How does a woman navigate and succeed in the traditionally male-dominated world of Wall Street? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, Marcia Dawood welcomes Lori Van Dusen, an inspiring figure in the financial advisory industry. Lori began her career at Lehman Brothers in the late 1980s, where she stood out not only for her quantitative skills but for her early advocacy of client-centered, conflict-free financial advice. With years of experience under her belt, Lori founded her own firm, LVW Advisors, where she continues her mission of empowering clients, and women coming into substantial wealth tend to gravitate toward her. Her book, "Running with Grace," encapsulates her remarkable journey and her commitment to teaching and mentoring others in finance and beyond. Lori and Marcia discuss the upcoming major wealth transfer to women and the importance of education and mentorship in breaking down barriers in the financial world. Through Lori's experiences and insights, listeners are inspired to take control of their financial futures and redefine their relationship with money.
How does a woman navigate and succeed in the traditionally male-dominated world of Wall Street? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, Marcia Dawood welcomes Lori Van Dusen, an inspiring figure in the financial advisory industry. Lori began her career at Lehman Brothers in the late 1980s, where she stood out not only for her quantitative skills but for her early advocacy of client-centered, conflict-free financial advice.
With years of experience under her belt, Lori founded her own firm, LVW Advisors, where she continues her mission of empowering clients, and women coming into substantial wealth tend to gravitate toward her. Her book, "Running with Grace," encapsulates her remarkable journey and her commitment to teaching and mentoring others in finance and beyond.
Lori and Marcia discuss the upcoming major wealth transfer to women and the importance of education and mentorship in breaking down barriers in the financial world. Through Lori's experiences and insights, listeners are inspired to take control of their financial futures and redefine their relationship with money.
To get the latest from Lori Van Dusen, you can follow her below!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorivandusen/
Running with Grace: A Wall Street Insider’s Path to True Leadership, a Purposeful Life, and Joy in the Face of Adversity - https://a.co/d/4Y9rYGT
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Marcia Dawood: Lori, welcome to the Angel Next Door podcast.
Lori Van Dusen: Thank you. Happy to be invited. Marsha.
Marcia Dawood: Yeah. I was talking to our mutual friend Kathy Mice, and I'm so a fan of her company Bublish, and been watching her journey and what she's been doing with it. And I know that she helped you publish your book Running with Grace, which came out about a year and a half ago. I read it. It's fabulous. Everybody will see the links in the show notes to be able to purchase a copy themselves. Laurie, happy to have you here today. Tell us a little bit about your background before we get into a deeper conversation about money and women and all kinds of stuff.
Lori Van Dusen: Yeah, I started on Wall street in 1987 at Lehman Brothers. It was Shearson Lehman Brothers. But when I looked back, I found my hiring papers, and I was actually hired by Lehman Brothers. And I always say I think they had to hire me because I passed all the tests. But when I showed up there, I just researched who had the best training program. So I had gone, was the first person in my family to go to college and graduate. And then I went to graduate school. And long story, short, circuitous path to Wall Street.
Lori Van Dusen: Didn't really know what I wanted to do. Got a master's of education, master of Education, Harvard, and then said, I still don't know what I want to do. Research, training programs. And ended up at Shearson Lima Brothers, and literally was on the top floor of the South Tower. That's where we trained. That's where I worked. And it was a big class of all men and two women. So someone could correct this.
Lori Van Dusen: I don't know, a couple hundred men, two women. Three years later, I was the top of a class. It was a quantitative business. It was the dialing for dollars business. I would say also that a lot of this was done on the phone. And the only thing I would try to do is understand the person on the other end. And I would close the call with, you know, asking for a meeting. Now, sometimes I got hung up on, sometimes I had success.
Lori Van Dusen: But I was a Wall street broker who thought, this business is really screwed up. Like, why do all these people, you know, get up every morning and say, you know, how am I going to make a living by selling products? And then why aren't they aligned with the client in terms of their performance? And I just, you know, I started a long time ago, like I said, in the late 80s when Wall street was on fire. But it was hardly an bracing environment for a young woman. But it was quantitative, so I just did My thing, I became successful. I shared a lot of my work with people. I did early stage financial planning and integrated wealth management. I was literally building people out of my office an asset based fee because I didn't want to sell products. It's all in the book.
Lori Van Dusen: Well, but I came a very recognized advisor. I think I always say to people, they're like, how did you become whatever, you're in the Barron's hall of fame, you're this, you're that. And I'm like, I think it was more about giving away and teaching people how to be good advisors, listening to clients, how to take their, you know, whole financial life and marry it with their ecosystem and give them good advice. And so I helped start organizations and mentorship programs and things like that in the industry. And so I think a lot of the recognition mission certainly was quantitative, but a lot of it was also qualitative. So that's my story. I fought for big banks, literally. I went out, started my own independent firm in 202011 and now it's LVW Advisors and have a great team, award winning business, great clients and it's been a long journey.
