908 Jenna Biancavilla:

Melinda Wittstock:

Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Jenna Biancavilla:

I fell into the typical trap that entrepreneurs fall into where you’re afraid to spend money, so you wait too long to hire. And I’m going to say this to every entrepreneur listening, you need to hire someone. And you’re not going to listen, just like I didn’t listen. I heard all the books and the podcasts and the advice, and I still waited too long. I kind of got disregarded in this mastermind group. And they’re like, you don’t have a business, you just have a job that you’ve created for yourself. I think it set me on fire to say, I do have a business. I want something that can run without me. It’s about you being a mentor, a coach, a leader, empowering these people to be as good as you and trusting them with jobs that you don’t necessarily think they’re ready for, but you want them to learn. And that’s really how you create a great culture and a great team. And that’s been what I’ve been able to multiply.

Melinda Wittstock:

What does it mean to you to be a business owner? Have you created a business that can run without you, and without you creating a never-ending job for yourself? Jenna Biancavilla is a multipreneur in the tech and finance spaces who says she learned the hard way that not hiring soon enough was holding back her business growth. An investor and wealth advisor who also champions the success and profitability of women-led companies, Jenna offers sage advice for entrepreneurs on hiring early, effective delegation and team mentoring plus how to navigate the financial landscape with confidence.

Melinda Wittstock:

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m all about paying it forward as a five-time serial entrepreneur, so I started this podcast to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb.

Melinda Wittstock:

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur and investor who is the founder of two companies, Pearl Capital Management and the innovative fintech platform Svvy.. Jenna Biancavilla shares her entrepreneurial journey from finance to tech, plus we dig deep into how women can become more financially savvy as entrepreneurs and investors. We also talk about what it takes to juggle multiple commitments without burnout or stress. Jenna will be here in a moment, and first:

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Melinda Wittstock:

As we race to the end of the year, you may already be thinking of what you’re going to do differently to grow your business and wealth in the year ahead. As we wrap up a year, it’s a good time to take stock – if you can find time in all the holiday festivities – of where you’re at and where you want to be. What worked well in the past year? What didn’t? What strategies or new approaches might you be planning for 2025?

Melinda Wittstock:

Today we’re talking about how to be financially savvy, both personally and in your business, with multipreneur, wealth advisor and investor Jenna Biancavilla. Jenna is the Founder and CEO of Pearl Capital Management, a holistic, fee-only fiduciary, financial planning firm, and she advises on over $180 Million of assets under management. Passionate about helping women grow their wealth and businesses, Jenna focuses on helping every client align their use of capital with their personal goals and philanthropic values. She also leads the Arcadia Team of Geneva Financial, a home loan company “Powered By Humans®”, showcasing her versatility and expertise in different facets of the financial industry.

Melinda Wittstock:

Now if that doesn’t sound like Jenna has enough on her plate, she also co-founded a new fintech platform called Svvy with her sister, with a goal to

revolutionize the financial services industry with a platform that weeds out predatory salespeople and protects women and their wealth. That sounds good to me! Today she shares what it’s been like bootstrapping a tech company, the mindset shift she had to make to leap from running a services business to a scalable technology product one, and how she learned the importance of building and leveraging a team, empowering employees, and creating a thriving company culture. We also talk about what has to change for more women entrepreneurs to land venture capital funding.

Melinda Wittstock:

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Jenna Biancavilla and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock:

Jenna, welcome to Wings.

Jenna Biancavilla:

Thank you for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Let’s talk tech. Let’s just dig right in there. Because as a multipreneur, you have a tech company Svvy in the finance space that you’re bootstrapping, which is really, really rare in technology, but perhaps needed for a lot of women entrepreneurs who struggle to get funded. So, I’m fascinated how you’re doing that.

