GCG Wealth Management Financial advisors Clay Craven and his grandmother Billy Ricketts helped launch a new Greensboro, North Carolina-based office of the Woodbury Financial Services enterprise GCG Wealth Management. Financial advisor Billy Ricketts has been told she was the first woman to be a registered representative in her state. However, she’ll tell you that she hasn’t checked and can’t confirm that.
At 98, Ricketts is most likely the elder stateswoman of wealth management. But she calls her recent move to affiliate with a new broker-dealer and a fast-growing group “exhilarating.”
“We have a bright new beautiful office,” says Ricketts, who went independent from Wells Fargo Advisors with GCG Wealth Management under Advisor Group’s Woodbury Financial Services. “I don’t know how much longer I can work. I hope for quite a while.”
Ricketts started her financial career in 1959 with Equitable Securities after she felt the urge to help people who couldn’t pay their medical bills at the hospital where she was working. She obtained a Series 1 license six years later, according to FINRA BrokerCheck.
Her grandson Clay Craven has been her business partner for the past 18 years. They joined three other advisors who also left Wells Fargo to start GCG’s new office in her lifelong home of Greensboro, North Carolina. The five advisors have a combined $330 million in client assets.
Charlotte-based GCG’s founding advisor Joel Burris calls Ricketts an example of a "true Southern lady." Her local knowledge will help the office of supervisory jurisdiction-like group establish a foothold as it carries out its plan to expand to a dozen advisors at the new Greensboro office next year, he says.
“What really is amazing is to see her work ethic: She’s there before the market opens, she just absolutely loves the business and loves her clients,” Burris says. “That really does transcend to the rest of us as well.”
GCG — which has some 40 advisors managing $1 billion in seven offices — itself aligned with Woodbury earlier this year when the Advisor Group IBD retained about 400 advisors from Questar Capital under a preferred affiliation deal.
The enterprise has since become Woodbury’s second largest group, notes Burris, who stated a goal of being the biggest Woodbury enterprise in three years and the biggest with Advisor Group in five. Its option for reps to be W-2 employees of GCG also makes it different than many IBD groups.
Joey Hagner, GCG’s head of business development, had […]