Message from the CEO - The Real One

Hello FinGym Friends and Family!

Yesterday, you may have seen an atypical "Message from the CEO." Long-time supporters of the Gym will know that I personally write all of the emails that come with my name attached to them. Yesterday's email was not written by me, but this "mistake" is actually a gift because it reminded me that I haven’t shared with you more about our CFT School.

Twelve years ago, I became a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch with the hopes of changing financial advisory. Before this, I met and worked with too many advisors at Merrill Lynch who seemed no better than a used car salesperson (and ironically many of them were car salespeople before they were advisors) and I just knew there was a better way to support people on their financial journeys. I set out to become the advisor I wanted in my life — someone trustworthy, someone who gave advice they would take themselves and someone who truly cared for their clients and took responsibility for their  financial success.

When I started the Financial Gym, it was not only to serve a community of underserved people, but it was also to continue to build a better “advisor.” Two years into my Financial Gym journey, I knew that I had created the “secret sauce” of being a financial trainer, and I set out to raise money to hire and train others in what I felt was the “right” way to be a financial advisor. However, almost every investor I spoke to said something along the lines of, “Your results are great, but that’s because you’re great and you can’t replicate you.”

For the record, I never wanted to replicate myself; I was looking for individuals who were “compassionate, empathetic, desired to help people and had a love of personal finance,” and that description was certainly not limited to me. Anyone can learn about ETFs, term life insurance or APRs, but not everyone has the compassion to sit with someone while they cry because they’re scared to check their credit score. My response to those investors was that Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley replicate advisors all day long, it doesn’t mean they’re good, and I think more financial trainers need to exist in the world.

Over six years ago now, I met Bridget Todd, employee #1 and financial trainer #2 of The Financial Gym, and with my training of Bridget, the Certified Financial Trainer program officially began. Since Bridget, we have trained more than 77 trainers over the past five years, and through this process, we have learned so much about not only sourcing and training new trainers, but also mentoring and supporting their growth as they support their clients. 

A few years back, I remember listening to two of our financial trainers who I did not personally train on our Financially Naked podcast, and thought, “Wow, we’ve figured it out; we’ve figured out how to share our ‘secret sauce’ and it’s even better than I imagined.” We didn’t replicate me. We found the compassionate and empathetic people that I knew we would and shared everything we learned with them.

As many of you know, the last few years have been particularly challenging for Financial Gym. Towards the end of 2021, we were thinking about growth opportunities and how we could continue to spread financial literacy on our very challenged budget and we decided on offering CFT® as a licensing opportunity. Before then, CFTs were only full-time employees of the Gym, but we realized that even though we didn’t have the capacity to hire hundreds of full-time teammates, we didn’t want to keep our “secret sauce” amongst a small pool of people any longer. 

So, in January of this year, we kicked off our first cohort of CFT School with the goal of seeing how the program could work and if it was something we thought we could be successful doing. From our standpoint, success is knowing that if anyone works with someone who has the CFT® designation, they can feel confident that they’ll be working with a compassionate, empathetic person who has their best interests at heart. They will not only get great financial guidance, but they will also receive non-judgmental and encouraging support along their journey.

I am so pleased to share that after five cohorts of CFT School, we know that this is not only a program worth investing in if you’re thinking about a career change, side hustle or extra financial literacy, but that if you work with someone with our proprietary CFT® designation, you are in great hands. If we are limited in availability for trainers, as we will be when we’re closed for the week of August 29th, and our warm up team connects you with a CFT®, I guarantee you that it will be the same experience you would have with a full-time FinGym trainer. The CFTs that we would directly link you to utilize all of our technology and resources, are a part of our Slack community and are continually mentored and supported by our team at Financial Gym. 

What I love most about this program is that it gives us the opportunity to allow so many people the ability to think about advisory differently or start their own business or help people live their best lives. I would love to have 500 full-time trainers, but more than that, I would love to support 500 business owners whose business is the same as mine — providing compassionate and empathetic financial guidance to underserved communities. Goodness knows there’s so many of them out there, and this program will allow us to get to the communities even faster than we could internally. 

If you’d like to find out more about the program, you can check out the website here. Please know that if someone from Financial Gym connects you with a CFT®  that person has my guarantee and they’ve been trained and are continually coached and mentored by my team here, and you can trust them as you would any full-time trainer at Financial Gym.

Cheers!
Shannon McLay (the real one)
Founder & CEO
The Financial Gym

PS: The Gym will be closed the week of August 29th so that the team can enjoy the final days of summer and rest up for a busy season ahead of us.