Marcia Dawood: But yeah, you do a great job. In the book of outlining the whole story, it was really fascinating to see all of the ups and downs that you had. And it sounds though you were very good at the, at the job, not because you were obviously very smart, but you were listening to what people were telling you and really trying to understand their situation, their relationship to money, how they felt about it and then offering them advice based on that. Did I get that right?
Lori Van Dusen: Oh yeah, it's deeply. One of my degrees is in psychology and I think it's my most valuable degree because I think money is very deeply. It's a deeply emotional thing getting into someone's value system, what they really care about, their family. It's, it's a, a lot of open ended questions and listening without judgment because it's not your situation. So people need to be able to open up to someone that they trust or team of people in our case now that they trust. And you can't help someone manage towards goals if you don't really understand them and you don't understand the context of them and what's important to them. So it wasn't the way that people thought in 1987. It was more about dialing for dollars.
Lori Van Dusen: If people remember anybody listening, watched movies like Wolf of Wall street or any of them, that's what it was like. Dial for dollars, sell people products, make money, walk away. And I just disliked it intensely. And I was almost offended by it. I just didn't understand it. So I didn't like the conflicts of interest. I wrote white papers against some of the practices in the industry and in the firm I was in. I just did my own little demonstrations around what was what I thought was the right way to deliver real advice versus sell products.
Lori Van Dusen: And I think you can't do that without understanding people and asking questions.
Marcia Dawood: Yeah. So we're about to come into a pretty significant wealth transfer to women over the next several years, trillions of dollars. And I've talked to a lot of women, we've talked about this on the podcast in the past about their money mindset. And I'm actually surprised at how many women keep money in cash or some type of cash equivalent there. There's almost like a fear, or not necessarily like a risk intolerance, but more of like just a not knowing or some type of a fear around money. So tell us, like, from your experience and all of the extremely insightful conversations that you've had over the years, like, what are your thoughts on that?
Lori Van Dusen: I think that's probably true. More than it's not. I think that there's a, a confidence that you have to build up around money and empowerment. And we were talking before the show, and I wanted to share this a little bit more with the audience. So I did a keynote speech for the National Susan B. Anthony Houston Museum on the occasion two weeks ago of her birthday. It's a birthday celebration and they're raising a bunch of money for a big museum and house. And the theme of the talk and the event was the power of the purse.
Lori Van Dusen: Because Susan B. Anthony, who most people know as the advocate for women's right to vote suffragist, she was really, it was important to her that women, so women in her time, in 18, let's say 1870, if a woman earned any kind of wage, it was immediately her husband. So it was not hers. And she gave numerous speeches, probably more speeches on this topic, of financial independence and the power of money in terms of women's independence and their right to choose things and their right to navigate life by keeping their own wages. And she's a big advocate of women's careers in nursing, medicine. There's a whole kind of history lesson in this. But I was thinking a lot about her when I wrote my speech and I delivered it, and she felt it was so important. And I thought, okay, think about this.
Lori Van Dusen: This is the 1800s. Susan B. Anthony went between in her Lifetime, the Gilded Age and the Wild west. Telling her story about women's empowerment, the women's right to vote. She didn't live to see the 19th amendment ratified, but she changed history. And I thought, how did I end up on Wall Street? I know this seems like a leap, but I actually grew up in Rochester. And when I started researching her, I wrote about a five minute car ride from where she, she grew up. And I thought, is there something in the water, at the air? Because I always never thought about this.
Lori Van Dusen: Why, why have I never thought that I didn't belong in a male dominated industry or didn't belong managing money? Or why, why is it, why is this there that women, why are women such a minority in venture capital and finance? And it gets back to your question. And I think a lot of it comes from in my life, early education and mentorship. And I think in my world, I think women, what I found is women aren't comfortable because they either haven't had to make the decisions, they haven't really been empowered to make the decisions, and they haven't had somebody encourage them or really understand their risk tolerance. Women are actually very good stewards of money. I don't want to make some sweeping generalization, but women are very good stewards of money. They're very good investors. They're less likely to gamble or take crazy risks, but they need to make educated decisions. And once they have education, they don't need to see every four, every tree in the forest to make a decision.
Lori Van Dusen: They make a decision. But they need a good advocate, somebody who's going to take an educational approach, I think. And I was lucky enough to have that when I was a kid and again came from nothing. But I had a great mentor, my grandfather, who loved the stock market, loved investing, didn't have a lot of money at all, but shared with me and showed me when I was a little kid. And I talk about that in the book and that's how I think basically I ended up on Wall Street. And the tie to Susan B. Anthony is without Susan B. Anthony, I don't think he would have.