Jenna Biancavilla:

Well, my whole background is in finance, so I have this financial planning brain. And so first and foremost, it’s hard to turn that off when everything that I do is more conservative in building companies that are more sustainable. I would say starting with the point, it’s unique to my brain that it’s really painful to think about a burn rate and intentionally building something that burns money instead of creates wealth. It’s the opposite of all of my training.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, that’s interesting because over the years with Silicon Valley technology companies, the plan was always go for growth, fund the growth with investment, and we’ll figure out the business model later. The blitz scaling thing, the way Amazon grew. And even if a woman wants to do that, women don’t ever get that kind of capital. Like when we’re being evaluated by investors, they’re looking at us differently. And so, it’s almost like we have to be a lot more creative about how we grow. And that growth rate may be slower, but women do tend to get to profitability sooner, and perhaps not necessarily even by choice, as it is for training, as it is for you, but just by necessity.

Jenna Biancavilla:

Well, and what’s infuriating is as an investor, I know the data that women led companies are more profitable, they have better profit margins, they have more success rates than male led companies. So, the fact that statistically we run better companies and we’re still struggling to get funding is infuriating to me. But I have seen a couple different female led company specific venture capital companies launch. And so, there’s a couple funds out there that are only investing in women founders. And I’m really excited to see this trend. And statistically it should be a better performing portfolio, so investors should flock to it. I have my fingers crossed that hopefully the landscape can start changing because we run better companies.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s true. All the stats bear that out. We have over 90% chance of actually surviving past the five-year mark, whereas male only founded companies, I think it’s like 20% or something, right? We’re better with money maybe because we have to be, but also we return more on the dollar or we’re more likely to exit with a good exit rate. Any way you look at this, women are a better investment. And it doesn’t make sense to me that any investor would be looking at a female founded company with all that data and all that stat and still hasn’t moved for 30 years.

It’s still less than 2% of the total venture money, right?

Jenna Biancavilla:

Well, we’re more conservative. We, we just are innately more conservative creatures, which is again why we probably are going to have more because we are not going to bet on something that’s a losing bet. But we’re not as good at selling ourselves and getting in front of those investors and telling them why we are so much better than everyone else out there. And so, I think that might be our downfall is that we don’t have as much arrogance.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, that’s true. In addition to growing Podopolo, I also have a new role as a venture partner in the new VC fund of our board chairman who was our lead investor as an angel like in the early, earliest days of Podopolo. Zero Limits Capital is focused on women and diverse teams Steve Little who runs it, he is a longtime entrepreneur, has grown six of his own, you know, businesses to high nine figure exits, has raised, billions of dollars over the years. You know, hands down, he thinks women are better CEOs like so, so there are men that are starting to see this. But to your point about the confidence, I’ve been to all these pitch competitions. Sometimes I’ve been in them.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m now evaluating a lot of female led companies and sometimes the aspirations are set a little too low. Like we’re a little too conservative sometimes in our numbers or what we think we can do or just a little tentative maybe in selling it. But the thing that I see the most is that women sometimes think an investor is doing them a favor. They’re not. They’re the one taking the risk and providing the opportunity for the investor. And so, like getting that power relationship right I think is a big learning for a lot of women.

Jenna Biancavilla:

Well and I’ve had, you know, the pleasure to sit on advisory boards for different startup tech companies and some of them male led. I’ve sat and looked through the financials and again I have a finance brain and to your point, looked at it, looked at their projections and said, you guys, this is actually impossible, and you forgot some very key factors that need to be factored into the math on where you’re going. And it’s actually fascinating that I caught these things after they had already done investor pitches. The investors didn’t catch their bad math on their projections of where they could go. And so, I’ve actually like ripped apart first, firsthand bad math that some of these male founders are putting in front of investors. So yeah, to that point we’re not, I’m not saying it’s bad math, but just there’s so much optimism around where they, they think the company can go. And women are more, I don’t know, logical or conservative and we really try to make sure that we’re not misleading someone.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly. But what happens is all the investors have become so aware of the fact that everybody’s going to do the hockey stick and inflate their numbers or their optimistic, you know, entrepreneurs are general, generally optimistic people. So, and so they automatically deduct from whatever you’re saying. So, if you start with reality, they deduct from the reality and then suddenly it’s not an interesting opportunity for them.

