Woman and Finance: Shattering the Glass Ceiling with Sheryl Hickerson

Welcome to the FAST Podcast, Financial Advisor Strategy Talks with Lara Galloway, SVP of Financial Education at White Glove. Lara provides advisors with an opportunity to hear from some of the best minds in the business, follow along to learn quick tips to help you grow your business. From gaining new leads, to keeping current clients engaged and everything in between.

Now onto the show.  

Aric Johnson: Hello, and welcome to the FAST Podcast with your host Lara Galloway from White Glove. Lara, what's going on?  

Lara Galloway: Hey, Aric, we've got a great talk coming up today. I'm so excited.  

Aric Johnson: And for those that are seeing this on video, you're getting a dash of pink today. Not even a dash, more like a tsunami of pink is on the screen right now, and there's a great reason.

There is one thing missing though, Sheryl that I noticed. Can I bring that up? Can I ask you a question?

Sheryl Hickerson: Go for it.  

Aric Johnson: And this absolutely tells my age. I'm looking for a leather jacket that says Pink Ladies.

You have one?

Sheryl Hickerson: Now, it's funny you say that. [00:01:00] I have a black jacket that says that, and I wear that with pink. So, yeah.  

Aric Johnson: Well, it was leather. It was from Grease. The Pink Ladies. All right. Well, Lara, what are you guys talking about?  

Lara Galloway: I really wish we could just talk about Grease because I just watched that at home with my daughter again and oh man, we could sing along.

It would be great.  

Aric Johnson: Which one? Grease or Grease 2?

Lara Galloway: Well just Grease 1. Grease 2 we haven't done yet. We got to get into that one.  

So guys with me, the Pink Lady herself today is Sheryl Hickerson. Sheryl, I'm so excited to have you here today. Sheryl is running an amazing community called Females and Finance, which I am proud to be a member of.

I'm learning my way around. I'm so excited. Sheryl is on a mission to do a lot of teaching of social and digital marketing strategies for financial advisors and financial services organizations when she founded Females and Finance just a short while ago. I'm going to get the full download on that because what we want to talk about today is what she has done with this amazing community, why she built this community and how she built this community.

[00:02:00] 4,100 members strong, I believe. Golly. And you guys launched something called The Fearless Pledge, which is to get 100,000 women into the profession of financial services by 2025. I am so excited to talk about this. So Sheryl, I'm going to welcome you formally to the FAST podcast. Thanks so much for being here today.  

It's a pleasure. I'm so happy to see you again. I think we're going to run into each other at a few conferences coming up, so I can't wait. Okay, a very obvious question, Sheryl, if you could just give us a little bit of your background and the profession and why you chose to focus on women in the financial services industry.

Sheryl Hickerson: I appreciate that. I have been working in financial services since I was 19 and I had moved from Missouri to San Francisco. I picked a spot on the map and said, I'm just going to go there.

And I had a thousand dollars in my pocket and thought I was rich. And I was so poor. By the time you get there and you think you have this [00:03:00] money and you don't, and I had to get a job and don't tell mom the babysitter's dead. I'm not kidding. I went into the Kinko's in Berkeley, California and copied the resume straight out of the book and I faxed it off to the wrong number.

And thank you to the financial services institution that called me and said, hey, I think you're looking for something else, but we're hiring. Would you like to come in? I was like, yes. And so I did. I went in, I did an interview with them, and they hired me, and the rest is history. I literally have never worked another job outside of financial services since the get-go. And I just, I don't know, Lara, I just fell in love with it. It was one of those things where I connected with it and when I took that job, I don't think I really realized the amount of help that financial service professionals bring to everyday people.

And you know, we always are after the elephants out there that are going, I get it. But truly, when you look at everyday people, there is so much good stuff that happens there, especially when there's something bad that happens. [00:04:00] A lot of times there's a trigger. I love the work that we do and from what I found was as I was progressing through my career, oftentimes there's always the first and the only, right?

I was either the first person that became an account rep for that office, or I was the only woman in that office, and I just got tired of the first and I wanted to see what I could be doing because so many people had poured into me over the years. What could I be pouring into others?

