 Lawrence is thoughtful, articulate, and on a mission to deliver financial literacy to the world!
Over the past 7 years, Lawrence Gonzalez has served as an Auditor for the US government. His primary role encompasses auditing over $4.2 billion dollars of government funds dispersed throughout 48 unique jurisdictions as well as Financial Assistance and International Programs Compliance. However, his true passion is Financial literacy. Lawrence disseminates poignant financial literacy education with some brevity through articles, resources, worksheets, and speaking engagements aimed at providing solutions to socio-economic disparities affecting Black and Brown communities. It's all about tackling money even if you have -$125,000 in debt. Meet Lawrence at the Millennial Money Matters Summit 12/12/2020 @ Noon EST. ~Click here to join the conversation or rewatch the event~ This interview was transcribed from video with some gentle editing for clarity. RK Lawrence, you shared with me that you were raised by five aunties, who reminded you of the Spice Girls. How do you feel that your upbringing and transitioning from Haiti to the United States impact your higher education? How did you then become empowered to teach others financial literacy? Lawrence If I had to go back, one, I grew up in Haiti, I was actually born in the US, my mom was a single mom, so she couldn't take care of me and my older sister, I guess, two years older than me at the time, she was two. So she sent both of us, me first, to Haiti, and then eventually, my sister showed up. So we're living there with all the other extra aunts, and I do have two uncles that would come in and out every once in a blue, but they did remind me of the Spice Girl's completely. Each one of them had their own specific thing that they did that was just innate to them. I had one who was sporty, who was also more of a tomboy. She was the one that's more disciplinarian, and she taught us everything about math or anything to that extreme. Then you have one of my aunts who was like a dancer, but more a free spirit. So if you think about girlfriends, it's probably like that. There's a serious one that does the small business. Then there's another one that kind of does more to child-rearing, making sure that everybody getting to school, makes sure everybody's getting fed. So she's holding down the households, and there is always this like dichotomy of different people there. By 5am in the morning, we're all up. Haiti is a different place because we have rolling blackouts. At nighttime, pretty much around seven to eight, nine, the lights get cut off. The only thing you have to do is sleep. You wake up in the morning. So the idea of being a morning person, or an evening person, it didn't exist, you just wake up in the morning, everybody was up by five, that and everybody had a job to do. So it was kind of like, we got to go with it when you have a household of eight people and maybe even four or five kids at the time, everybody has got to get dressed. There's a sequence and you seen it in parents, they always have this sequence of like, who's taking the shower, who's not taking a shower, who's eating, who's getting out the door, who's getting dressed, all of that happening as one because we all have a job to do. I remember my aunt, the first two times I went to kindergarten, she walked me to kindergarten, she told me to remember the location, remember where it is. Then, probably three or four days after, it was my job to just walk myself. It might have been maybe, four or five blocks or something, but you just kind of go do it yourself. Additionally, when I went to the next level, I think, elementary school, if I had to gauge it, I had to get in the car. She's like, "hey, remember this route." Even as a kid, you're four years old, you're like, what's going on? Remember this route. It was, every time, remember this location. So I remember where I was based off of every turn of the car, whatever it is, because after a certain time, she was just gonna leave me in that truck. And she's like because he has to go to work. So everybody had a purpose. For kids, we had a job, and our job was education. We noticed that people that actually got more and more education had a better life, right? So they improve their standards of life. It was never a question about why should I go to school? It was never a question of what I need to learn. It was the fact that I need to learn as much as possible because that's just our job. If their job is to go to work, our job is to actually do better in school. My aunts were fierce, disciplinarians. We also had a tutor that came in on Saturdays to teach us more in math, especially in the summertime when schools were out. And hey, if I didn't get it, right, he would tell her, and she would make me right. This is the way it is. So for me, the math was already ingrained. We had to learn all our math, especially the multiplication tables; it was always there. I loved it all the way through, and eventually, I did see one time when the door swung closed, my aunt flipped out this notepad, and it had a whole bunch of numbers. It turned out to be in the ledger. At the time, I didn't know what it was; I just knew that was important to her. She was always writing down everything because they had a little small business when they were selling Coca Cola or a little cafe type of scenario. She had all the ledger information, and I thought that was so important so that I needed to learn that. I started noticing, okay, she saved some money out here, she saved some money out there, I started, instead of actually getting on the car on the buses, I literally started walking so I could save my own money. For me, financial literacy was just part of what we did. It was never something I had to question, as much as I had to embrace. From that point, because my family was a very much community focused family, we always gave back. Therefore, it was never a question for me to give back to somebody else.
