Once a year, our entire PWL Capital team assembles in one room for our annual summit. This year, that meant 150 people coming together. The last time we did this, 15 months ago, we had 80 people.
What struck me most wasn’t the size of the team. It was the excitement in the room and the alignment across each member of the team. France Kingsbury, our chief legal and compliance officer who joined in March this year, commented that this was the first event where no one was on their phone during the presentations. A fully captivated room is a pretty powerful statement in itself.
PWL was founded with a belief that Canadians deserved a better way to get financial advice. The summit was an opportunity to celebrate what was built 30 years ago and look at the opportunity ahead. There are many capable advisors and firms doing excellent work across Canada. Yet as an industry, we still have a lot of work to do. Too many Canadians don’t have access to financial advice—and even fewer have access to truly great advice.
We are building the firm that Canadians deserve.
Here are the key things that stuck with me from our summit:
PWL co-founder James Parkyn shared the origin story of PWL. In 1996, the founders set out to change the way Canadians receive financial advice in a way that serves them better. The firm has grown and evolved since its inception 30 years ago. But this core mission has not changed. We continue to find better ways to deliver on the client experience.
As we attract more amazing, like-minded people, we need to be intentional about maintaining the values and culture that got us here.
This is something Cameron Passmore, PWL’s CEO, has always been very intentional about. When we bring together great people who share a common philosophy and mission, we become better as a firm. Every day we learn from and challenge one another, continually making us better for the clients we serve.
Culture doesn’t maintain itself as you grow. It is shaped by the people you bring in, the behaviours you reinforce, and the standards you protect.
We all have a responsibility to preserve what makes PWL special.
Compensation drives behaviour, and we want to drive the behaviour that reflects the culture that makes this team so strong. This is something Tessa McGirr, head of people and culture, often reminds us of.
At PWL, we don’t set individual sales targets, and that is by design.
Individual sales targets can create an incentive to focus on what benefits you. Removing individual targets allows the focus to stay where it should be, which is doing what is right for the client and the team. That distinction matters.
Our focus is on building a better business, and when we do that, the economic details take care of themselves.
Adam Bruckman, co-founder and CEO of OneDigital, PWL’s parent company, shared a line from a previous employee engagement survey: “This is the hardest job I have ever had, and I would never do it for another company.”
This line really resonated with me. I truly feel that way about PWL, and I think most of my colleagues would agree.
This is an extremely hardworking team doing challenging work. We set a high standard for quality and expect a lot from everyone. But when you are surrounded by people who care deeply about the work, the clients and each other, the hard work is incredibly rewarding. It is important to take the time to pause and celebrate.
We have incredibly skilled people across PWL. The opportunity with AI is not to replace talented people. It is to elevate what we are doing, create more capacity, and allow people to spend more of their time doing the work where their skills, experience, and relationships matter most.
We saw a clear example of this at the summit.
Braden Warwick, our chief product officer, has been leading the development of a new financial planning dashboard that builds on the planning foundation that has evolved at PWL over many years. It brings together that collective knowledge in a way that will help elevate the client experience while improving the quality and consistency of advice we provide across the firm.
AI enhances what Braden and the team have built. But it’s not the foundation of it. The foundation is years of financial planning experience, thoughtful processes, and the expertise of skilled people.
That is how I think about the opportunity with AI more broadly. We can use technology to make great people better at what they already do, create capacity for them to do more of it, and ultimately deliver better advice to more Canadians.
Alan Nelson, co-managing partner of CRA | Admired Leadership shared something that stuck with me:
“Leadership is about making people and situations better. If you make people better, you create loyalty. If you make situations better, you create results.”
The front-stage moments matter. But Alan highlighted that the backstage moments are a better indicator of the type of leader you really are. Treat the unimportant moments like the most important ones. The best leaders lead well even when no one is watching.
Dave Butler, co-CEO of Dimensional Fund Advisors, described three qualities he consistently sees in the firms he admires most: culture, consistency and camaraderie.
Those qualities are not accidental. They are built through the standards you set, the behaviours you reinforce, and the way people show up for each other every day. Culture gives a team its identity. Consistency builds trust. Camaraderie makes the hard work more rewarding. Together, they create the foundation for a high-performing team.
I left the summit proud of what has been built—but I am even more energized by what is ahead of us.
Growth to get bigger is not the goal. The goal is to grow with intention by continuing to bring together exceptional people who believe deeply in doing this work the right way, while making great advice available to more Canadians.
This is the firm that Canada deserves. And we are just getting started.