And I really believed in the ability of crowd sources and crowdfunding. All of that idea of bringing good stuff together to help, you know, one too many kind of thing. And that's sort of how Females and Finance was sort of birthed from that concept.

Lara Galloway: I love what you just said.  

I've heard your story about walking into San Francisco with a thousand bucks like the world is your oyster, obviously. So clearly you have some skills as an entrepreneur, as a networker, as an [00:05:00] educator, as a leader that were nascent when you were 19 years old, and you've been able to grow those because I know I've heard you talk about mentoring and the coaching and stuff that you've had from some of the allies. I love what you just described there, and I think it sets the scene perfectly, especially when you go into talking about crowdsourcing because what better way to connect your ability to network and be that fire start?

For a group, right? To get people together on an idea, but then to combine that with financial services and say, here's where we can do good. Here's a place ripe for doing good. Then Females and Finance was born.

Sheryl Hickerson: Well, I did a ton of research between 2017 and 2018.

2018 became sort of a special interest group on Facebook. I was looking for a repository, to be honest with you. I didn't have money. I just wanted to be able to collect people into a space that we could dialogue. [00:06:00] And Facebook groups were natural, LinkedIn groups as well, but there's a lot of work that still needs to be done.

But it was very fast approaching when I started. I got to be honest with you, Lara, I went into it thinking if I could get 200 women to listen to me, and that happened like in eight days. I mean, honestly, that was just picking up the phone for every original OG out there.

Because my call sounded a lot like, Hey girl, I'm going to do this thing, I'm not even sure what I'm doing, but will you help me? And they're like, of course. Of course. And it just progressed from that. And so I never ever thought at that time that this would be thousands of people, much less me going out and talking about trying to change a profession, to a hundred thousand in numbers.

Lara Galloway: Amazing. I think it takes somebody willing to do that little bit of roll up your sleeves and get out and call people individually. I mean when Adam Holt said that you were telling us earlier [00:07:00] that he couldn't believe that you started this community without advertising.

Let's talk about that a little bit.

Sheryl Hickerson: Yeah, that's a big one. I think that there's advertising in the sense that you can go out market, but I do make posts about Females and Finance, so I want to be very transparent about that.

But as far as paid media going out and doing paid advertising and such, no I did not. I still have never done that. I get so much word of mouth traction. I mean, even just before you and I got on this call, I've got four emails in there from members who are introducing me to another person. That to me is much more authentic in the way I like to do connecting versus going out and being like, Hey, come over here and do this, or whatever.

Instead, what I do is I try to just put the spotlight on our members and then say, if this is something that is appealing to you or attractive to you, come and join us. It's funny because that ask in and of itself alone, as people think half the time, there's no way that there's an organization out there that really wants to see me be successful, what's in it [00:08:00] for me kind of a thing.

And it's been really hard because it sounds so kumbaya when you say it out loud, the things that we do, I mean, you've seen some of it behind the scenes too, just from being a member, but it really is listening and putting your ear very closely to the women and the male allies of what is it that you need to get from here to there kind of thing.

The marketing part for me is fairly easy. I got a lot of awards back here that say I do that job well. But the other part of it, which is how do we connect people to real success points for them and everybody has a different success point, and because I can't deem you successful and you can't deem me, it's an intrinsic feeling we have, right?

I'm really interested in each of the members when we talk to them about, what does success look for you? How do we get you there? All the while remembering going back to our mission and holding onto that as sort of our chassis of hiring, mentoring, training and advancing women. So that's what I get up every day and think those four elements are what my job really is, and then everything we build.

And [00:09:00] the one good thing about women is we tell other women when things are good. You know, one bad thing about women is we tell other women bad when things go bad. If you're listening to this right now, we are very closely knit network. And I try hard to make certain that information sharing is open to them.

There's not a lot of flat architectures that they can just share when they need to and share openly, honestly. The good and the bad comes with that, and it's just been a natural progression. So I really haven't had to do paid advertising, if you will.

Lara Galloway: So, you've mentioned a few things there.

The mentoring, the training, the coaching, the lifting up. But also that word of mouth and connecting people. What's the biggest void, Sheryl, that you see in the industry right now that you're trying to fill with Females and Finance?  

