm would never consider — but it’s worth asking yourself if the behavior is serious enough to warrant a discussion.
At a minimum, I think it’s perfectly fair to inquire if you could be removed from these client accounts. I know you are building your credibility and you just got formally assigned to these clients, so this would be taking a risk for you. That said, if you are at a place where your fiancé is encouraging you to leave, that means this has spilled over into your personal life and is having broad impact.
I don’t recommend running away from things in most cases. As Kelly Clarkson sings in “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)”, we want to get stronger by facing things we are afraid of. In most cases standing up to bullies or those people who ridicule you actually feels good. However, when it comes to important clients of the firm, you tried taking a stand and were chastised for it. I don’t know if you want to go out on a limb directly with any one of them again until you find out what your options might be — for example, to be removed from having to work with them.
I respect that you are confronting behavior that offends who you are as a person, and your moral leanings. The situation puts you in a place where you can’t ignore something you consider to be egregious. Unless you feel you can go into some happy Zen place in your mind when you interact with each of these clients, I don’t believe you have another choice but to raise this with your senior advisor and run the risk as being seen as too soft or not capable. In our careers we are making choices all of the time between one path or another. Sometimes they are pretty easy choices, and then — like with what you have written about — other times it is a no-win proposition and you have to choose what’s best for you.
Dear Bev,
I am writing this feeling very disappointed in the leader of our firm. During 2025 we lost a handful of key people, and I’ve been asked to take on additional responsibilities. I’ve done this because I care about the firm and I enjoy working here. Now that it is year-end, I was fully expecting I would be rewarded for what I’ve contributed.
My boss is not someone who believes people should get paid for more than what they do — “that’s why we give them a salary” is always his refrain. In my case, at some points I had two to three jobs in addition to my regular one. I was hoping he was going to do the right thing by me, but I left a meeting, right before I started writing this to you, where he told me the budget is tight and he isn’t sure what he can do.
In the meantime, I help with the books, so I know he and his three junior partners paid themselves almost twice what they got in 2024. Clearly budgets are not that tight.
Do I confront him? I don’t have an ownership stake, and I’ve only been here for a little over two
years. But if there isn’t anything extra for me (a) I am feeling like a fool for doing as much as I did and (b) I’m going to find it hard to work with him and trust him going into 2026.
Anonymous
Dear Advisor,
Oh boy, this is an example of why I always like to see things in writing. I’ve lost count of the number of times a client will tell me they know something is going to work out fine, but they don’t have any written commitment about exactly what that means and how it will unfold. I get the idea of taking on additional work because there isn’t anyone else there to do it, but that’s the point in time you have the most leverage to stop and ask what compensation will be aligned with the additional activities. If someone says “Trust me,” that’s a great cue to do exactly the opposite and ask them to put something in writing so you are both protected.
Fast forward to where you are now. You don’t have a commitment in writing, and your boss is basically telling you he doesn’t appreciate your additional contributions enough to reward you for them. You have to take some steps to make a case for why he is mistaken. I suggest gathering all of the things you have done this year outside of your job description and putting these in a document. Then, make a list of the people who left the firm and their job titles and the responsibilities you took on from each of them specifically. Your email had “Chief Administrative Officer” as your title, so I suggest seeing if you can find industry data on what CAO’s make in same-size RIAs. Often times your custodian has this information from their benchmarking activities.
Your best option is to make a case with your boss that you deserve something extra commensurate with the additional work you completed. Unfortunately, in this scenario your boss has the full power to either act on it or not. Your power will come over this next year when you learn to say “no” more often when asked to do things you aren’t getting paid to do!
That’s probably an unpopular way to respond, and I believe in most firms people do, from time to time, have to lend a hand because the firm needs it. In your case, it sounds like the situation was extreme and somewhere along the way you wanted to take a stand and make sure it was a fair arrangement. Going forward, you want to think critically about what “fair” looks like to you.
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry, in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. The firm has won the Wealthbriefing WealthTech award for Best Training Solution for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Beverly is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. She is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
