“One of my professional focuses over the last 12 months has been what we have deemed the ProGrowth movement.  With over 50 percent of America's wealth now controlled by women, according to Bank of Montreal's Wealth Institute, our focus has been on attracting more female advisors, and providing support for our current female advisors to evolve into even stronger sales leaders.

We took a three-pronged approach to this movement:

1. Virtual Women's Regional Advisory Boards — meet monthly and are designed to give women a louder and more confident voice in our distribution system. The boards also focus on best practices for advisor practice development.
2. Women's Sales Forum — an annual meeting for female advisors and sales leaders to come together to share best practices for their practice development.
3. General Agent Study Group — a focus group of self-selected general agents who focus on evolving their local cultures to embrace inclusion for women.

These collective efforts have combined to change the conversation so that women are recognized as significant contributors to our overall economy and our future success in financial services.”

Heidi Rasmussen, Co-Founder & COO, freshbenies

“In the past 12 months, I've overseen some large IT projects: launched an updated app, an updated website, a new CRM, artificial intelligence and automation (moving from Excel spreadsheets to proprietary systems that house data and automate internal processes). Let's just say the learnings have been rich! Here's my top four:

1. This process has forced me to poke into every area of my company to ensure the systems truly fit our needs. It can be painful to see where processes have gone off the rails, but I now think of it as a healthy cleaning process.
2. I must fight for a best-in-class customer experience. Just because I know how a system “should work,” doesn't mean it's easy to get all constituents on the same page.
3. It's necessary to bring my team along with me. Training a team to take over my role as leader is imperative, so that I can extract myself on major launches in the future.
4. After the launch, there's a strong pull for people to revert to the old way. I'm improving at the “trust but verify” concept. I trust that everyone is using the new systems correctly but verify often to ensure it's happening.”

Happy holidays to all of you, and as always, if you know of great women in the field who are working hard to make this this industry even better, send me an email introduction at [email protected].I'd love to connect!