Leave it to a marketing maven to hit upon a really great podcast title—Women Rocking Wall Street.
In an industry overwhelmingly “male, pale and stale,” it’s sure to get attention, which it has.
The brainchild of retirement plan personalty Sheri Fitts, author, speaker and proprietor of ShoeFitts Marketing, “The Women Rocking Wall Street podcast was created with one goal in mind: empowering women to survive and thrive in the financial services workplace,” Fitts explains.
Not that it’s new. The podcast debuted in 2015, and now features approximately 60 episodes available on iPhones, tablets and other digital devices. But the number of projects she’s involved in meant her creative energies were, for a time, directed elsewhere.
It’s now about the reboot, “especially on the tail end of #MeToo, Time’s Up and all the conversations currently.”
She had what she calls an “in” at Morgan Stanley’s diversity and inclusion area, and sent a proposal recently for a sponsorship that the venerable wirehouse happily accepted.
“I’m working with a creative team out of San Francisco and with some of the people at Morgan Stanley to put it together, but it’s not a Morgan Stanley podcast at all. They’re just sponsoring it.”
Advisors and academics, leaders and tech
Past interview subjects include:
- Liz Davidson, CEO and founder of Financial Finesse, a Los Angeles based firm, providing millions of Americans with access to unbiased financial guidance through workplace financial wellness solutions.
- Michelle Clayman, CFA and CEO of New Amsterdam Partners, an institutional money management firm in New York.
- Jillliene Helman, CEO and co-founder of RealtyMogul. At 28, she made the Forbes magazine 2015 list of 30 Under 30 Rising Stars of Enterprise Technology and has underwritten over $5 billion of real estate.
“This new season, which launched on March 12, includes Winnie Sun, managing director with Sun Group Wealth Partners, who is one of the most social advisors on Twitter,” Fitts says. “Then we have Rachel Carpenter who has a fintech financial data firm. She’s a 29-year-old CEO who’s killing it. And then Lori MacKenzie, who’s a professor at The Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.”
While there’s an obvious theme to each episode, it there a template in the questions asked and topics covered?
“Each episode is completely different, based upon the person whom I’m speaking with, as to what avenue we will go down, but the conversations last about 20 to 25 minutes. It’s really kind of sad, because I could talk to these people for hours on end.”
There is one constant, however, a segment called “Coffee for Badass” (again, awesome) where Fitts acknowledges a person or entity doing something innovative related to diversity and inclusion outside of financial services.
For example, a group of female country music producers are working to increase the access women have to country music resources.
“This past December, for the first time in 28 years, there was not a woman on the Billboard Top 20 in country music,” she says. “Yeah, not good.”
However, she emphasizes that while a particular issue the podcast chooses to highlight might be a problem, the focus is on positive solutions that are meant to inspire.
“Eve Ellis, whom we previously featured, used to be a competitive tennis player and coach, and then she moved into financial services. She has something called the Parity Portfolio which is a portfolio that screens for the number of women on a company’s board before it screens for anything else. So that one was really cool for several reasons.”
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.