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 Franklyn Rosario, MBA is the President and CEO of MyLifePlanUSA.com Aside from simply being an amazing person, mentor, and colleague, Franklyn's core values are community and education. His company provides financial planning for businesses, medical professionals, sports professionals & celebrities. Their focus is on protection, accumulation, real estate investment, and retirement. In addition, Franklyn has a skilled team of financial experts placed strategically across the United States. Meet Franklyn at the Millennial Money Matters Summit 12/12/2020 @ Noon EST. ~Click here to join the conversation or rewatch the event~ This interview was transcribed from video with some gentle editing for clarity. RK Franklyn, a lot of your thought process comes down to this entrepreneur mindset. How has an entrepreneur mindset helped you be successful? How do others begin the journey, and how do you suggest other people build that same thought process? Franklyn Yeah, that's a good question. So believe it or not the first secret sauce to that is actually a vision. Before you go to bed, you need to write three personal things that you will accomplish, and at least three business things that you will accomplish. That way when you wake up, you already have that. Right before we had this conversation earlier today, I was just watching a video on YouTube that was explaining this. There's a phenomenon I'm explaining to you right now, in which, when you have a vision, you write it down, the more you talk about it, the more you write it down, and not only write it down one time, I want to do this, it's like wake up every day writing it down, write it down, write it down, what is your vision, what is your vision. Aside from that, it's kind of funny because an entrepreneur is not made out of money, it makes money. It has creativity, but that creativity comes from having that vision, having the gratitude and, and having the thought process and having that hope and belief. At the same time, when you put all those together it's work. It's work because you know, even to read something, it's time, it's work. To write something, it's time, it's work, you know what I mean? The most important thing, the icing on the cake is finding a good mentor. Because it doesn't matter how much (of a) entrepreneurial mindset you have, if you don't have a good mentor, it may take you a while. Finding a mentor these days is not that difficult. You can go to YouTube. There's a lot of people that are talking about how to do this, how to do that, how to build a business. There's Jim Rohn. There's Dan Hardy. That's how I started. Of course, reading and listening to books will help you to get on the entrepreneur rollercoaster because it is a rollercoaster. It's not something that you run in a straight line. It could go up, it could go down. I'll give you a perfect example. I spent five years preparing myself to open a business in which I'm going to be in the community helping everybody. I opened in January, and then we had a pandemic. I had to close down and I came back home, spoke with my wife, "what are we going to do?" And I say, "well, I want to create a business where we can help people plan their life." And that's how we come up with "My Life Plan" The business has everything that I already do, which is financial planning, life insurance protection, we're going to add there too, in the near future, car insurance, pretty much anything related to insurance and financial planning as a whole. It takes time, and I did not do all of this, even though I know, some of those areas, one of the things that I do remember from my MBA classes is that you have to know when you do something, or you have somebody else do something. When you take that aside, as an entrepreneur, you know, and you say, hold on a second, I'm gonna make some money, I'm gonna find somebody who can build this, who can do this for me, when you think that way, things are going to become more possible. As an entrepreneur, sometimes, people have an idea or want to create a creative idea. But they don't, because they don't share the work. They're trying to do everything themselves. And that's a recipe for failure, there.  When I think of Kristina Ickes, the first word that comes to mind is phenomenal. She is an innovator, a developer of talent, an entrepreneurial leader in Finance, Human Services, and Information Technology. Kristina is an experienced executive with capacity and skills across multiple disciplines.