Jenna Biancavilla:

So that’s a good point.

Melinda Wittstock:

I saw a pitch from a woman who had the potential to be a billion-dollar business, but she didn’t see it herself and she was like projecting in her out years and maybe she get to $10 million in revenue in like 2028. And it’s like I actually asked a question, so I was trying to encourage her like well what if you succeeded more like that? Do you see a path where you could do more than that? And she was like, she, she didn’t have a good answer and that would be an immediate disqualification.

Jenna Biancavilla:

And I wonder if the, the advice to give to our fellow female tech founders is create, you know, two sets of data. One that is, you know, I’m pretty sure this is a safe bet, and investors can get this kind of rate of return out of investing with us.

Jenna Biancavilla:

And then a different one that is like if, if my wildest dreams come true and we, you know, disrupt a whole entire industry, we could do this. And I feel like maybe we do two sets of math, and you start with if your wildest dreams come true, but always have the backup in your back pocket. Is that a different way of thinking of it?

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I think so. I think those kind of scenarios and knowing your numbers, right? So, this is a good topic for talking to a finance expert because a lot of the other things that you see in the startup community, particularly for women, is this a sort of fear of the numbers or like knowing your numbers or being able to talk confidently about your numbers and being able to see it from an investor’s perspective of what the investor is actually looking for. What would make it interesting to them as well, right? And I mean, so when you’re working with, just on the finance side, like when you’re advising, do you see that in women that women are a little more tentative about? Like, you know, they come at it not as a finance expert, but as someone who’s solving a problem.

Melinda Wittstock:

Like maybe it’s a lived experience, they see a gap in the market, they have this expertise, they have a unique perspective, they have a differentiated product and solution, but they’re not necessarily finance experts or they’re not confident about their numbers. What’s your take on that? Why do you think that happens with a lot of women as opposed to men?

Jenna Biancavilla:

Well, I almost want to push back on that a little bit because that was the case for a while. But I am seeing, and maybe this is just kind of what I’ve created. So, my bread-and-butter business is a financial planning practice, and I have a team of, it’s an all-women team of all women financial planners, which a side note is, was completely by accident. I just kept interviewing men and women and hiring the best person for the job and fell into an all women team. I don’t identify as a feminist, and I actually identify working in a male dominated industry. So it’s funny how I landed here, but the type of women who are reaching out to us and either they’re the woman who’s running the finances of the household and that the man, you know, he just earns money but he lets her take care of it or you know, they’re running a business and they want a team of experts around them to, who know how to run businesses but also understand the finance. And so, they’re, they’re bringing us on board. I’m actually really optimistic about how many women are either confident in their numbers and the money or they feel empowered to hire experts around them so that they can feel like they know their numbers and they know what’s going on with the finances.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. I do think there is a sea change. I think women are getting more savvy. I mean, you know, as we, you know, we’re relatively, historically speaking, relatively new to business, relatively new to even feeling confident talking about money or even feeling we have the permission to talk about it and, you know, all these sorts of things.

Melinda Wittstock:

And women getting better at asking for what they need. And I’m also going to say actually receiving it, right? Like not thinking they have to do it all and finding leverage in bringing on teams of advisors and actually hiring and looking at hiring as an investment and such. There is a mindset shift, I think, so, I’m encouraged by what you say. I think I’ve just been around for a long time, so I’ve seen it all well.

Jenna Biancavilla:

And there are women on the other side of the table as well that I actually am finding I have to pull into the financial conversation. They’ve never done it before. They’re you know, in or nearing retirement and have never needed to think about money. Their spouse always took care of it for them. And I have to, you know, grab them and shake them and say, statistically, you will outlive your husband, and this will be your burden. And please don’t learn finance while you’re grieving your husband. Like, let’s learn this ahead of time. It just, just statistically, you know, we can all pray that everyone goes at the exact same moment, but just if we’re going on statistics, let’s learn money before we lose our loved one.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh my gosh, 100%. And just like the, the being involved in the financial decision making and having full transparency into it and just even women as business owners actually understanding not only the finances, but just the legal around like, heaven forbid you break up, like get a divorce and you own your business. There’s a whole bunch of things like that.

