Sue Chesney
Professional Experience
My first position in this profession was as a retirement plans specialist with one of the big custodians. After relocating to Denver, I was lucky enough to land a job with a financial planning firm. Over the years I served in just about every role - operations, marketing, compliance, client service and planner.
I earned my CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ certification in 2007 and obtained a Master’s degree in Personal Financial Planning in 2009. While I explored becoming a financial advisor, building my own business and working with my own clients, I discovered that I really just enjoyed creating/maintaining clients’ financial plans and developing strategies to improve outcomes.
In 2011, I started Delegated Planning (www.DelegatedPlanning.com), an outsourced financial planning firm for advisors that are looking for experienced virtual CFP® services. I can happily report we’ve grown from a one-woman shop to a team of more than 15 planners at this point supporting 50+ advisory firms across the country.
Why the Zoo?
Over the years I’ve been contacted by many students looking to enter the profession only to be hired by large institutions and broker/dealers. Many of these employers focus their training on selling a solution to a client for a problem they didn’t know they had. To me, that’s not financial planning. The firms I admire who focus on their clients’ objectives providing advice, not products, don’t seem to have the time to take on inexperienced individuals and train them deeply. With that in mind, Caleb, Carrie and I decided we wanted to do something about that.
Our intention is to improve and ease the path for students and new planners into the profession; helping them to understand real financial planning and learn some of the many programs on the market today. We hope this will make them more employable to the planning firms we revere. In order to make this work, we need advisors open to allowing us to provide data entry work for their clients. In turn, they will not only receive quality work, but also time to spend on some of the many other important areas of their lives - both professionally or personally.
Personal Info
I currently reside in the beautiful state of Colorado where the sun shines over 300 days per year. I moved here over 25 years ago to join my partner Aaron. Our intention was to stay a couple of years and head further west, but we became so enamored with all the fun activities to do, we’re still here today. While we’ve adjusted our activities a bit as we've aged - snowboarding less, cross-country skiing more; still camping but without the 10 mile hike in - we do get outside as often as we can. We can see the snow-capped mountains from our deck and we get to see some amazing sunsets most evenings.