Sheryl Hickerson: I'd say some of the biggest void today is on both sides of the discussion. So, on one side of it, I get calls today [00:10:00] from those who come with a scarcity mindset and say, why do you people have to do this?  

I love those calls actually, because then I know immediately not my person, I don't have the time to step into teaching somebody how to change their viewpoint on that, because it's not you people, it's all of us trying to make a better profession, just leaving it better than the way we found it.

Do you want to go back to scouting language? I mean, that's what our job is, isn't it? In addition to serving ourselves, we're also serving our profession and serving our clients. And at least that's the way I always took that job and that role quite seriously, especially from an ethical standpoint and other things that are there, I want to make certain we're building a better profession.

But I think that there's a lot of those who are still pushing against the I don't change, I don't like change, I don't want change. On the other side of it, I'm also going to push on the women and we have to lean into it as there's a lot of times where there's opportunity.

Let's just put a bucket of opportunity out there, right? [00:11:00] It's the adage of leading the horse, the water, they have to still drink it themselves. We're still pushing from a confidence mindset. You've got to go after the bucket of opportunity yourself. And we all know this.

Anybody listening has read, heard, wherever that a hundred percent of the skillset, oftentimes women think they have to achieve to be able to drink from the bucket of water, the opportunity. And that's absolutely not true. And even today, what I think we learned from the pandemic, which was the best thing that probably could have happened at the worst time to start a business.

We got this momentum going, then all of a sudden everybody was like, hold our beer. You know, you're going to sit back here for a minute and you're not going anywhere. And we were really able to pivot quite easily with our group, but the women specifically because they're so used to being of change.

So you've got one group who doesn't want to change, you've got the other one who can change. And then you've got two differences of we need [00:12:00] both, to lean into that problem. And I almost don't even like to use that because I know people are going to come at me with the Sheryl Sandberg stuff, but it's really the truth.

We have to find the issue and we have to do a little bit more on our part on this side, and they have to do a little bit more and that little bit more goes back to crowdsourcing. It's just that little bit, that's where we make monumental differences later on. The butterfly effect if you will.

Lara Galloway: I think there's so many lessons in here that people can learn. There are financial advisors listening to this who are women and who are going, wow, I need a network like that. I need support like that. I need to lean in and take this stuff on myself. There are financial advisors who are men, and they're listening and they're thinking, how can I support some of these women?

I know you're very big about your male allies and there's so many great guys that are out there that are supporting this cause too. What are some other things that maybe like, just in terms of supporting this [00:13:00] community, let's just be selfish. What's in it for me? If somebody's listening to this and they're thinking, what's in it for me? What would you say to that, Sheryl, about why does it make sense to support women in the financial services industry?  

Sheryl Hickerson: Well, besides the fact that it just feels good, we like to do things that feel good I mean, charitable donations and things of that nature.

They just feel good when we can help somebody else. And the other thing is too, that we don't know what we don't know. And a lot of times the feel good component of this is micro, it's truly that small. For example, some of the men allies come into our community and say things like I want to work with women better.  

What's a good way to start that. And then the women are like, I'm so glad you asked. What are you doing? A live example, we were on a networking call and we had a gentleman come in who's one of our male allies, one of our very best allies in the sense that he oftentimes pays for women who cannot afford their membership and they don't know it's him.

He [00:14:00] will literally tell me, if somebody really can't do it, just tell me and I'll pay, I'll help. And that's helped some of our younger women come in and not have to incur our annual $25 membership. It's not excessive, but I mean, sometimes, you can't meet that.

But that gentleman had a position available in his office that he wanted to hire immediately for. I asked him to pull up the position on the screen. Let's look at this, what you wrote. Okay, so you've got like eight women on this call. And he did, he pulls it up in front and we shared the screen, and immediately I'm like, take this off.

Don't say that you need to add the word flexible. Do you really need that or is that nice to have? And before you know it, this one-page job description came down to probably a third of a page. And a lot of things were truly optional. Some of it was firm and it had a much nicer flare to it. And what's much more attractive to us in appealing to women to say, okay, that's a job I would like to do.

[00:15:00] Because one of the things that I am very firm on is that for real change to truly happen, everybody has to be included in the dialogue.