Jenna Biancavilla:

There’s hundreds of scenarios. Yeah, the, the husband, wife led business and there’s a divorce and she wants to keep the business. But he was the CFO. So that there’s a lot of various different scenarios where earning as we go while we’re dealing with something very difficult. And so, if I could give advice to any woman who’s, you know, trying to avoid money, let’s just learn it while you have the opportunity and you’re not going through something difficult.

[PROMO CREDIT]

Wings of Inspired Business is brought to you by the new podcast, Zero Limits Business Growth Secrets. Join me together with Steve Little – serial entrepreneur, investor and mergers & acquisitions maestro – as we explore the little-known 24 value drivers that spell the difference between a $5m business, and a $50mm even $500 mm business. That’s Zero Limits Business Growth Secrets, produced by Podopolo Brand Studio at zerolimitsradio.com – that’s zerolimitsradio.com and available wherever you get your podcasts.

Melinda Wittstock:

And we’re back with Jenna Biancavilla, CEO and founder of Pearl Capital Management and co-founder of the fintech platform Svvy.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Melinda Wittstock:

So, you mentioned that you also are an investor. And I want to talk to you a little bit about this as well. One of my missions, I have a few, but is to really encourage women to become investors and to invest in other women startups. As angels, you know, getting going with all of that, there’s a lot of learning that needs to be done.

Melinda Wittstock:

I do see women being a little more cautious than men or not necessarily having the confidence to, like, evaluate investment opportunities in the startup world. Where do you think we are on a continuum there of getting more women interested in investing in other women?

Jenna Biancavilla:

Well, the first step is creating more female millionaires. And the reason I say that is because typically, anything that’s not publicly traded venture capital, these are considered a credit. They’re investments for accredited investors. And accredited investors have a million dollars or more or they have $250,000 of income or more. And so, the first step is we need more female millionaires so that they are accredited. We need them to understand money, that you have to not just have the money, but have the experience in investing to even get into this space in the first place. And so, it’s kind of, you know, a couple steps need to be founded. The foundations need to be laid, if you will, before we can even get to that invest in other women part.

Melinda Wittstock:

Exactly, and as women become more entrepreneurial, there’s record numbers of women now, I think, really post pandemic creating businesses and learning this. And I think, I don’t know, we all really need to support each other in that case. When I was starting out as an entrepreneur, there were no female venture firms and there were no venture partners, let alone GPs in venture since, you know, the first one in 2013.

Melinda Wittstock:

I mean, obviously there’s a lot more, but those funds tend to raise less than male funds, and so their check sizes tend to be kind of smaller. You know, there’s a whole bunch of structural things like that that need to be overcome as well. So, let’s get to Svvy. Your technology company. I want to understand kind of like what it does and how you’re growing it.

Jenna Biancavilla:

I’ll start with Kind of the backstory, which is that I’ve, you know, have a long career in financial planning. I did it with corporations for a while, then I launched my own financial planning practice. Did that for, I still have that, that, that’s been about eight years now that I’ve been running that. And through that practice I consistently had these women who were coming to me who had been taken advantage of by predatory salespeople. And so, I was unwinding these really expensive, high commission paying, they paid the salesperson high commissioned, really illiquid investments that didn’t suit them. And I had these women in my office just crying like, I just want to buy a little condo. Why is my advisor saying I can’t help have my money? I see the statement and it’s because there’s a lot of predatory salespeople in the financial sector that are just thinking about their commission check. They’re not thinking about what’s the best for this, this person.

