Meet Jenna Smith

Jenna Smith came to financial services by way of collegiate and professional sports, which is not the usual path, but it's one that gave her a specific kind of operational training.

She built her early career managing the fast-moving logistics of sports operations, starting with the University of Oklahoma Sooners football program before relocating to San Diego, where she managed lacrosse recruiting operations for a national organization while also working with the San Diego Padres. That kind of work leaves little room for error and teaches you to stay composed while keeping a lot of moving parts aligned at once - skills that turned out to transfer directly.

From there, Jenna moved into financial services and worked her way across nearly every side of the business - RIA operations, the institutional side at Charles Schwab, and broker-dealer environments - before landing back in the independent advisory space. That range gave her a rare, ground-level understanding of how the different pieces of the financial ecosystem actually connect, and how operations should work when they're built around advisors and clients instead of internal friction.

Jenna joined Guided Wealth after being recruited by her colleague, Carolyn Pratt, FPQP®, who had worked with her before and knew how she operates: not by patching problems as they come up, but by redesigning the underlying system so the same problem doesn't resurface. That approach - fixing the root cause rather than the symptom - is a big part of why the firm's operations run as smoothly as they do.