We cannot cut off an entire group of individuals. Men for examples, a big one. Just because I'm saving dolphins doesn't mean I'm killing whales. I want to have all of the resources out there. We just need to be swimming in the right ocean, if you will. But I do think that the group that we've created, because our members and the way we've done it, we have such a respectful group, a helpful group, with completely differences of opinions across the spectrum, as many as you could possibly think of, but still, so giving to one another just because, and doing business together with people who had never known one another before.  

Honestly [00:16:00] when I go to sleep at night, the thing that I tell my husband is I lay my head down at night and I feel like I've done a good job here. I've already left a legacy in this profession. Just building this, which was part of my goal in trying to transform our profession.

But it's the onesie, twosies. It goes back to the micro changes that I continually try to remind people that we can do one little change or adding one little person to your group to be able to talk differently than you ever have before. That's how we expand the rubber band of our profession.

So we don't just stay in the static situation that we've been in for so many years.  

Lara Galloway: I love that analogy. That's a great idea. So, do you find yourself in your group and all these conversations that you're having, all of these times that you're meeting with your members and doing the wonderful membership group like you have a lot of events, webinars and stuff where people are getting together.

Do you find there's a certain kind of question or a piece of advice [00:17:00] that you're giving more often than others?

Sheryl Hickerson: Yes. And it's about confidence. We have a tendency as women overall and maybe I’m overgeneralizing this, but we're still trying to get the confidence level up. It's amazing to me for example, I'll have a woman be doing a discovery call, for every member who comes in, they can go sign up.  

I encourage anybody who wants to go ahead, but you're still going to have to come through and talk to me. That's the way it works and I'm looking for abundance minded individuals and I'll get a lot of times women who'll get on a call and it'll sound very much like this, and I'll be asking them about their business and tell me about your work.

And I always say, talk about your greatness. We all have greatness. We all remember this right now. If there's anything else that I've said in this, you know, today, I don't care. This is it. You literally woke up today and you've won the lottery of life. You're here. The greatness is already inside of you.

People like me, my job is to pull that out of you so that it [00:18:00] shines bright so that you can be successful and go out and make better change happen wherever that might be. And it's interesting because I'll talk to somebody and suddenly, they'll say to me, I've written two books and I will have known this person for nine or 10 years sometimes. And I'm like, well, hold on. Wouldn't you write these books, and they'll say, oh, I did that in the past. I'm working on something else. And what that says to me is, oh, I've solved cancer.

I'm on the world peace. Like, we won't even sit in our greatness. We won't even relish in the moment that we took something so profound out of our brain and we put it into writing and we bound it and we put it out there for people in a very vulnerable way and exposed our words to people.

That's brave, that's big. That's to be celebrated. And yet we won't even take the time to sit in our celebrations. So, the confidence conversation is every day, all the way, all the time. And I think that that's just going to continue [00:19:00] to be a theme. And so, we make that a big part of the work that we do, and I always give everybody a voice in our organization so they can talk about their greatness and get very comfortable dialoguing.

Lara Galloway: I can vouch for that. You did exactly that for me when I joined on our call and you mentioned that thing about the books, and I said, well, okay. So, I pulled my book down and showed it to you. And I don't often do it. And you're absolutely right, I don't talk about it as much as I should, and I appreciated that opportunity.

And you do such an amazing job propping out all of your members. I mean, the amount of posts I see where you are shouting about the success of another person, whether it's a woman or a man. Again, I do want to always honor the fact that even though this is a Females and Finance community, I really appreciate what you're doing about, the dolphins and the whales, right?

Including both and just the success that you make normal for this group. I think it's phenomenal. I absolutely agree with you on that mindset piece and the confidence piece, [00:20:00] back in my coaching days, one of the things that I used to talk about when I did a lot of speaking, I would say, do you remember?

I know you do. You and I are similar age. You remember Wonder Woman and her bracelets and she could defend those bullets nonstop, right? With her fantastic bracelets. And I would say that's pretty much women, when we are given a complication we pretty much break out the bracelets and start.

Sheryl Hickerson: Oh yeah, we downplay. We do. Oh, that's nothing, right? You know? No big deal.  

Lara Galloway: It's so true. So, my children, I have five, well, six with Daryl's stepson, but my five kids will tell you I am the first one who was at the games going, you can do this.