Jenna Biancavilla:

And so, some, like I said, you know, if you have a million dollars, you’re an accredited investor and then these salespeople could just throw you in any kind of wonky investment that might be really risky that you didn’t know what you were getting because you, you trusted the title advisor. And you know, candidly, if you’re an advisor for a for profit, publicly traded business, they will always put their profits ahead of their customers. They have to answer to their shareholders. And so just thinking that they don’t actually have your best interest in mind, but they’re, they’re looking out for their profits. I see this problem on repeat, I do some research and I find that one in four women will be the victim of a financial crime at some point in her lifetime. And that was shocking. It was a shocking number. One in four.

Jenna Biancavilla:

I didn’t know it was that bad. And so, I partnered with my sister, we started talking about how to solve this. And I couldn’t scale my financial planning business, Pearl Capital Management, big enough, fast enough to really solve this problem at a nationwide scale. But we could do something with technology. My sister has a whole technology background. My background’s on finance. We created Svvy, which is a full vetting platform. It vets out all of the bad actors, all the high commission people, anyone who’s going to just be a condescending jerk.

Jenna Biancavilla:

And we only have advisors, men or women, but advisors that would have women’s best interest in heart that get approved onto the Svvy platform. And then we do a matching algorithm and connect women who want to be investors with advisors that are local to them, that they know they can trust.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is so important. I remember one of my first companies, I had a CFO who actually embezzled money from the company. I put it down to learning experiences. These challenges. But if we can avoid them, it would be better. So, so tell me about what it was like to jump into the technology world. Like you had all this experience obviously in the financial space. Building a technology company is not easy getting all that, right? What have been some of the challenges along the way?

Jenna Biancavilla:

Well, my first challenge was that I saw the price tag to build it in America versus building it overseas and it was like a 60 times difference. It’s something that just was so unfathomably different in, in price that I chose to build it overseas to start with an India based team and you get what you pay for. And our MVP was very viable product. And also building, my sister and I, being females, building a technology platform that empowered women in a culture that didn’t think women should be in these type of positions. It was all male coders that were developers that we were working with, and we just felt that there was a big disconnect that they didn’t really respect us. And so that was, you know, exactly the opposite of the savvy mission was to be working with men that didn’t want to empower women. I learned that lesson the hard way. We now have American based developers and they’re amazing.

Jenna Biancavilla:

We’re really excited to launch some new features, but that was, that was pretty painful to build it overseas.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, it’s tricky with outsourced developers too because they’re not necessarily aligned. Like they have different interests, they just get paid, and you know, create, you know, they’re not as invested, I guess, in your success.

Melinda Wittstock:

And yet building a technology team is tricky too, especially if you’re new to the technology world in terms of how to evaluate, you know, who’s good and who’s not and whatnot. It can be really, really tricky, especially if you don’t have boatloads of money to pay all these folks. But you learned, you got your first minimum viable out there. Then how are you doing it now? Do you have an in-house team of developers or how is that working?

Jenna Biancavilla:

We have developers that are, they are technically 1099. They’re contractors, but they’re, you know, spending at least 20, 30 hours a week plus with us. So, this is their big project that they’re working on. But it was pretty hard to find a really high-quality developer that only wanted to work for us. So, we did it with independent contractors for now and they are awesome. We consider them part of the team. We still will do team meetings weekly and incorporate everyone together. So maybe, maybe eventually I can convince them to join us full time.

Jenna Biancavilla:

But a lot of developers like that autonomy of having their own LLC. So, we’re navigating that still.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And so where would you like Svvy to be? With the services business it’s difficult to get to the kind of scale where it’s really transformational. Technology is inherently scalable. What’s your vision for, for the Svvy part of the equation in your multipreneur universe? Where would you like it to be?

Jenna Biancavilla:

Well, I’m so glad you mentioned scale because this is such a passion project for me. I didn’t need another business. If anything, one of my fellow financial advisor friends said you must really hate your free time when he found out I was launching this. But because it’s such a passion, I really think that thus far regulators have thrown the book at the finance world, the finance industry, in trying to regulate it to get all the modern-day Bernie Madoffs out of there and it’s not working. The regulations, they’re still bad actors. You were talking about a CEO that was embezzling money. They’re still bad actors. And women are not making decisions on moving forward with their finances because they don’t know who they can trust.

