For Kylie Felker, this month’s promotion to president of Greenville’s Foster Victor Wealth Advisors is the culmination of years of effort she says were filled with both challenges and growth.
The promotion also neatly coincides with her earning an executive MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an achievement that her partners say clearly demonstrates her talent and drive during two years dominated by the challenges of a global pandemic.
Leading from the front
As one of three principal partners at Foster Victor, Felker has served as chief operating officer since the firm’s founding in 2016.
Principal Rob Victor says her demonstrated leadership skills and ability to bring out the best in her team members is one of many reasons that promoting her to president made so much sense.
“I think Kylie is the glue to our business,” Victor says. “I think she does a really good job of maintaining and cultivating our culture.”
Victor adds that Felker is skilled at leading different groups of people and bringing out their strengths. He credits this, in part, to her high emotional intelligence and ability to understand the perspectives of different team members.
Principal Paul Foster says Felker’s leadership style embodies the ethos of the firm: leading from the front.
“I think she leads by example as well as anyone I’ve ever seen,” Foster says. “She doesn’t ask anyone to do anything that she’s not willing to do herself … If there’s a busy time here, she’s the first one here and the last one to leave.”
Exciting opportunities
Felker says she is excited to be stepping into the new role and is proud of the organization as it stands today but looks forward to new challenges and opportunities for growth.
She says leading a talented group of professionals and continuing to evolve as a financial planning firm is an exhilarating prospect.
“It’s exciting to work with a group of people that inspires me to improve each day,” she says.
A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Felker graduated from Furman University with a degree in accounting. She says working on her executive MBA degree over the past two years has been hard but gratifying.
She adds that balancing the commitments of a full work schedule at Foster Victor, the coursework for obtaining her MBA and the demands of being a wife and mother have been challenging.
But navigating those challenges have made her a more effective leader, she says.
She says that in addition to a world-class education at UNC, working with a variety of professionals from numerous fields and backgrounds broadened her perspective and gave her invaluable insights into best practices for running companies.
“I’ve learned what to do and what not to do,” Felker says. “One of the really valuable things about an executive MBA is people are coming to the table with experiences and are willing to be vulnerable and share those.”
She adds that those real-world perspectives offer insights she believes will prove very useful in her new role.
Pandemic lessons
Felker says while the past two years saw many challenges brought on by the pandemic, those challenges taught her and the Foster Victor team valuable lessons that have ultimately improved the caliber of their work and their effectiveness as a team.
“We’ve learned a lot in the past couple of years,” she says. “We learned how crucial and important it is to have all of our team in the office every day.”
While this was an approach shunned by many companies across the nation and globe, the decision brought the team closer together.
She adds that the pandemic also demonstrated how important it is to provide clients with digital solutions. In a world saturated with “information overload,” giving clients timely and accurate input so they can make informed financial decisions is critical, Felker says.
But maintaining the unique personal touch of face-to-face interactions with clients is also something that will remain important.
“We don’t believe that the future of financial advice is going to be digital,” she says. “We think it’s a combination of using digital tools and those continued relationships.”
She says that in a tumultuous world with rapidly changing markets and information, maintaining and strengthening relationships of trust with clients remains central to how the firm does business. “We want to be that voice of constant reason,” she says. “We want to provide people with all the information they need to make decisions that take emotion and greed out of it.”
On being in Greenville
After falling in love with Greenville as a Furman University student, Felker says living and working here now is exciting.
She, like so many others who have moved here from different parts of the country and world, finds Greenville a dynamic community that continues to draw new talent from all over.
“Even in the last half-dozen recruits we’ve had, more than half of them haven’t been local,” she says.
That influx of people augments the talent pool that already exists, and she says this blending helps explain the explosion of growth, innovation and entrepreneurship that are becoming hallmarks of the area.
“I think it’s making Greenville better because we’re able to blend that greatness that already existed here with fresh perspectives,” Felker says.
She adds that one of the great things about her job is learning from people about the businesses they are starting or the projects and issues they care about. There are some really passionate people in Greenville doing really great things,” she says. “It’s humbling.”