Lori Van Dusen: My mom was the CFO of our small family business, but she told me in the 60s and 70s when she would write letters because there were no cell phone, she'd write letters and communicate that way. She would sign them a Van Dusen because if people found out she was a woman, they wouldn't want to do business with our little company. So I thought, wow, how times have changed. And we as women have come so far. It doesn't seem like it, but it's really crazy far. And we have this wonderful ability to do a lot with money that's really powerful. And as I said before, women are great stewards. They just need encouragement and education.
Lori Van Dusen: And it's like, why aren't there more women in STEM in the field? In certain fields, you could answer that. Why do you think that is?
Marcia Dawood: A lot of it stems, pun intended, back to the schooling. We need more girls and the younger the better, all the way down to preschool and kindergarten being taught that, hey, engineering is cool and it's for boys and girls. And I think if we could start there, we would get a lot farther.
Lori Van Dusen: So I think your question is like a really good one and it's right. I think it's spot on based on my experience. That's what I would say is women tend to be, have more money in cash, tend to invest as, as growth oriented as men. They don't tend to, they tend to be a little bit more reticent. And it all stems back to that. I think it starts like very early. I don't think it's just once they come into wealth, they're just more conservative. I think it's just starting early and just teaching women how to invest.
Lori Van Dusen: And it's just, I think it's just something that has to be ingrained earlier. But you mentioned this great wealth transfer and I've heard a lot of different statistics around this. So I'm not going to say this is the statistic, but it is something that I said in my speech. I think within the next decade, 40% of assets will be in the hands of women. And I said something like, I think that would blow Susan B. Anthony's mind. It's a huge wealth transfer going on. So it's very incumbent on my industry to understand that and also put people, men and women around women, clients that are going to listen, educate without judgment and start wherever the person is comfortable.
Lori Van Dusen: Wherever that client is comfortable.
Marcia Dawood: Yeah, really meeting people where they are is important. I've talked to some people, I keep asking people, now I'm on this, tell me your money mindset kick or tell me about your money stories. And so many of them where they start. And I try to be as open ended as possible not to guide. Right. And I've seen so many of them, they usually start with some kind of traumatic, for lack of a better term, story that happened in their childhood and that's what set their path on how they handle money and how they look at it.
Lori Van Dusen: Yeah, I think that's true across genders. I think it's true. It's just that men are taught earlier to be risk takers and to, you know, I don't tend to think a lot in genders. Like, I don't think, think this way. But when you look at the results of it, I would say women are more timid and less experienced and it's just obvious. Less women in certain field. Why is that? And I think some of it is traumatic experiences, bad experiences, trusting someone and losing money. Whatever it is you as an advisor have to understand.
Lori Van Dusen: That gets back to the original kind of part of our conversation, which is there's a lot of psychology and emotional support that comes with being a really good financial advisor because money and a person's life, emotional life, are very tightly connected. So you have to be able to unpack that, be patient. We also, we work with a lot of different clients, men, women, organizations, all kinds of stewards of wealth. But, but more recently, we've come into a couple client situations where women have never handled the money and they've come into substantial wealth and they're very afraid. And it, I think sometimes advisors just don't have the patience for it. You, you have to spend a lot of time. And I think it's just been my DNA. It's, it's.
Lori Van Dusen: I've been credited, I don't know that it's true, but I've been credited with starting this independence movement to financial advisory. And I, I did what I did because I thought it was really important to be a fiduciary, to sit on the same side of the table to really understand people. And maybe it's my background in education too, but this is a slow process. It's not something you do have to meet people where they're at. And it's not like one size fits all. And I think too many models out there and too many advisors, both in the big banks, independent, they just want to slam everybody into a model and this is what's right for you. And it's not about that. You have to start with really understanding the person and what they're afraid of and what their goals are and really unpack it.
Lori Van Dusen: Like what's. Go to the dark corner and understand what are they really afraid of. Why have they kept all their money in cash? Or why are they so conservative when they seem like they're too young to be this conservative?
Marcia Dawood: Why.
Lori Van Dusen: And a lot of it just stemmed from being patient and educating. You know, we, we're. I'm a big believer in stress Testing too, like taking assets and putting them together and showing people, well, here's history. Here's one of the worst sell offs we've ever had. And here's what would happen to this portfolio. How would you feel if you've lost this much in this period of time? You have to use a lot of different tools, whatever you can get at to get people comfortable to make a decision and move out of cash.
Marcia Dawood: Right, right. And especially when it comes to couples. You said you gave the example of a woman who now is in charge of the money for whatever reason. And then. But when there's two people who are making a decision, how does a woman like get educated and learn about it and feel comfortable?
Lori Van Dusen: Yeah, well, what I can only speak from my experience and point of view. What I think is important if there, if we have a couple who comes to us, we never deal with one spouse. We just don't because it's not in anybody's best interest to deal with just one spouse. It is typically, again, to your point earlier in your question about, you know, it's typically the male who has been making the decisions on money. And yet we have this great wealth transfer going on. So there's a super big disconnect. So it's really important to me that both people are heard. And what's shocking sometimes is you get both people in a room and they have very different ideas about what to do with money.
