Employees at Bailard Wealth Management can point to several reasons why the San Francisco Bay Area-based wealth and asset management firm is a special place to work.

There’s the open compensation policy, where every employee can know anyone else’s compensation, which CEO Sonya Mughal said helps close the persistent race and gender gap in financial services while helping to hold leadership accountable. Or the compensation package, which Mikhail Saliba, a client associate who joined Bailard full-time in July after completing an internship, said is “above and beyond” what his peers are making at their first jobs after graduating college.

The firm has remained fully independent since launching in 1969; is a majority employee-owned and women-led firm; a Principles of Responsible Investing signatory; and has its own private charitable foundation to donate financially in addition to volunteering in person, such as Mughal and Saliba teaching a high school financial literacy class.

But it’s much more personal for Lena McQuillen, Bailard’s director of financial planning. While interviewing with the firm, McQuillen explained that she needed some extra flexibility to act as the primary caregiver for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s.

“They even told me that you have to put your family first, that it’s really important,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons I felt comfortable coming here.”

With a career in wealth management that dates to 1997 and experience at both large financial institutions and small RIAs, McQuillen doesn’t feel as if she would have gotten the accommodations Bailard offered anywhere else, including after her mother died.

“With a big company, you get kind of lost. You feel like a number. I don’t feel like that here and that’s kind of what attracted me,” she said. “My thoughts and my values and the concerns I have, I know I can bring them up, but at the same time, feel like I have a voice here and I can make an impact.”

— Ryan W. Neal