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by Penny Pennington, Managing Partner, Edward Jones

On January 1, 2019, I became the managing partner (as a private partnership, this is our corollary to a CEO) of Edward Jones—just the sixth one in our firm's 100-year history. The age and endurance of our firm is just one dimension of the moment we found ourselves in—we were a new leadership team, stewarding a storied company into the future.

Our firm was doing extremely well when I began my tenure. Edward Jones had experienced remarkable growth for decades. After starting with one financial advisor in 1922 and growing to 100 financial advisors in the early 1970s, the firm reached the milestone of 1,000 financial advisors in 1986, then added its 10,000th in 2008—and has nearly 19,000 financial advisors as I write this. In terms of number of financial advisors, we are one of the two or three largest firms today.

By almost any measure, the firm has been successful. Edward Jones is listed on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held financial services firm in the industry. We serve 7 million clients and care for $1.8 trillion of their assets as of the end of 2021. Our more than 50,000 associates consistently rate us highly as an employer, leading to 22 consecutive years on FORTUNE's “Best Companies to Work For” list.

At the same time, I was acutely aware of the fact that we are on the verge of unprecedented change—and it's change that was already underway before the COVID-19 pandemic began. The investors we meet with are often looking for more than traditional financial advice; what they're seeking looks more like advice about holistic financial wellness. They're interested in a very human-centered approach that is quite different from the way financial advisors have traditionally worked.

What this all means is that the role of the financial advisor must evolve—and the value of their role has changed. Clients are placing even more value on having a personal relationship with their financial advisor than ever before. Fortunately, at Edward Jones, that's been our competitive advantage from day one. We've always put our relationships with our clients at the center of what we do. But other firms have started to see the value in it, and they're working hard to close that gap.

In addition to these pressures, there are other elements of change creating great impacts for us. Regulatory changes are rightfully requiring us to serve our clients and their best interest. The economics of our business model are also under pressure—the transaction of purchasing securities has become a commodity and is nearly a free good. Competitive forces have lowered the breakpoint at which clients can purchase certain products. These pressures have an impact on revenue and compensation. Perhaps your business and model are undergoing the same kind of metamorphosis.

With all these factors in play, it was clear that our firm was at an inflection point. To me, it also meant that the conditions were ideal for transformation, and for putting conditions in place for our firm that would allow us to continuously improve over time. It's important in this context to recognize the difference between change and transformation. Change occurs in linear, predictable, and incremental ways—a change to a digitally enabled value proposition, for example. Transformation, on the other hand, is more vertical. It's often about multi-stakeholder (rather than single-stakeholder) impact, and it fundamentally impacts the purpose, culture, leadership, strategy, capabilities, and operating model of a company simultaneously. Transformation is riskier and more unpredictable than change.

Companies transform for one of two reasons. One, they're in a crisis; or two, because they get to—they see that the journey and the effort will be worth it, and they're excited by the possibilities. They recognize that transformational impact can improve not only the commercial enterprise, but also lives and possibilities. Edward Jones is firmly in the second camp. When you have a vision of the impact you want to have, you can either bring that vision down to fit your current reality or you can pull reality up to meet your vision as it was intended to be. Here again, we're in the latter group.

We're pulling reality up to our vision, and we're doing it from a position of strength. We began a change journey not as a discrete event with beginning and end points, but one that creates sustainable conditions for the firm to continuously improve and increase our impact over time—in fact, to quicken the pace of growth and innovation.