By Steve Garmhausen
Megan Miller wishes more women seeking careers would take a serious look at the wealth management field. "It's a fabulous place to have a career because many of us have skills that are well-suited to being advisors," she says, "and it's a wonderful way, at the right firm, to balance a high-powered, highly compensated career with managing a family." Miller, 37, a senior wealth advisor at MAI Capital Management in Boulder, Colo., has done exactly that.
Speaking with Barron's Advisor, Miller, whose team serves about 250 households, reveals the keys to her career success, including being an avid reader. She discusses the challenge of helping clients see through today's onslaught of clickbait. And she explains one of the most rewarding parts of her job: Helping women who've been ignored or patronized by previous advisors to build their financial confidence.
How did you come to be in the business? Elyse Foster, my mom, founded Harbor Financial Group 37 years ago. She started the business the year I was born. She was a trailblazer, and she did fee-only financial planning very early on, which was unheard of at the time. So I grew up around financial planning and wealth management. I interned at the firm as a high schooler and took the office paperless.
When I went away to college, I wanted to be an attorney. But I quickly discovered that I did not, in fact, want to be an attorney, because there are a lot of really challenging personalities to work with. After college I started my career at Charles Schwab as a registered representative, and I was on the high-frequency, high-net-worth trading team for several years. But I didn't want to just be an order taker; I wanted to be on the advice side of the business. So I got my CFP and went to work for my mom. Starting from office manager, I worked every position in the firm to my final position before we were acquired in 2024 by MAI, which was chief investment officer.
What size was Harbor at the time of the acquisition? We had $321 million in assets.
Was it difficult to give up CIO duties after the acquisition? It really wasn't. I enjoy the work for sure, and it fits the analytical side of my brain, but my preferred role, and probably the highest and best use of my skills, is in client relationship management and business development. It was a natural evolution in that we were looking to offload that set of duties and MAI fit nicely. I still do a lot of the decision-making at the local level, because MAI is a very flexible platform. They have models and investment recommendations, but also a great deal of flexibility to tailor portfolios to what your clients want. So it's still a big part of my role, but not as large as it was before the acquisition.
What rules do you and your mom follow to work effectively together? I think we have them, but we've never had to talk about them. We both have a high level of respect for one another. We joke that most people don't know we're mother and daughter until we tell them, especially after I took a different last name. We enjoy working together, and we're not hiding it, but it's a very professional environment, and our skills fit nicely together so that we make a really good team. Some things she's better at than me, some things I'm better at than her. We both want to help each other and figure out the best way to help the client.
Who are your typical clients? We have four or five different core clients. One of them is your traditional high-net worth family. The second one is a more unique take: We have a strong and growing young professional offering where we serve people who aren't yet wealthy but have strong incomes and high ability to save. They don't meet traditional asset-management minimums, but they have the same needs as somebody with a million dollars. That's a fun place to grow the book of business, because it kind of grows up with you. I also have a divorce credential that lends nicely to helping women get through a divorce as best as they can from a financial point of view. And we work with a lot of entrepreneurs here in Boulder. Lastly, we've landed with a lot of doctors, and dentists seem to be another core asset group for us.
You have the Certified Divorce Financial Analyst credential, which probably took some work to earn. Was it worth it? It's absolutely worth it. It's an underserved market in financial planning. It's not an attorney's job to understand the long-term implications of a financial trade-off, nor should it be. So the idea that the consumer has a good understanding of how their assets work for them and how they will work in the future is a big ask for most people. I think we as an industry need to gain more knowledge and put more information out there about this. It's a great thing to add to your credential list for credibility.
What differences have you seen in the ways younger and older clients prefer to receive advice? I don't see a big difference when I'm strictly looking at age brackets. Some older clients only want Zoom meetings, and they're very technical. I also have younger clients who are like, I want to see you in person. I need to know you. I need to be in your presence. I do think the whole space is moving toward faster and more timely responses. Ten years ago we used to have a day to get back to somebody before they would wonder if we got the email. Now it feels like we have hours. And that's across all age brackets. It's more prevalent with newer clients. The newer you are, the more skeptical you are, and the longer you've been with us, the more trust we've earned. So to me, it's not an age thing, it's a client life cycle thing.
You've mentioned that many of your clients are women who had been underserved or talked over by prior advisors, and it's up to you to rebuild their confidence. Would you explain that? It's a big challenge and we find it on a regular basis. When we're working with a potential client who's working with another advisor, they're very skeptical. A lot of times they feel disillusioned by the profession. They often say that they were mansplained: Everything was dumbed down for them, if they were brought into the conversation at all. We often hear that they were completely ignored. Some can identify that they were just with the wrong advisor, and with that group it's fairly easy for us to overcome those challenges. Our style is very communicative, based on how fast or slow the client wants to go.
But some cases require years of rebuilding trust. We often get the best results through constant communication and meeting them where they are on education -- however they want to tackle it, whether it's articles we send out or more-frequent, shorter meetings. It's very individualized and based on what a particular individual has been through, the questions they have and where they want to be.
I want fabulous relationships to unfold, because when you get over the hurdle, they just blossom. They come out of their shells and they recognize that of course they have the capability to understand this, and they feel so empowered. It's fun to see that light turn on.
What are your clients worried about these days? Everything? One of the downsides of social media is that there's so much information barraging us all day. Some of it is very real to be concerned about, some of it is just inflammatory, to get clicks. That's the hardest part to combat, the way the media landscape has evolved. It used to be we all had cable subscriptions; that's where we got a lot of our news, and it was vetted at some level. Newspaper journalists were more prevalent. They weren't just somebody in the basement typing up an article to get clicks. Part of our job is trying to get to the bottom of where clients read something. What did they read? What's the source, is it valid, and how might it affect their portfolios?
The other thing that's been happening more the past three or four years is that people are tying their finances to what's going on in the social landscape. That's an interesting challenge to overcome, because we don't want to minimize their concerns. We're hearing a lot more about the state of the world and the state of lower-income and more-marginalized groups, and that is upsetting to people. They're trying to understand how their finances are affected by it, and also how their finances can affect it. It goes back to ESG [environmental, social, and governance investing criteria], which is an imperfect solution, to be sure, but at least there's something that we can point them to as a potential step toward aligning their financial position with their values and concerns.
What do you think are a couple of the keys to your career success? I read a lot. I gather a lot of information from experts in various fields and do my best to put it together. I think that has served me very well with clients, because they want to know what's going on. My clients are very well-informed, and they want to work with somebody who's also very well-informed. Having a baseline in investments has also served me very well in being credible to clients.
What is your advice to young people entering the industry? Stay curious. Don't get comfortable, because our industry changes so fast. The world is changing very quickly, and investments change with it.
I'll make a plug that this is an especially good career and is underappreciated for women. It's a fabulous place to have a career because our skills are well-suited to being advisors, and it's a wonderful way, at the right firm, to balance a high-powered, highly compensated career with managing a family. To me, it's a perfect blend of soft skills with the analytical space. I get to do both, and I also get to prioritize my family and my kids. If someone's looking for that, I think this is an almost-perfect solution.
Thanks, Megan.
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March 02, 2026 15:49 ET (20:49 GMT)
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