Making money and/or creating wealth
January 28th, 2008 by monies“I made all the mistakes,” said Williams, 45, from her 2,500- square-foot office suite on N. Robinson in Oklahoma City, where she heads the Williams Financial Services Group, which serves about 225 investors.
“Like a lot of African-Americans, when I first started making money, I went after a lot of possessions,” she said. “I learned, like everybody else, that possessions do not lead to financial security.” Often, it’s just the opposite.”
She said that about 15 years ago, when she was becoming a star salesperson for Equitable Life Insurance Co. of New York and big commissions were starting to roll in, she did what most of us would have done: bought nice things for herself.
“One should [save] at least three to six months’ take home income before getting that beautiful living-room furniture,” Williams reflected. “Of course it’s hard to do that when you want things n-o- w.”
The oldest of eight children, Williams grew up in Philadelphia in a neighborhood so impoverished that once, dumbstruck, the family found their refrigerator robbed of all its food. To the usual problems of providing for a large household, her father, a postal worker, was also burdened by heart disease. He died when Williams was 19 and had only $15,000 in life insurance.
“I saw all the problems a family can have,” said Williams, who, while still a child, resolved to raise herself from poverty and help others do the same.
She won an academic scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh, graduated with a degree in psychology and was recruited, while still in college, to join the sales staff of Equitable. She built a sales record on cold calls and hard work. “I was too naive to know what I couldn’t do,” she said.
Did she have a mentor? She laughed and said: “I sure could have used one. I did have good training materials and I read every book I could on sales and on the insurance industry. I knew my products very well.” Within a year she was the top salesperson in her group.
Over the previous years she had married, become a mother and moved to Oklahoma City for a fresh start. Although they divorced, she remained in Oklahoma City. Her oldest son is 24 and lives in Atlanta. She and her second husband, a home designer, also with offices on N. Robinson, have three children, 16, 11 and 7. In addition to her membership in the Women Presidents’ Organization, she is president of the local chapter of Jack and Jill, one of the oldest and most exclusive social clubs for African-Americans, founded in 1938 in her hometown of Philadelphia.
“I was happy to become a member of Jack and Jill,” said Williams, “but my mother, who now lives here in Oklahoma City, was very proud.”
The only one among her siblings to have finished college, Williams says she enjoys the reputation in her family of having made it, financially, but her own assessment is more cautious.
“You can think you’re rich and not have that much wealth,” she said, adding that her ambitions for her own business are to grow her sales staff from one to four and to move away from commissions and become a totally fee-based company. A financial planner’s fee is typically 1.5 percent of a portfolio’s value per year, for holdings of less than $100,000. Williams stresses that wealth consists simply in having most of your assets in forms that are likely to increase in value over the years.
When she left Equitable eight years ago to go it alone, she found a niche among schoolteachers who poorly understood their retirement plans. She brought in pizzas for teachers during their lunch hour, during which she would point out gaps in their plans and open the door to selling them supplemental products like annuities and life- insurance policies. Today, in light of the tech meltdown, she advises clients to balance their stock holdings among six categories: government securities, bonds, value stocks, growth stocks, small capitalization stocks and cash. You want to shift money, she said, toward the conservative end of the spectrum — cash, government securities, bonds and value stocks — until winners re-emerge from the ruins of dot-com companies.
She feels a particular need to help African-Americans create wealth.
“I begin every sale with education, telling clients about my own experience, and finding out about their experiences, and learning how much we have in common,” she said. “Education almost always leads to sales, but, and I am telling the truth, between educating and selling, I would much rather educate. That’s the future.”
She is trying to find time to write a book she has never seen in the marketplace. The working title: The Journey to Financial Planning for African Americans.
Marsha Firestone is the president and founder of the Women Presidents’ Organization. For information on WPO, call (212) 688- 4114 or visit www.womenpresidentsorg.com.
Author: Marsha Firestone
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