Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with

financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial

advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight

from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the

next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone.

Welcome to the 177th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest on today's podcast is

Sarah Stannage. Sarah is the founder of cultivating wealth, an independent RIA based in the New York City area

that oversees nearly 50 million of assets under management for 95 ongoing client households.

What's unique about Sarah, though, is the way she transitioned into the world of financial advice

as a career changer in the midst of the financial crisis and the

last bear market, which ultimately forced her into the independent channel with less support,

but more flexibility to build the business at her own pace, which in the end made it easier for

Sarah to craft the advisory firm she ultimately wanted to. In this episode, we talk in depth about

Sarah's journey through the

advisory industry. Why she initially started out in a major wirehouse for their training program

would let her to initially skip out on the independent RIA channel and make a switch to the

independent broker-dealer channel instead, but still choosing one with had more independence,

even if it meant a little less salary-based in training.

Why she ultimately made the decision to switch

to the RIA channel six years later anyway, though,

because of how much the support structures

for independent RAs had changed and developed

...