Like other industries, financial services is grappling with societal inequities. Does leadership reflect the profile of the rank-and-file or its customers? Do employees have equitable opportunities for promotions and raises? Right now, RIA firms, like those across the industry, are largely white and male.

But the RIA industry developed, in part, because of advisors’ desire to forge their own paths and to better control how they help their clients. And that ethos of independent thinking could help set the standard for how to better create a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

Scott Rister, president of Budros, Ruhlin & Roe in Columbus, Ohio, said the need for diverse voices became clear to him after he attended a Northwestern University program in 2016 that brought together executives from all around the world.

“It opened my eyes to the value of bringing people together who think differently; you solve problems differently,” said Rister, who is also a member of the inaugural Capital Group RIA Advisory Board. “The bigger the decision, the more I want other people who think differently than me at the table.”

Here are four suggestions that Rister and other RIAs have for firms that want to be more diverse and inclusive:

1. Look for candidates before you have an open position.

The oft-cited reason for a lack of diverse faces ─ despite years, if not decades, of calling attention to the lack of them ─ has usually been that there is a pipeline problem, that there just aren’t enough qualified candidates from a variety of backgrounds available to hire.

Waiting until a position is open and needs filling typically means relying on existing networks, which are likely not as diverse as they should be. “If you truly want to build a diverse team and culture, leaders have to be intentional and be out there networking in groups where you can attract that talent,” Rister said.

Buoyed by his experience at Northwestern, Rister said he began seeking out ways that he could promote diversity at Schwab, where he spent 20 years in a variety of management positions before joining his current firm in 2019. “We looked to tap into Black business organizations, made more of a grassroots effort” to find candidates and build up a robust pipeline, he said.

“If you look in different places and keep an open mind, you will find diversity,” said Rita Lee, principal, vice president and director of research at Brouwer & Janachowski in San Francisco. “It’s worth investing the time.”

For Lee, that meant setting aside the more marquee names of the Bay Area’s institutions of higher education — where the competition for recruits is high anyway — and looking to forge relationships with students at smaller, more regional colleges like Saint Mary’s College of California and San Francisco State University.

2. Being an advisor is about more than numbers.

Sure, business and financial programs on campuses seem like the natural hunting ground for candidates for RIA firms. But the advisory business also needs skills in psychology and sociology in equal measure. Financial planning is not just about crunching numbers; it’s also about helping clients figure out the formulas that enable them to realize their goals. That’s something that requires the ability to talk with and understand other people.

“I can’t teach you empathy,” said Kelly Hokanson, owner and certified financial planner at The Planned Approach in Kansas City, Missouri. “You either have it or you don’t.”

Hokanson has a background in psychology, but that work began to take its toll. Looking for alternative careers, she turned to the financial advisory business, an area with which she was familiar because her father was in the industry. But she landed at a brokerage that had a very macho environment with very few women. “Opportunities were always given to the other men in the room,” she said. “I had not grown up like that coming from teaching where [women] were in the majority.”

Hokanson believes that her nontraditional path to financial services has shaped the evolution of her firm since she and a cofounder started it in 2002. The Planned Approach is now comprised of five women ─ including one who’s Black ─ and Hokanson says that, because of this, the firm has built a practice helping clients that might otherwise be overlooked by traditional advisory firms.

“We’re looking for candidates with the aptitude for the work, even if they don’t have the experience or the training,” said Lee, who is also a member of Capital Group’s RIA Advisory Board. “With the right coaching mentor, they can be trained to be a good financial advisor.”

3. Move from creating networks to building alliances.

Networking helps to start relationships. But to build lasting bonds, Rister and Lee say they, with their firms, have formed alliances with nonprofits and college programs in their communities to find a diverse set of candidates. Lee said she has gravitated toward students in fields such as social work at regional colleges, individuals and institutions that typically don’t receive much attention from recruiters in the financial world.

Her firm’s most recent hire was sourced through 10,000 Degrees, a local nonprofit that helps students from low-income backgrounds obtain college degrees. “They are grounded and hungry to listen and to learn,” she said. “They just need an opportunity.”

For the past five years, Rister’s firm has had a scholarship aimed at bringing more women into wealth management. The program includes a paid summer internship as well as $1,500 toward the student’s tuition the following year. “When we first started that, we’d interview 10 people and only one person would be head-and-shoulders above,” he said. “Now because of some of the work with professors at the university, you’ve got 10 people we’re interviewing, and they all are great candidates.”

The firm is launching a diversity scholarship and is eyeing ways to get students as young as high schoolers interested in finance, for example, through sponsoring financial literacy curricula. “We’ve got to get in sooner with underrepresented groups,” Rister said. “It can’t be just a one-time conversation.”

Both Rister and Lee add that these efforts also help to introduce a facet of the business world that is not the predatory stereotype seen in popular culture. “One thing that goes against us in the industry is that we are lumped in with [the negative perception of] Wall Street,” Lee said. “But we are the good guys. We help make sure you don’t get taken advantage of.”

4. Don’t overlook the “inclusion” in D&I.

Rister said that as he worked on diversity efforts throughout his career, he began to hear feedback from white males who felt left out of the process. “They were saying, ‘I’m never going to be getting opportunities; my career is going to be limited,’” he added. “That opened my eyes that, if you really want to change a culture, everyone has to understand the value to them personally.”

Rister took part in one approach that he believes was particularly effective. It included talking about unconscious bias, encouraging employees to join affinity groups that they didn’t “belong” to in order to engage with a different set of people and, ultimately, making diversity and inclusion part of an employee’s specific goals. “We also became intentional in building committees and project teams with diverse representation, in not only race and gender, but age, background and years of industry experience,” Rister said. “You’re not always going to agree, and that’s OK. But when you start spending time with [a diverse set of people], learning about their culture, it helps to start taking down some of the walls.”