Cindy Alvarez spent years building a practice focused on serving women investors and implementing tax-efficient private market strategies. When her previous firm was sold, she evaluated several options before choosing Savvy. We sat down with Cindy to understand what drove her decision and what partnership with Savvy enables for her clients.
How did you get started as a financial advisor?
I became a do-it-yourself investor probably 35 years ago. This might've been when E-Trade first launched, if you can believe it. I took a little bit of my savings and started investing, and didn't realize at the time that I had such a passion for economics relative to the stock market and our geopolitical environment.
My career change came a little bit later in life after I had started a women's investment club in the community where I live. Once I realized how much I enjoyed the collaboration, I decided to get licensed and worked for a small RIA practice. Eventually I saw that practice selling and started looking at other firms, with Savvy being one of them.
What made choosing Savvy an easy decision?
My decision to move to Savvy was a pretty easy one because what's important to me is the value that I can bring my clients. If I can deliver an experience to my clients that is true to my own value system and honors theirs, it's kind of a win-win.
Savvy allows the flexibility for advisors to work with their clients the way that they want to. That means establishing your level of service, the different types of service, the different investment strategies.
They really let you go do what you're good at doing: taking care of clients, building relationships, and maintaining those relationships. The fact that Savvy can provide the tech stack, the operations support, and the compliance (those are things that most advisors don't want to do) just leaves more time to spend with your clients.
Savvy allows the flexibility for advisors to work with their clients the way that they want to.
What caught your eye about Savvy during the evaluation process?
At the time, Savvy was a very early startup. It’s special that we get to build this as we go, that we get to leave our fingerprint on the design of Savvy, and our feedback is very valued.
As advisors, you can be really heard at Savvy.
It only takes about five minutes with Ritik to know that this is the place to be. He's as kind and as authentic as he possibly can be. He really wants to provide advisors with the tools they need to be successful, and he will stop at nothing to get there.
As advisors, you can be really heard at Savvy.
How does Savvy differ from your previous firm?
When you work for somebody else, the pressure is on. Get as many clients in, build the book of business, it's always a numbers game.
At Savvy, there is zero pressure to be big. You can be a small practice. You can have more work-life balance at Savvy because you don't have the pressure from a business owner or a corporation making sure that you're meeting their numbers week after week, month after month, year after year.
Your practice is by your design.
Tell us about the advisor community at Savvy.
What's really cool about Savvy is there are practices across the country and the advisors all collaborate. We've created what's called the Brain Trust at Savvy. If I'm struggling with something, I can throw it out to the Brain Trust group in Slack and have my colleagues across the country respond and help me problem solve.
Every day we are educating each other and being a resource to each other. It's different perspectives. Some of our advisors are attorneys, some are CPAs. Some are new, some are seasoned. Even though a lot of us haven't even met in person, it's amazing how many relationships we have built across the country based on different advisors with different experiences.
We've even got quite a Denver Savvy presence that has grown. We make it a point to get together with our fellow advisors here in Denver. We've gone to a baseball game, we'll go to happy hour.
It's interesting because in a sense you might think we'd be competitors, all vying for new business, but it's not like that at all. It's such a collaboration and a team environment. Supporting each other is great.
When one of us wins, we all win.
When one of us wins, we all win.
What excites you about where Savvy is headed?
Savvy is capitalizing on technology and AI tools that will take a lot of the manual work out of what we do. That's exciting because it means we can spend more time with clients and less time on administrative tasks.
The vision is to bring a more comprehensive experience to our advisory practices across the country. Right now, clients often have to manage multiple professionals in their lives: their financial advisor, their CPA, their estate planning attorney. But the direction we're heading means we'll be able to provide more of that in-house.
That brings so much comfort and ease to clients. They don't have to manage all the professionals in their lives. I get to be their central point of contact, coordinating everything they need.
What's your North Star with partnering with Savvy?
My number one goal is to provide more value to clients. It's a competitive industry out there. If clients trust you and you can continue to bring more value to them, you're winning all day long with your clients.
I don't think we need to chase growth. I think that growth is a natural process when you have happy clients. They'll refer you all day long because they want to share the same great experience with their friends and family.
Hello 👋🏼 I'm Cindy. I work with a diverse group of clients to help navigate complex financial decisions by offering personalized financial and tax planning strategies. I help with decision-making when it comes to the more simple tasks of how to fund home down payments, when to take Social Security, how to exercise stock options, when to sell a business, and how to financially navigate divorce. There are more complex tasks that require tax and estate planning strategies where private market investments come into play.
