Samantha Clark, CLF, CLTC A Powerhouse with Purpose

This financial leader is growing an industry by growing relationships.

By Julie Knudson

It’s been said that experience is the best teacher. When her husband passed away unexpectedly, the years Samantha Clark, CLF, CLTC, vice president and managing director at National Financial Network in Garden City, New York, spent helping clients build and protect their financial lives ended up paying dividends for her own family. “My husband was only 41 and he died of a massive heart attack,” she explains.

With two young children to nurture, her stay-at-home husband had been a huge help in making room for Clark to focus on building her career and networking with her industry peers. “When he passed so suddenly, life had a new perspective,” she says. Fortunately, Clark and her husband had been careful in their own financial planning, and she was able to leverage those resources as she looked to a future different from the one she had envisioned.

A career with a purpose

Clark has always had an interest in how money fits into life. In college, she enjoyed taking classes on psychology along with courses in finance. “Only later, when I started in the industry, did I realize how much that psychology background would really be needed,” she recalls. Growing up, Clark was fascinated by her godmother, a portfolio manager with Oppenheimer Capital who helped Clark secure an internship in the World Trade Center in the late 1990s. “It was great because I was in the hustle and bustle of Wall Street,” Clark says.

While an intern in college, Clark put her resume on Monster.com hoping to land a position closer to the front line. She fielded several contacts and ultimately convinced a skeptical manager at Guardian to give her a chance. Sheer guts and a knack for putting clients at ease helped to quickly build her book of business. “My main reason for joining the company was to prove my G.A. wrong,” Clark says with a laugh. “But the reason I joined the industry was to add that alignment of psychology and finance to my life.”

Whether it’s divorce, losing a spouse unexpectedly or making the sacrifices necessary to put a child through college, much of the strife families endure can be traced back to money. “I thought that if I could just help a few people and teach them about how money works, then look at how many lives I could change,” Clark says of her early days in the industry.

Clark has since moved to National Financial Network, and her clientele is wide ranging, including people from all walks of life and all income levels. She especially enjoys partnering with passionate entrepreneurs. “They have a vision of what they want to build and what they want to grow toward,” Clark says. “Because I develop very strong relationships with people I work with, to be able to carry that relationship through and see their dreams come true , that’s what drives me.”

Growing the industry

After getting her bearings in financial services, Clark quickly began to wonder why more women weren’t involved in the industry. “To this day I don’t understand why there aren’t more women here, especially in management,” she says. To help provide encouragement and mentorship to women considering careers as advisors, Clark became a member of Women in Insurance and Financial Services (WIFS) and launched a chapter in Buffalo, New York in 2008. Participation grew and the chapter soon expanded into Rochester. “I led the chapter and after the fourth year I gave up the presidency and stayed on as the immediate past president,” Clark says. In early 2015, after 14 years in Buffalo, she relocated to Long Island, and she’s now in the early stages of starting a chapter there.

Along with growing WIFS’s presence in Buffalo, Clark also launched an economic empowerment program for victims of domestic violence. Though participants in the program were mostly women, she’s quick to point out that domestic violence doesn’t pick and choose when it comes to gender, race, religion or any other demographic. “There was domestic violence in my household growing up,” Clark explains. “What I saw was a woman who couldn’t leave the household because of money.”

It was just more fuel for the fire, helping to move Clark on a path into the financial industry where she could help other victims build a foundation of their own that didn’t rely on anyone else. “Whether it was just helping them understand how to open a checking account or pay bills, it was an amazing experience showing these people how money works.”

Clark has also been instrumental in connecting women with new opportunities within her own team. “From working with a lot of female entrepreneurs, I know they enjoy working with other women and networking with other women,” Clark says. It’s an area she highlights in her management role today as she works with new advisors. “I look at myself more as a coach and a mentor,” she says. “When I can see someone else’s career expand and grow, I love that. It fuels me.”

A big proponent of industry involvement, Clark has been a NAIFA member from day one and has enjoyed the networking and partnership aspects of the organization.

“Throughout the years, I was asked to sit on the Buffalo chapter’s board, which I did.” She headed up a number of development efforts, too, reaching out to speakers and helping to build up the group’s recurring meeting roster. “I loved it. I met so many great people and learned so much about other companies,” Clark recalls. She’s currently working to support and increase the presence of the NAIFA Long Island association.

The future is looking good Clark sees a bright future for advisors, even if that optimism isn’t always apparent among her peers. “There’s a lot of talk now about Millennials and how robo-advisors are going to take over and we’re not going to have an industry,” Clark says. But she isn’t buying it. While she says the industry is evolving — she agrees large mergers and other factors have