Lori Van Dusen: Very different. And one spouse. And again, I don't want to be two, but I think a lot of times the wife or the female partner has not spoken up or got had a forum where she thought I could be heard without judgment or this is what I think. So I find a lot of times like we're the, we're the person who should be really helping them come together and reach a consensus. And I think that's one of the things that I've spent a career doing, worked with a lot of boards, investment committees, and not for profits. You managed a bunch of money around different organizations and have taught my people like you need to figure out how to bring consensus to the room. And that doesn't mean everyone agrees and sings Kumbaya, but it's how do we get to a decision that people are comfortable with. And the same thing is true of couples.
Lori Van Dusen: Just asking open ended questions and letting both of them talk. And it's not only the right thing to do, but it's a very smart business thing to do. And then involving the children whenever that happens. If you're talking about stewarding wealth across generations. It's how do you teach them getting back to you teach them when they're young. You got to teach them when they're young and show them. And if you start getting children involved in making decisions when they're young around finance and wealth and savings and all these things, they become confident adults.
Marcia Dawood: Right.
Lori Van Dusen: It's our better model forever. But I feel like I was taught it as a kid and then it was reinforced because I started my career really, which sounds weird, but working with. Mostly working with large. Large enough for profits. I just. It's all in the book. But I just got in the door and realized this is really complicated stuff. But it's really needed bringing people to consensus around things and boys that need it in the world right now.
Lori Van Dusen: I. That's a skill set that I think what I would say is whoever's looking for an advisor, how they should get to the point where they can be confident in asking questions is you have to do a little research around seeking out a good advisor. And I don't want to talk my book, so I'm not. But I do think that's super important. And if you're going to get a good advisor, ask for referrals, talk to their clients, talk to people who look like you that have maybe navigated the way you're trying to navigate. I think that's important. There are all kinds of tools that didn't exist before if you really want to learn online. But.
Lori Van Dusen: And there's all kinds of podcasts too. But. But I think really interviewing and getting a good advisor and somebody who's willing to do the work and be oriented towards education and understanding you is super important. And if it's a couple that they make the decision together, it's not, oh, this guy is my advisor and he's going to be your advisor. Because the statistics in the industry are very striking that when a spouse dies or when wealth transfers, it rarely stays minority of times it stays with the original advisor. And that gets back to. That's it's not only the right thing to do to get both people involved and also the family. When it makes sense, it's very good business.
Marcia Dawood: That makes sense. And you talked earlier along those lines. You talked earlier about mentors. Getting. Having women especially have mentors early on and even throughout life. What are some of your. What's some of your advice around that?
Lori Van Dusen: Yeah, I think reaching out to people that you admire or people that have been successful and asking for their advice. I don't know. I think people rarely say no. And so I think the person who wants the advice has to take the first step, I think. So. I give a lot of talks. I'm involved in different organizations, and I'm in front of young people a fair amount. And I always say, if anybody wants to reach out to me or has questions, feel free.
Lori Van Dusen: And some people take me up on it and others don't. I'm involved in an organization called Breakthrough New York. And basically anyone can look it up. But it's a really powerful organization around children and mentoring them through all from the time they're pretty young all the way through to college. And we have virtually virtually 100% of the kids that go through this program go to colleges, graduate. It's a really remarkable program. But I did the speech last year, I did keynote speech, and I said, reach out to me if you want advice. And that was a really interesting audience because I got more young people reaching out to me than most audiences.
Lori Van Dusen: And I think it's because they've been taught to do that from the time young. And these are kids that come from impoverished circumstances, rough circumstances, but they want to learn. And that was. That's really the only kind of caveat to getting into this program. It's totally privately funded anyway, people could look it up. But it's a remarkable thing around mentorship. And they're literally put with many different mentors because kids that come from rough circumstances, it's more than just academic. It's emotional support.
Lori Van Dusen: It's a lot of things. It's more than just money. But those young people are more inclined to reach out to somebody and not feel. And I guess my advice would be don't be shy. Reach out. Go on LinkedIn. Send a LinkedIn invite. Ask something.
Lori Van Dusen: Tell someone you want to have a conversation because you want to know how they got to where they're at. Whatever it is it's incumbent on. We have to teach more young people to do that.
Marcia Dawood: Absolutely. Well, Lori, thank you so much for coming on the show today. We'll definitely put links to buy the book Running With Grace. It's excellent. Everyone should read it in the show notes. Any other ways that people can get a hold of you or your firm?
Lori Van Dusen: Yeah, that's great. We will have all that. I really appreciate you having me on, Marcia. This is fun.
Marcia Dawood: Yeah, this is great. Thanks.