PlanMember Financial reviews

We agree with the commenter that PlanMember does have a fabulous location on the bluffs of Carpinteria, making it a convenient location for those in either Ventura County or Santa Barbara County to come to work. Per the compensation comments, “Industry Averages” is a broadly interpreted statement and can be easily misinterpreted. PlanMember strives to provide fair and competitive compensation and benefit packages for our employees. To best estimate salaries and economic influences PlanMembers’ HR utilizes industry salary surveys for each job description annually. These job surveys examine compensable factors such as licenses/credentials, education, experience, skills, knowledge, independent judgement, and responsibility required by each job along with location of position. Salary surveys evaluate each job’s value or worth to the organization and in the marketplace, establishing pay ranges that maintain internal and external pay equity. We also work closely with the UCSB and Cal Poly placement offices to benchmark starting salaries for new graduates. PlanMember salaries fall in the mid- to upper range of the recently available surveys. This data is consistently reviewed, taking company budgets, talent acquisition environment and inflation (Cost-of-Living-Adjustment/COLA) into consideration. Finally, it is also important to remember that pay rates are only ONE factor in calculating our “Total Compensation” or “Total Rewards”, which includes all the extrinsic and intrinsic rewards we receive because of employment (health care, profit sharing, etc.). We continue to be excited about our company and the growth prospects over the next decade!

We encourage this employee to discuss their “CRM” comments with their manager and propose that this be considered at our bi-weekly Platform Committee Meetings. All ideas for platform improvement are welcome from any company source. We also strongly agree with the commentor that PlanMember is good, we might even say great, at training staff for a career in Financial Services, and in particular, Investments. We provide initial training, support for securities industry licenses and credentials and encourage work on industry committees and associations. We do have a different view on the comments about being “poor” at retention. This remains a competitive industry and the overall skills our employees gain at PlanMember are highly desirable, especially at firms that do not invest the time into training that PlanMember does. With that being said, our Securities Industry Training Program (SIT), which recruits new college graduates into our SIT program has over the past 15 years since inception retained and promoted a huge percentage of SIT entrants. Graduates of the SIT are now Managers and Directors of various Operations department desks, Compliance professionals, and the vast majority of our Sales Support staff. Several of our SIT graduates have gone on to become Independent Investment advisors in our business and our hugely successful, both financially and happiness-wise. While a minority of the SIT candidates have moved on to success with other Financial Services firms, we applaud their success knowing that our training assisted them in the early success of their career. Finally, staffing levels are always in flux in a large service organization, in what is frankly, a smaller sized employment pool of Santa Barbara/Ventura. We acknowledge that the pendulum can swing from full employment periods to other times where recruiting replacement staff is more difficult. The current post-pandemic “reopening” is an example of a tougher environment for employers to attract and hire qualified candidates, although we have invested in more internal and external recruiters to help us get through this challenging environment.