Meet Kristina at the Millennial Money Matters Summit 12/12/2020 @ Noon EST. ~Click here to join the conversation or rewatch the event~ This interview was transcribed from video with some gentle editing for clarity. RK- In May 1991, women made up only 5% of Senior Management positions in Fortune 500 companies. In 2019, women made up 29%. A colossal jump and most of that was due to legislation and companies being intentional in their hiring efforts regarding women in a leadership position. Companies placed more attention to diversity and inclusion processes. But that being said, you, as a woman, have worked in predominantly male-dominated fields. What has been your experience, how has the glass ceiling impacted you? Finally, what advice would you give to other young people who will experience similar circumstances to what you experienced? Kristina Ickes- It's a loaded question, right. There's a lot there to unpack. But, you know, I was fortunate to have avoided a glass ceiling during some of the early parts of my early career. So in that early stage, I was able to move into middle Directorships and then Senior Executive roles really through kind of grit, education hard work, and work presence. Being able to adapt my kind of driven type-A style as an individual performer, as I evolved into a more collaborative leadership style after I could perform individually, was really a key component of the C suite roles that I held. So, I've been a Chief Financial Officer and Chief Information Officer. It's also important to note that I didn't have children at that stage of my life, and I was able to put in an inordinate amount of hours. And when I think about the amount of time that I spent relative to my male peers, I was putting in many more hours than they were. So I may have been more visible to more people at that time. I left the Senior Executive Positions in nonprofit leadership to go into one of the world's most esteemed financial institutions; I have been inspired by the women who were at the helm of some of them. So Sallie Krawczyk, Erin Callan, and Zoe Cruz were in really prominent leadership positions at major Wall Street institutions in 2005, 2006, 2007. So I've been inspired to take a leap and then move into the mostly male-dominated industry to work in a field that I'd always felt called to in order to try and find my way. I sort of had an expectation that these women had blazed some trails, and in many ways, they had. So, I watched in absolute horror as these women who had been breaking the glass ceiling and had broken it found themselves on the glass cliff. One by one and quickly, during the financial crisis that was looming deep in the heart of the financial world at that time frame, these three strong, talented, hard-working women were out of leadership roles, and in some respects blamed for the failings that they hadn't lead these organizations into. In at least one instance, I would say that the woman was set up to fail. Personally, the glass ceiling has impacted me in a few ways. And the first that I could recount is that I experienced firsthand some male junior colleagues who were hired at a 16% higher rate of pay than I was at one point. They had less education, they were Bachelor's levels, I was Masters. And they had less experience. And that was a market differential at mid-career hiring. I noticed it, I brought it up to the firm I worked, and then I decided that I just outperform them, and that's what I did. So I worked at outperforming and out producing in an environment where I could drive my own income higher by stronger performance. That type-A individual performer piece, roared back, less collaborative, less collaborative leadership type-A driven. If the base pay wasn't going to be equal, I could at least equalize it on my own terms by working hard. I think the second piece that I've seen in this is maybe a little less glass ceiling and a little more opaque tinted window is that there are social constructs in play that can inhibit women, when they're even given an opportunity. Women who are seeing out at night professionally, for instance, can be targeted for rape or other crimes, right? It's not really a glass ceiling, but that may prevent women from wanting to go out and go to nighttime meetings or nighttime networking events because they don't want to be targeted, or they don't want their reputation tarnished. Yet they're working, and they're trying to exceed, and they may be vulnerable or more vulnerable. I've also had my professional time wasted by men who feigned being prospects to become my clients. So I've worked really hard to set up an appointment, only to arrive at the meeting and find out that they wanted to ask me out. I mean, some women who were prospective clients are also kind of in that group of more opaque glass that kind of gets in the way of being able to get through any glass ceilings because they were raised on ideas. They were socialized in such kinds of patriarchal environments that the notion of working with an unconventional woman who was working in a financial role was concerning or unfamiliar to them, and they chose the relative safety of working with a man because that's what they knew, you know, their husband had made the financial decisions, their dad had always made the financial decisions, their dad had been the breadwinner, when or whatever that was. They found safety in what they knew or recognized. Then, many men, who were legitimate prospects for business would sometimes make the decision to work with a male advisor. Perhaps not even aware that for one reason or another, they just weren't comfortable working with woman in that role, even though many times, women in that role are going to be more successful for their clients. There's study after study that shows that women can bring a lot of their clients to more successful outcomes. So it's a really interesting challenge that I have seen. |
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