I remember one time my daughter, for example, was supposed to walk across the stage to win a particular [00:21:00] award. And they were supposed to bring their parent that encouraged, which at that time was her dad. And for whatever reason, he wasn't there. He wasn't on time.

And I'm sitting in the back and I'm watching her, and I could see her kind of looking to the back like, Where's dad? And all the other people had their kids. As soon as she put that first step on the stairs, I'll never forget what took me, I just set everything down I took off and I mean, in jeans and a t-shirt I'm running because I thought there's no way my daughter's going to be up there without her person. I wanted her to have her support person.  

Sheryl Hickerson: So, I'm a hype person and the reason why that sounds easy to do, but it's not is because you're trying to find the things that make them. Too often when we're talking to professionals, I guarantee anyone listening to this right now will say things like you know, I’m a financial planner.

That doesn't make you interesting. It doesn't make you different. I'm sorry. It just doesn't. I want to get down to the real nitty gritty, vulnerable part of who you are, why you do this work, and when you really start pushing on people and you really make them [00:22:00] uncomfortable, all of a sudden they'll say my mom didn't have any money.

Like they almost get defensive about it. I came from a single parent and we didn't have money. I love that because that right there is what you need to be telling people. That's your pitch and that's your difference. That's your uniqueifier.

That's great. It's one of those things where I'm trying to pull that out of you so that you can go out there and share that with people and the rest of the profession needs to know this person's really unique. Let's celebrate that uniqueness. And I think that's really important, especially for women.

Lara Galloway: I love that. That's so true. And we work a lot with Deirdre Van Nest. We love her too, she does that. One thing I love about everything that you've shared, you've got a lot of successes under your [00:23:00] belt.

You celebrate other people's successes, but I'd love to just hear from you something that you are the most proud of.  

Sheryl Hickerson: Well, I'm always most proud of being a mother. I know that sounds maybe a little bit not what people expect or just seems so cliche or whatever, but honestly I get teary-eyed just saying it. I love my children.

I have three children, two I foster and adopted five children and each one of my kids are look at me getting teary-eyed, just talking about my kids. That's how much I love them. I do love my children. I love to be a mom. I loved every minute of being a mom, even though they drove me nuts. That to me was what made me proud.

I love helping somebody at the core of who I am. When I see them get to something, I'm like, yeah, they won. You know, that to me is a huge part of the winning. But it started with my kids, I always go back to my son Justin. I was a single mom when I was a [00:24:00] teenager.

And that's one of the things that made me really slow down. And I'll never forget, I was about 19 and he was standing in my kitchen and he had his jacket on, and he looked down and he says, mama, he says, these zippers look like lots of M's. Look, mom. And I sit there and I said, you know what?

You are so smart. You are right that I'm totally going to be late to work, but who cares because you know what the letter M is and it was just that first time of noticing that I wanted to celebrate someone's win. I knew it back then but mothering really helped me do that.  

Lara Galloway: Man, I think that's perfect.

There’s really a perfect metaphor for anything, right? Like so much of the work to do for financial services is educating, helping, nurturing, helping people learn what they need to know to take control of their future financially and make things possible for them.

Sheryl Hickerson: Right. Like you just said when you [00:25:00] started this conversation, how there's so much impact a financial advisor can have on the life of their clients. And it's a mirror of motherhood for sure, it really is. As a mom, I have no trouble with that. And you know, I also want to say my own personal advisor is Ian Freeman.

And Ian said something one time that stuck with me for so many years now that I can't let it go. And he said, our only job in this profession is when our clients come to us and say, am I going to be okay? Do I have an answer? That's our job every day is waking up and looking at these families that trust us, or business owners or clients or however you want to define them and say, can all of them come to me right now and say I'm going to be okay?

And we have the answers planned for them that they are going to be okay. And a lot of this was because they were affected by 9/11 with a lot of families and he knew in that moment, for the rest of my life, that's my job. And I love that analogy too. So if mothering isn't for everyone, I get it.

Lara Galloway: Please know [00:26:00] that I respect that. But we do have to answer, am I going to be okay? That really is our job. And again, taking it seriously for your clients, you know? When I do a lot of coaching for our advisors who do workshops with White Glove, and during the pandemic, when we had to switch from seminars to webinars, I got to watch, I actually got to see these guys doing their thing, and I realized when I was doing that, so many financial advisors are relying on the market, the stats, the volatility the returns.  

