Ep. 21: Radical Transparency: How Financial Advisors Can Build Team Trust and Reduce Turnover with Zack Hubbard
Most firms invest heavily in client relationships while quietly neglecting the internal ones. The result is predictable: talented people leave, institutional knowledge walks out the door, and the cost rarely shows up on a single line item.
In this episode, Anne speaks with Zack Hubbard, Director of Financial Planning at Sargent Investment Group, an independent fee-only RIA based in Bethesda, Maryland. He has spent his career building financial planning teams from the ground up inside firms where the role didn't exist before he arrived.
Tune in as Zack shares what he has learned about trust from both sides of the manager-employee relationship, including why direct feedback compounds over time, what makes a young hire genuinely bought in, and why routing criticism through a third party quietly destroys what took months to build.
What You’ll Learn:
Why financial advisory firms lose good employees they never meant to lose.
The feedback structure that quietly predicts employee retention.
What indirect feedback signals to the team members receiving it.
How trust in a financial planning team moves from credentials to genuine loyalty.
What a new hire's feedback quality reveals about their commitment.
Why the honest hiring conversation most managers avoid is also the best retention tool.
The cost of waiting for an annual review to say what needed saying months ago.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
"If you're not building that relationship with your employees the same way you think about your relationship with your clients, you're not going to keep them." - Zack Hubbard
"The more trust you have with your employees, the more they will stick around and weather some hard times." - Zack Hubbard
"If you can build that level of trust where they have an unwavering belief that it's going to work out, you can weather a lot." - Zack Hubbard
About Zack Hubbard:
Zack Hubbard, CFP®, is the Director of Financial Planning at Sargent Investment Group, an independent fee-only RIA based in Bethesda, Maryland. Before joining SIG, he built the centralized planning practice at Greenspring Advisors and developed its training program for incoming financial planners. He holds the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® designation and is an active member of NAPFA.
Resources:
Follow Zack:
LinkedIn: Zack Hubbard
Follow Anne:
LinkedIn: Anne Claessen
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