Jenna Biancavilla:

And so, we’re getting this analysis paralysis. I don’t know who to trust. I’m doing nothing. And doing nothing is a decision and a detriment to your finances. Going back to my wildest dreams, if all my wildest dreams come true, we change the landscape of the whole entire industry by letting women vote with their dollars and say, we don’t want you high commission sales guys anymore. We don’t want to work with used car salesmen in finance anymore. And sooner or later, the whole industry will have to adapt and shift because there’s no one signing up with them.

Jenna Biancavilla:

And they will have to shift to be more consumer first and not profits first if we do this insanely well. So that’s the passion. Vision is to change an industry with capitalism instead of regulation.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You seem to me like someone who’s living, breathing proof that you can accomplish a lot of things if you understand leverage.

Melinda Wittstock:

I mean, you’ve got Svvy, you’re growing Pearl Capital Management, you’re advising on over $180 million in assets. But you’re also do a lot of volunteer work. I mean, you’re mentoring foster children, right? And you’re a foster mom to a rotating cast of shelter dogs, which melts my heart. I’m such a dog lover. So how like, literally any woman listening to this is like, how do you do all that? What’s your secret for managing all of those things and not burning out and staying sane?

Jenna Biancavilla:

Well, I have to give a shout out to all of the moms who have children at home. I do not have small children at home. My husband has, you know, older children, so we have adult children that are his right now that are not in our house. And anyone who has kids at home knows that that’s going to be a big part of the time and energy of their day to day. So, some of these other things, like mentoring foster children or bringing foster kids into the home, fill that maternal void. Because I don’t have small, small children of my own at home. I don’t want to women to compare themselves to me because we’re all different.

Jenna Biancavilla:

The one really nerdy thing that I have taken up is I don’t watch television. I don’t watch movies. Instead, I’m a big podcaster or a big book reader. And so that really continues to get me to the next level and open up a lot of time in my day. Our house guests think it’s pretty funny that we don’t have televisions.

Jenna Biancavilla:

Um, but just cutting that out has definitely given me the opportunity to have the mental space to think, how could I make the world better? Let’s go get a foster dog and bring him home.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s just so beautiful. Where I was going with the question was how can we get better at leverage? Because I think I’ve seen a lot of women fall into the trap of really thinking like, oh, I’ve got to do it all right? And not only that, but, like, do it all perfectly, like, you know, with this kind of perfectionism thing and that that’s inherently not scalable because there’s a limit to time, right? Time is a finite resource. So, the only way to get to that kind of scalability or be able to manage all these different things is to understand leverage and like building a team and, and, and, and such. And also, what you describe in terms of the way you choose to focus your time, right, on the team building side and on the ability of women to not only ask for, but receive help. What has your entrepreneurial journey been in that respect in terms of being able to really find the leverage points in your business so that you’re able to focus on the things that only you can do, and you can delegate the rest.

Jenna Biancavilla:

It’s a tough journey. I fell into the typical trap that entrepreneurs fall into where you’re afraid to spend money, so you wait too long to hire. And I should have hired my first employee way earlier than I did. And I’m going to say this to every entrepreneur listening, to hire someone, you need to hire someone. And you’re not going to listen, just like I didn’t listen. I heard all the books and the podcasts and the advice, and I still waited too long. I hope someone takes the jump. One thing that I was at a convention for entrepreneurs, and I thought I was running a business.

