At eleven-thirty at night, in a guest room turned study space, Megan Brenner sat crying over her CFP books. Her dad was in an assisted living facility after a massive stroke. Two small kids were asleep down the hall. A full-time job waited the next morning. She asked herself why she was doing this to herself, then remembered exactly why. Megan, co-founder of Craft and Sage Wealth in Kansas City, walks Sam through how a small-town upbringing, a stubborn streak, and the hardest season of her life shaped the values she runs her firm by.
What You'll Hear
- Why the CFP designation is often called the most grueling professional credential in finance
- How Megan went from part-time receptionist to co-founder of an independent RIA
- What it looked like to study for the CFP at night while losing her dad after his stroke
- How she decides what stays on her plate and what gets delegated or dropped
- Why she books grocery delivery every week and calls it a values decision
- How a support system of mentors, peers, and coworkers showed up in the ICU waiting room
- Why so many of her new clients are suddenly single women navigating a new normal
- Her one piece of advice to young women who ask if they can be a CFP, a business owner, and a mom
The weight of the CFP and a non-traditional path in
Sam opens by asking Megan about the Certified Financial Planner designation, which a previous guest described as the hardest certification he had ever earned. Megan agrees. The CFP is essentially going back to school, spread over about a year for most people, with separate classes in tax planning, retirement planning, estate planning, and other disciplines. Each class carries its own coursework and exam, plus a final project, before you even qualify to sit for the multi-hour board exam.
Some candidates now take the CFP as an extension of their undergraduate studies. Megan didn't know the CFP existed when she was in college. She came at it the other way, already working full-time, already a mom of two young kids. That path is common, and it's brutal. You aren't studying in the quiet of a dorm. You're studying around a job and a family and everything else a normal adult life brings.
That frame matters for the rest of the conversation, because Megan's path into financial planning didn't follow the clean script either. She started as a part-time assistant, answering phones, emptying trash, and asking questions in the margins of client meetings. The CFP came later, and it came while her personal life was coming apart.
From a small-town farm to a Kansas City bank job
Megan grew up on a farm in the Ozarks area, the oldest of four. She's quick to joke that her siblings would testify she isn't the outdoorsy one, but she loved the quiet and the relationships that came with a slower way of life. Her family, she says, are her best friends.
She went to College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, a work college where students graduate debt-free in exchange for labor on campus. That experience baked in a default posture of hard work. She knew she wanted to do something in business, so she took as many business classes as she could. By her junior or senior year, a specific dream took shape. She wanted to find a company that was either just getting started or struggling, get inside it, and help bring it back to life.
She graduated in 2009, straight into the teeth of the recession. She kept losing final-round interviews to candidates with thirty years of experience who had just been laid off. So she moved home and took a management role at a local bank, supervising tellers and the accounts department in her early twenties. Most of the team was older than her and had been there for years, so she led with relationships first. Day one respect wasn't automatic. It had to be earned.
In 2011, her husband's job brought them to Kansas City. Megan, by her own account a country girl learning to drive in city traffic, took a step down into a new-accounts role at a sister bank. That is where she met John Christie.
Answering phones her way into an independent firm
John was a client at the bank. Megan opened a stack of accounts for him, and he eventually said he wished she could work at his firm. She said she probably could. He tried to talk her out of it. He told her it wasn't a corporate job. He told her it was only part-time to start. She told him she would answer phones, get coffee, take out the trash, whatever he needed.
Once inside, she didn't sit still. She pushed the office to go paperless, chose the electronic storage system, and rebuilt internal processes. When she hit something she didn't understand, she didn't ask John to teach her. She called the back office and figured it out, then confirmed her conclusion with him afterward. John's read on her, as Megan retells it, was that she was great because she wasn't waiting to be taught.
About four years in, the firm brought her on full-time after she finished her licensing. Then she told John she wanted to become an advisor. He and Mark, the other advisor in the office, let her sit in on client meetings and take notes. Megan would scribble questions in the margins, then corner one of them afterward. She wanted to know why John paused when the wife in a couples meeting wasn't tracking, even though the husband was. She was fascinated by the human part of the work, not only the numbers.
Craft and Sage Wealth, the boutique independent RIA she now co-founded with John, sits in the Crossroads in Kansas City. The firm leads with planning and treats investments and insurance as the byproducts, not the point.
The night the CFP books almost won
In 2019, Megan's dad had a massive stroke at fifty-eight. He never came home. He spent his final chapter in an assisted living facility, including the COVID stretch in a nursing home, before passing away in 2021. All of this happened while Megan was working full-time, parenting two small children, and grinding through her CFP coursework at night.
She remembers one specific evening in the guest room, around eleven-thirty, books open, kids already asleep, after a hard day with her dad's medical team. She started crying. Why am I doing this. This is so hard. Then the answer surfaced. She was doing it because this was her purpose. On weekdays she was getting maybe four to five hours of broken sleep. On Sundays she locked herself in a library study room from open to close, came home for dinner and bedtime with the kids, then kept studying.
What got her through wasn't willpower. It was a support system that gave her grace. Coworkers knew they were getting a version of Megan that was the best she could offer that day, and that was enough. Friends dropped off dinner at her door. When her dad was in the ICU in Columbia, several hours from Kansas City, the elevator doors opened and her office family walked out to sit with her in the waiting room.
She is clear about how that support got built. She had spent years doing the same thing for other people first. The people who showed up for her were the people she had already shown up for.
Values as a filter when everything is loud
Losing her dad reshaped how Megan decides what to keep on her plate. She talks about pausing at the end of the day and asking a simple question. Does this align with my values. If it doesn't, it has to be let go, delegated, or restructured.
One small example she uses is groceries. She can't remember the last time she was in a grocery store. Every week she orders delivery, and she calls it a values decision rather than a convenience one. During the week she works hard and her kids work hard. The weekend is her undivided time with them. Dragging them through a grocery run, where nobody is having fun, isn't worth the trade. Whatever grocery delivery costs extra is a tax she is happy to pay to protect one-on-one time with each of her kids.
This is also how she coaches younger women who ask if they can be a CFP, a business owner, and a mom. The answer is yes. Easy, no. Conventional hours, no. Worth it if it's truly what you want, yes. She points out that for a long time women in her industry have been trained to not say anything. Standing up for yourself is a skill, and it takes building a small group of people who know you well enough to both ground you in the middle of a storm and call you on your thinking when you need it.
The theme running under all of it is that Megan has a now-clear picture of her why. A growing share of her client base is suddenly single women, navigating a new normal after death, divorce, or disability. She can sit across the table and tell them she actually understands. And she can promise them they won't do it alone.
About Megan Brenner, CFP
Megan is co-founder of Craft and Sage Wealth, a boutique independent registered investment advisory firm in the Crossroads in Kansas City. She partners with John Christie and specializes in comprehensive financial planning, with a growing practice serving suddenly single women. Megan is a Certified Financial Planner, a mom of two, and a graduate of College of the Ozarks who worked her way up from part-time assistant to co-founder over more than a decade. Craft and Sage Wealth