Dealer CEO shares how her firm grew 1,042%

In this industry, growth can happen slowly and then all at once. That was certainly the case in 2025 for Designed Wealth Management. The independent dealer, founded in 2021, saw revenue growth of 1,042 per cent over the last two years, enough to earn the firm’s Co-Founder and CEO the #3 spot on The Globe and Mail’s list of Canada’s Top Growing Women-Led Companies.

Kunza explains that her firm’s year of landmark growth was half a decade in the making. She highlighted how her firm managed to attract new advisors and how they’ve managed to scale up their backend operations to keep pace with this growth. She emphasized that for an up and coming independent dealer in this industry, reputation takes years to build. Once that presence is established, however, advisors who resonate with the mission come flocking.

“Our growth in the beginning was smaller because a lot of people turn away a new dealer, or they want to see that you’ve been in business longer than two months,” Kunza says. “It’s a long sales cycle. A lot of the growth didn’t hit us in the first two years. When you look at the percentages, that’s what you’re seeing. A lot of people waited in the wings who had heard of us early and were interested and really liked what we were doing. But it’s nerve wracking. It’s a big decision for advisors to move. Our growth expanded quite a lot in through year three, four, and into year five. The mission is clear and we’ve been growing and that’s how we got to where we are today.”

That growth can also be quantified in people. Kunza notes that her firm has around 60 employees now working on the operations side in the back office, serving between 170 and 180 advisors across the country. Much of their revenue growth can be understood through new advisors joining the firm, bringing established books of business with them. Market growth in the last year helped, as well, but Kunza says that Designed saw significant growth in the number of accounts served, which wouldn’t be influenced by asset performance.

Kunza adds that while advisors are growing Designed by the simple act of switching firms, they tend to attract advisors who want to keep growing. Designed’s advisor base skews younger and Kunza says that her firm has long shown a willingness to accept advisors with smaller books and a plan to grow. Designed has no asset minimums for established advisors and Kunza notes the success they’ve had in bringing over advisors with $5 million books who have grown to $40 million over the past few years.

Managing that growth, Kunza explains, is led by a focus on operational capacity over cost management. Designed will try to stay ahead of their operational needs, listening to their teams to find out where they need to add capacity and hiring to ensure they can operate appropriately. Because onboarding a new advisor takes months, Kunza says that her team can be responsive to their pipeline in hiring.

Their recent growth has taken Designed from startup to established mid-market player, in Kunza’s view. In their first few years of operations, she says, they expected some losses as they grew. Now, however, the firm is profitable and that profitability gives the team leadership more capacity to explore new niches in the business and unexplored areas for future growth.

“I think of that startup phase as making sure the plane will fly,” Kunza says. “Once you get in the air, you can start having a little fun and exploring all the places you can fly to… We started by focusing on how we can get advisors to join, but now we can be more exploratory and look at what kind of products and capital market activities our advisors might want. We have the time and energy to do that because the business is running, it’s working, now we can be creative.”

Kunza notes that this creativity anticipates an eventual slowdown in growth. She says that once the phase of exponential expansion is over, Designed will need to have built new routes to sustainable growth and to ensure client and advisor retention in an evolving industry.

This new stage of curiosity for the company reflects, somewhat Kunza’s own life and experience. While she describes herself as a segmented person with distinct professional and personal passions, she has shown remarkable capacity for exploration in her personal life. Kunza is a published children’s author, a rower, speed skater, & biathlon competitor, and an opera singer. Her professional life has been similarly varied. She’s a CPA, a former Chief Compliance Officer, and an expert on both the investment and client relationship sides of the business. Those experiences, and the innate confidence and curiosity that informs them, allows her to operate effectively as Designed grows. Kunza can work with familiarity across various segments of the business, ensuring that as teams grow and become more specialized they don’t fall into silos.

For all her varied capacity, Kunza credits her co-founder and firm Managing Director Michael Konopaski as instrumental to their growth. Konopaski, she says, takes on the external-facing work of the firm, leading advisor outreach and connection while she focuses on internal operations. They collaborate closely, operating as “co-CEOs,” and share an ethos of curiosity that Kunza believes runs through the whole firm.

After hitting this major growth milestone, Kunza says her firm isn’t setting a specific number as a growth target. Instead, they’re focusing on process and expecting growth to come from it.

“We don’t set specific numbers. Some people would set how many advisors they want to get to by the end of next year, but that’s a little bit backwards to us. We say we’re going to implement and execute on our day to day and our marketing plans in an effort to grow,” Kunza says. “We could likely predict based on general growth patterns that we’ll likely get to X number. But instead of focusing on X number, we focus on the process as opposed to the outcome. Knowing that at this stage the outcome is going to happen. We may fall short of that particular number, or we may exceed it.”