Jessica Smith knows what growth requires
Jessica Smith joined Designed Wealth Management before the firm had onboarded its first advisor. At the time, much of the dealer was still being built. Smith had spent the previous decade at a high-net-worth money manager, eventually becoming vice president of client relations.
The move wasn’t really planned. Smith had resigned while on maternity leave, without another job lined up, because she felt ready for a change. A coffee with Michael Konopaski led to an introduction to Gillian Kunza, CEO of Designed Wealth Management, and that meeting ended up changing the direction of her career.
Smith remembers being struck by the fact that Kunza, a woman around her own age, was building an investment dealer from the ground up alongside co-founder Konopaski. It was the chance to be part of that build that appealed to her.
Spotlight
Designed Wealth Management is Canada’s fastest organically growing investment dealer. Through its outstanding culture and its commitment to collaboration and customization, it has become the advisor’s dealer. With maximum flexibility and support, Designed attracts advisors who want a dealer where they are free to be themselves. Designed is dedicated to working with advisors and understanding the needs of the clients they serve. They are a dealer where advisors can enjoy their work with clients and bring their best ideas forward, across a variety of needs.
Company Profile
170+
Number of advisors
13
Registered provinces and territories
$9+
Billions in AUA
70+
Number of employees
7
Advisors on advisory board
Bio
Spotlight
Milestones
Company Profile
Years of Experience
17 years in the industry
5 years at current company
quick fact #1
Employee #2 at Designed Wealth Management
quick fact #2
Extensive yoga and Pilates training, launched successful movement practice during Covid, and has led hundreds of hours of classes
Jessica Smith
Vice president, strategic operations & growth, Designed Wealth Management
Jessica Smith’s path from operations to business development has given the Designed Wealth Management executive an unusually practical view of advisor growth and leadership
Read on
“It’s the importance of building a team where those people don’t necessarily need management. They need someone to lead them and say, ‘What do you need to be successful?’”
Jessica Smith,
Designed Wealth Management
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Published Oct 19, 2026
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2021
2024
2025
2026
Received associate portfolio manager designation. Was second employee to join Designed Wealth Management, before the first advisor was hired.
2021
Led and built operations and transitions departments at Designed to 20+ member team, servicing entire advisor base. Led transitions of +150 advisors to bring their practices to Designed, some books as large as +$800M.
2024
Accepted as member of CIRO FOAS operations committee. Awarded WPC 40 Under 40 Rising Stars in 2025.
2025
Spearheaded the Designed Women in Wealth Program.
2026
Milestones
For Smith, the measure is whether a woman can remain in the business through different stages of her life and eventually reach the point of succession planning her own practice.
Outside the office Smith has also spent seven years heading up a community running club, and has taught yoga and Pilates, both built around bringing people together rather than the activity itself.
“It’s not about the running,” she says. “It’s about the community”.
The run club regularly puts Smith alongside people whose working lives look nothing like hers. One week she might be running with a firefighter; another, with a lawyer. Those conversations have shaped how she reads people in a professional setting too.
“Whenever you meet someone, it’s important to recognize that you’re meeting a human being that is fully formed outside of this conversation,” she says.
Smith looks for that point of connection in her work as well. It is useful in recruitment, where understanding what an advisor is trying to build is what matters.
Having joined Designed before the first advisor arrived, she learned the business from the inside out. Today, she brings that same close understanding of how practices operate to deciding who might be a fit for the firm.
“We want to be regarded as a women-supportive company. We promote women advisors, and this is how we do it, with concrete ways for them to find ease in building out an advisory practice”
Jessica Smith,
Designed Wealth Management
Transitioned out of operations to lead business development department and initiatives for Designed Wealth Management.
“I didn’t know where this was all going to lead or what would come of it, but I didn’t really mind,” Smith recalls thinking. “I’m ready for the adventure.”
Five years later, Smith is vice president of strategic operations and growth at Designed Wealth Management, leading advisor recruitment and business development at a firm that has grown to more than 170 advisors and approximately $9 billion in assets under administration. Her role now includes advisor recruitment, but the experience of helping build the dealer from its earliest days still shapes how she thinks about growth.
From operations to recruitment One of the more consequential things Smith learned at Designed was what not to do.
She had managed teams before joining the firm, but in an environment where senior leaders remained closely involved in how departments were run. At Designed, she found herself working under a very different assumption: give people the tools and mentorship they need, then step back.
“It’s the importance of building a team where those people don’t necessarily need management,” Smith says. “They need someone to lead them and say, ‘What do you need to be successful?’”
Many of the advisors Smith speaks with are already looking for an answer to something that is not working at their current dealer.
Her time in operations shaped how those conversations go. Smith knows the technology advisors are working with and where processes can become cumbersome. Instead of staying at the level of grids and fees, she can talk through how a practice is actually run.
“If all I ever did was talk to advisors about their grids and fees, I wouldn’t have as strong a base of knowledge on any of this,” she says.
That knowledge also feeds into how Designed positions itself against older, more established dealers. Smith says older systems tend to box advisors into a fixed way of doing things, whereas Designed will flex the platform instead.
“We have not been making the platform more rigid,” she says. “No is never the first answer. We will always try to solve it.” That extends to access as well; an advisor with a problem can still call senior management directly.
Women in wealth Smith is also helping build Designed’s Women in Wealth program, working alongside three advisors at the firm on a project organized around four pillars. She isn’t interested in the usual format for these things.
She has attended women-focused events where the stories were inspiring but the practical questions remained largely untouched. Someone might leave encouraged by another woman’s career, she says, and still have no idea how to ask for a raise or what happens to their registration if they take a leave.
“We want to be regarded as a women-supportive company. We promote women advisors, and this is how we do it, with concrete ways for them to find ease in building out an advisory practice.”
What she wants is a playbook: a set way for an advisor to take parental or family leave without losing continuity in their book of business, including who might step in temporarily and what happens to registration status during time away.
She recalls one advisor who didn’t mention her pregnancy during recruitment, worried it might affect whether Designed brought her on. That experience is part of why Smith wants the firm’s position stated outright rather than assumed. Smith says, “We view parenthood as an asset. Wanting to build a family is a positive signal. It should be promoted and celebrated.”
Smith notes that it also changed her in ways she didn’t expect, before the even greater change brought by having children herself. “The biggest thing that becoming a parent did for me as it relates to my career,” she says, “is it gave me a level of resilience in my job that did not exist before.”
The aim is to have the arrangements thought through before they are needed. If another advisor is going to cover a book for six months, for example, Smith wants the questions around continuity and compensation to have already been considered rather than negotiated when the time actually comes.
That has led her to put more weight on retention than on the industry’s usual emphasis on recruitment.
“Get people in the door, certainly, but how do you ensure that they don’t eventually fizzle out?”
