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Rachel Elson is an advisor with Perigon Wealth Management, an $8.7bn registered investment advisor based in San Francisco.
I like to say I was Perigon’s first intern — or, at least, the first one that stuck.
Almost six years ago, when I went back to school for a career change, I landed at Perigon, working 20 hours a week while completing my CFP® certification coursework. I spent my first couple of months banging my head against our financial planning software, then worked to create capacity for the two advisors I was supporting.
As our business grew, it became clear that we needed to bring in another intern to help create capacity for all three of us — and then another intern after that.
Suddenly, we had an ‘intern program’ — and a good one. Since 2021, our team has brought on eight interns, not including myself. We’ve hired three full-time and are working to bring on a fourth in the coming months; the others are still in school, although three have chosen to pursue other finance-related careers.
When I tell other advisors what we do, they tell me it sounds too hard: ‘I don’t want to waste my time working with college students,’ I hear.
Yet building an internship program that works — and doesn’t waste anyone’s time — is both workable and essential for any team that wants to grow its business, especially as wealth managers contend with a shallow talent pipeline and stiff competition for quality candidates
And because we believe in sharing best practices with peers to make our profession stronger, we wanted to support the Net Positive Consortium in wealth management by explaining exactly how we do it.
Understand the value
The biggest hurdle is simply deciding to say yes: choosing to bring interns into your firm. Everything else is simply logistics — and as planners, we’re pretty good at those.
Over the last few years, our team has added several dozens of client households per year — and I don’t know how we would have managed without our rockstar interns. Our interns don’t do practice cases; we have them sign NDAs first, so they can help with real planning work.
Our interns review uploads of new client info, looking for gaps that need further inquiry. They enter the building-block facts into our planning software, creating a foundation for advisors to map out various plans and scenarios. They help us fill out ad hoc planning spreadsheets and generally provide hands-on support for many of our advisory efforts.
In doing so, they add incredible efficiency to our new-client onboarding process — generally the most laborious part of a client relationship — and create the capacity to let Perigon’s advisors focus our efforts on delivering great service to clients.
Know your pipeline
Our long-term goals for our internship program are pretty clear: We want to create a talent pipeline that attracts and trains young talent, creating capacity for more senior advisors in the short term and developing a fresh advisor cohort that will help Perigon succeed over the longer term.
All of which is to say: I don’t want to hire any intern who doesn’t have the potential to ultimately become an Perigon advisor.
In a perfect world, each of our undergraduate interns would come on board as a full-time planning associate after graduating, get their CFP certification, join meetings, get to know our clients and become a full part of our relationships. Over the long term, I’d want them all to become advisors with their own set of clients.
That’s not always going to be workable. Similar to what I tell clients when they ask about the market: I don’t have a crystal ball. We’ve certainly had wonderful interns who tried this path and then decided to pursue other careers.
But it does make us very picky about who we hire. If a finance major wants to ‘explore’ the world of financial planning, I’ll generally pass; I’d rather recruit people who already know and appreciate the profession. And if a student sends me an email riddled with errors, I look in another direction: If they don’t show sufficient care in addressing a potential boss, we couldn’t trust them to send follow-up notes to a client.