Like that's not what your clients or your potential clients care about. They literally have one question. Am I going to be okay? That's it. You make sure I'm going to be okay. If you can, you got a job,

Sheryl Hickerson: That's it. That's literally all it is. And that's why, although for me, mothering is the thing that I attach onto so, so strongly. It is part of how I define myself probably almost first and foremost. But I think that, going back [00:27:00] to what you just said there, you know, and I love to give props to Ian on that because that to me was the first time it really opened my eyes to this is exactly what our job is.

And I love it. Making great returns, having more money on top of more money. All that's great. But the financial floor that has to be taken care of is, am I going to be okay? That's it. That's so good. That's your mantra and you go through your Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

That's foundationally what you're looking at. It all absolutely ties.  

Lara Galloway: Well, wrapping up here, Sheryl, I was going to say, do you have like a personal mantra? Do you have one on top of that? But I feel like, God, if we can, cite that one from Ian, it's so good.

Sheryl Hickerson: I'll say that I add to that. I also want to remind people I have a stencil on my wall so I never forget it. I used to just have a plaque, but I actually stencil it on the wall and it says Dr. Maya Angelo says, when people show you themselves the first time, this is very important to the success of businesses.

[00:28:00] So as you are working with individuals, I don't care if it's vendors, clients, whatever that looks like, if something doesn't feel right, if it feels off trust that deeply because every single time I have it, it's burned me. And I think that instead now I listen to my gut very clearly, and honor her, however that looks for someone else.

I want you to remember that you're here to do work, to share your greatness at every job. My daughter my youngest child is an adult with autism, and she said to me, every job is to serve another human being. Look at any job. And I did. I sat one night and I thought, what? There's got to be a job that's self-serving.

There really isn't. Every job is to serve another person that I've been able to come up with. And if that's the case, do it with people that you enjoy. Do it with people that you love. And if they are painful and you felt it, [00:29:00] go back to Maya Angelou's quote on that, because it always serves you.

Lara Galloway: Those are some fine words to live by. Before I let you go, Sheryl, would you let people know how they can find out more about Females and Finance and your fearless pledge?  

Sheryl Hickerson: Oh my goodness. Go to fearlesspledge.com. That's it, that's all you got to do, and it'll take you right to the page. And I want to give a shout out to Jen Rutley.

Jennifer Rutley with Hidden Insights Group, who we've partnered with to help us with our survey component. And also she's the executive director of our pledge and has done such a fabulous job in helping us create change.

Lara Galloway: Well, it has been a pleasure spending this time with you, Sheryl. Thank you so much for being a part of our podcast today.  

Sheryl Hickerson: Absolutely. Thank you for this. This has been fantastic.  

Aric Johnson: Sheryl, I'm going to just echo what Lara said. Thank you so much. As a father of a daughter and a grandfather of a granddaughter, I can't thank you [00:30:00] enough.

I mean, this is something that's needed all the time, and so I'm excited to help my daughter get plugged into things like this and find her success career-wise in all sorts of aspects. But thank you for what you do. Of course, Lara thank you for all you do with White Glove.

If folks want to reach you and just kind of want to learn more about what White Glove does and why you're so heavily connected in a network with such amazing people, how do they get ahold of you?  

Lara Galloway: Well, they can always find us on the website at  whiteglove.com or shoot us a message at info@whiteglove.com  

Aric Johnson: Awesome.

Thank you both again, and of course one last thank you always goes to you, the listening audience. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening to the FAST Podcast with Lara Galloway. If you have not subscribed to the podcast yet, please click the subscribe now button below this way, when Lara comes out with a new podcast, it'll show up directly on your listening device, and we humbly ask that you share this podcast, read it, and leave a review as this actually does help others find the show.

Again, thank you so much for listening today. For everyone at White Glove, this is Aric Johnson reminding you to live your best day every. And we'll see you next time. [00:31:00] Thank you for listening to the FAST Podcast Financial Advisor Strategy Talks with Lara Galloway, your go-to source, designed to help you grow your business.

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