Jenna Biancavilla:

It was me as an advisor with a couple support staff around me, and I kind of got disregarded in this mastermind group. And they’re like, you don’t have a business, you just have a job that you’ve created for yourself. And if you’re not there as the main advisor, nothing happens. And so that was painful to have someone tell me, I don’t have a business. When I identify as a business owner and I think it set me on fire to say, I do have a business. I want something that can run without me. And then when you’re thinking about yourself as a leader, we keep hearing delegate, delegate, delegate. And it’s not about you delegating to someone else. It’s about you being a mentor, a coach, a leader, empowering these people to be as good as you and trusting them with jobs that you don’t necessarily think they’re ready for, but you want them to learn. And you need to start thinking of yourself as a coach and almost be selfless in that. Yeah, they might be as good as me and leave and start the same exact thing and take all my clients from me. But if you have that selfless, I’m empowering them, maybe even giving them ownership in your company, they’re actually going to love you and stay with you because you gave them this career. And that’s really how you create a great culture and a great team. And so that’s been a big game changer for me of not just delegating, but empowering and coaching the team around me. And that’s been what I’ve been able to multiply. That’s how I’m able to step away from certain business tasks and say, I trust you. You guys got this. I’m going to go focus on a couple other things right now.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s amazing. So, I feel like we sort of scratched the surface so many more things that we could talk about on the show. You probably have to come back again. I want to make sure, though, that as we start to wrap up that people know how to find you and work with you and what’s the best way? Because I think all of us need really good, you know, financial advice, financial planning and our entrepreneurial journeys and certainly the protection from bad actors and all the things. What is the best way?

Jenna Biancavilla:

Well, if they’re looking for myself and the Pearl Capital Management team, we are physically located in Arizona and in Michigan, but we can do anything remotely. You can go to pearlcapital management.com and look more at what we have to offer there. If you’re looking for an advisor near you and you’re not necessarily looking for our team, but just someone that you can trust, you can go to besvvy.com and that’s B, E, S, V, V, Y. So, we spelled savvy without the A and besvvy.com will ask you a series of questions and do that matchmaking algorithm to connect you with an advisor local to you. If that’s important to you, that you could trust, that’s great.

Melinda Wittstock:

And on the advisory side, is it everything from like, you know, tax planning, estate stuff, you know, for women who are on an exit trajectory or, or like bookkeeping? I mean, what, what are the full ranges of services

Jenna Biancavilla:

We found the best way to set this up was to be kind of the quarterback of their financial team. So, we start pulling together the team that they have and working it all together. So, for example, we do this holistic all the finances approach. We’ll do a lifetime tax planning projection to make sure that you’re being strategic. Business owners who are exiting are really gravitated towards us. Because I also am a business owner, so I’m in the trenches with them, which you’re just not going to get at big corporate advisor land. And so, we’ll do this whole tax planning, and it will map it out over the next 50, whatever years. But then we always hand it to the CPA.

Jenna Biancavilla:

The CPA will be the one to prepare the taxes. So, the CPA that’s on their team will be incorporated into the plan. We’re doing a lot of tax planning, but we’re not prepping, preparing taxes and the same thing with estate planning. So, we’ll talk about how we have a multi-generational approach to not give additional money than is legally required to the IRS. So, if we can get that multi-generational money passing down hands in a strategic way, we will map out all of that in our financial planning software. But we’ll always hand it to an estate planning attorney that’s going to write the trust to match the plan that we’re putting together. So, we will pull in other professionals when necessary because we don’t have CPAs on staff, we don’t have attorneys on staff, but we are the hub in between all of those, those pieces of their financial life.

Melinda Wittstock:

Got it. Amazing. Well, I’ll make sure that we have all of those details in the show notes. So, if you’re driving, jogging, you know, I don’t know, like people are doing all kinds of things when they’re listening to podcasts. You go to the website and get all those details. But Jenna, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Jenna Biancavilla:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock:

Jenna Biancavilla is the CEO and founder of Pearl Capital Management and co-founder of the fintech platform Svvy.  Please create and share your favorite moments of this or any other episode with Podopolo’s shareable clip feature. You can also join us in the episode comments section so we can all take the conversation further with your questions and comments.

Melinda Wittstock:

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