Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
October 10, 2012 at 01:27 PM
The Raymond James Women’s Symposium kicked off Wednesday with a schedule of events designed to make it clear to women advisors from the newly acquired Morgan Keegan that they are a welcome addition to the firm.
Now in its 18th year, the symposium is seeing its largest attendance ever, at more than 300 individuals, 26 of whom were Morgan Keegan advisors until the merger became final in April. The popular three-day event, held at the Don CeSar Hotel in St. Pete Beach, Fla., also includes eight women advisors from firms such as Wells Fargo (WFC) and Morgan Stanley (MS), who are considering moving their books of business to Raymond James.
Raymond James Financial (RJF) said April 2 that it had completed the acquisition of Morgan Keegan from Regions Financial, paying $1.2 billion in cash. In an interview with Research magazine at the time, Raymond James COO Dennis Zank said he expected most of Morgan Keegan’s 1,000 advisors to join Raymond James, and that 98% of the 600 Morgan Keegan reps presented with retention offers had signed a letter of intent to join the firm and that of the 98%, 96% had already submitted their paperwork to do so.
With the paperwork out of the way, the two corporate cultures joining at the Raymond James Women’s Symposium focused on the positives of change. The first day’s events, held in a sunny ballroom that was filled to capacity, were peppered throughout with laughter, many one-on-one conversations, and a feeling of camaraderie among women who were clearly eager to network with one another.
“Embrace change even when it’s uncomfortable,” said Susan Goodman, speaker and chief awareness officer of the training firm Pursue Possibilities, during the symposium’s first workshop, a relaxed session that encouraged advisors new and old to define their investment strategy and use Raymond James tools such as Wealth Management Solutions and Asset Management Services to get there.
Also on hand to welcome Morgan Keegan advisors were three new Raymond James women advisors who told their own stories of why they decided to join the firm:
Marcia Person of Raymond James & Associates, the firm’s employee channel, initially became an advisor because she realized when getting a divorce that she could do a better job than the advisor that her husband had hired. She walked into Smith Barney in 1994 with a psychology background and said, thinking that being an advisor would be equivalent to a sales job, “If you teach me, I can sell anything.”
