Jamie L. Clark
Founder / Ruby Pebble Financial Planning / Seattle
Jamie L. Clark has made“ non-traditional” a calling card: Clark serves LGBTQIA +, BIPOC tech professionals looking for non-traditional paths, those who want to retire early— or perhaps remain child-free, stay unmarried or keep finances separate from those of their partners. The firm might serve members of the Jewish community or what it sees as other marginalized groups.
“ My business growth has been wild,” says Clark.“ I’ ve started turning away people with non-traditional goals.”
Serving this group has paid dividends for the three-year-old, one-person firm, and for Clark, a former software engineer who went into financial planning after the tech world caused the young British Columbia native a certain amount of burnout. The first stop was an associate planner position with Arrivity Financial Planning.
Ruby Pebble’ s clients are generally high-income earners in their 40s in stressful tech careers, jobs they might want to retire early from.
“ I have clients who don’ t live together with their partner. I have clients who have kids but aren ' t married with their partner and they own a house together,” Clark says.“ I have clients who are married
but don’ t live together. I have clients who are child free and don ' t have a partner and all of that.”
The clients are drawn to the authenticity of the firm, a lifestyle practice for Clark, who recognized early on that LGBTQ and other groups were being underserved and jumped at the opportunity to serve this burgeoning demographic.
“ As someone who took a non-traditional path with my partner, I didn’ t want anyone else to feel discouraged but instead supported and guided,” Clark says.“ Part of why I have a hard time seeing it as a niche is because I think it ' s normal to not have kids and not care about getting married.”
At age 16, Clark, a self-described data nerd, developed personal finance software and still uses it today. Ruby Pebble now has 27 ongoing client relationships and has worked with 60 clients in total. There are no plans to expand the practice beyond herself; Clark says she might stop taking on new clients when she hits about 55 relationships.
Serving non-traditional clients isn’ t“ something that a lot of advisors are doing,” says Clark.“ People come to my website and they just feel seen.”
James Conole
Founder & CEO / Root Financial / Encinitas, Calif.
Not many people feel confident enough to admit right off the bat that they were fired from their first advisory job after five years. But James Conole isn’ t sweating that too much: Since 2017, he’ s carved out his own YouTube empire advising people on retirement and the young advisor is sitting pretty on a $ 2 billion AUM practice.
Conole’ s father was a former pastor who left his job to become an entrepreneur consultant. For two years when James was young, he says the family, which had four kids, felt the sting of having very little money come in for a couple of years.
“ You don’ t know your family’ s financial situation when you’ re a kid but you can feel things in the air.” Later on, Conole’ s mother gave him the book The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey.“ Frankly, that book changed everything.”
Conole has posted some 1,300 videos on YouTube, sometimes hitting millions of views as he counsels viewers on tax issues, Roth IRAs, donor-advised funds and retirement. He hits on how a couple might get through retirement on $ 2 million or when is the best time to start claiming Social Security. He also talks about the psychology of retirement, asking if people are saving too much— and not really planning for what they’ re doing with it( and thus working hard for money they might never get to spend).
While many people his age are trying to figure out what young clients want, Conole felt more comfortable jumping right into the ring with the older generations, talking to them about their retirement issues just the same way older advisors do.“ When I started, I was 28 and I felt like people who are two times, three times my age aren’ t going to want to get financial advice from someone like me, so why don’ t I try to create services for people my age?” he explains.
But he felt that business model was harder.“ Sometimes there’ s varying degrees of the value you can add, depending on the situation; there are varying degrees of what service model makes sense for someone like that. It felt like I was trying to push uphill,” he recalls.“ So at some point, I was like, well, why not just go back to what I was doing at my old firm, which was very much the thing that every advisor does, because it ' s profitable?”
38 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | MAY / JUNE 2026 WWW. FA-MAG. COM