We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Barbara Provost a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Barbara, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
Women are behind financially. Blame it on the pay gap, the fact that women leave the workforce to care for children or sick family members, the pink tax or even the poor money messages women have been given, and continue to get! Purse Strings was created so that women have one trusted resource they can go to for free online financial resources and access to a directory of vetted financial professionals who are uniquely equipped to serve a female market.
Barbara, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
As a consultant in the financial industry I could clearly see how their linear process, all male sales force, marketing materials of happy families skipping down the beach did not reflect the true realities of what women needed and wanted. This led me to commission a researcher to do a deep dive into the data. I had two questions; how is the financial industry helping women, and are women prepared for their financial future. This statement in one of the reports summed it up – “The insurance and financial industry wins the award as being the least sympathetic to women – and women are NOT prepared for their financial future.” It confirmed everything I was observing.
But, I knew I needed to go to the source. So, I facilitated many focus groups and talked to hundreds of women to hear from their own personal experiences. The over arching theme was that their financial professionals didn’t even look at them. They just talked to their husbands. And, if they did talk to them it was to collect a check for a product they were told to buy.
This all stops with Purse Strings!
How’d you meet your business partner?
I met my business partner at birth! That’s right – she’s my daughter! As I was building Purse Strings Maggie was always by my side from conversations at the kitchen table to discuss colors and branding, to being my scribe at countless focus groups, and now she is the engine behind the whole company.
I started creating the Purse Strings model when Maggie was in high school. But, the company took off during the pandemic after I closed my consulting practice to work on Purse Strings full-time. By that time Maggie graduated with her MBA and together we rolled up our sleeves and dug in together so that all women have the opportunity to be financially fearless.
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
Purse Strings was created due to my years of consulting across many financial institutions and seeing how their sales processes, products and materials were clearly overlooking the female market. None of the marketing, products or linear sales processes spoke to women or represented women.
Then, just taking in what was happening around me, I would see women of retirement age working as cashiers or handing out samples in the grocery store. It prompted me to investigate how women were being served by the financial industry and if they were prepared for their financial future.
The data confirmed that “the insurance / financial industry wins the award as being the least sympathetic to women. And, women were not prepared for their financial future.”
So, Maggie and I set out on a mission to talk to hundreds of women and find out what they wanted and needed to be financially competent and confident. Women told us that they wanted a trusted resource where they could learn what they needed to make smart financial decisions. And, they wanted us to find them financial professionals they could trust. So that’s what we set out to build.
All of this work was happening while I was running my consulting company and Maggie was finishing school.
Then comes the pandemic. The whole world shut down – including my consulting company. And, that’s when Maggie (fresh from completing her MBA) and I put our heads together and launched Purse Strings, LLC as our full-time endeavor.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.pursestrings.co
- Instagram: pursestringsco
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/pursestringfinanciallyfearlesswomen
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pursestrings/?viewAsMember=true
- Twitter: @pursestringsco
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@pursestringsco
- Other: Podcast: https://pursestrings.co/podcast/ Women and Money: The Shit We Don’t Talk About