How Ashley Fox quit her Wall Street job and built a startup to financially empower those Wall Street would never talk to

Meet Ashley M. Fox, the founder of Empify and the first in her family to attend college. She also landed her dream job of working on Wall Street, which will inspire her to pursue entrepreneurship.

Despite working with one of the world’s biggest banks for about eight months, the Howard graduate desired more than what she had. This desire and vision led her to become an entrepreneur.

“After about eight months at my job, I felt like I didn’t have the desire to be the best person on Wall Street; I wanted to be like the client,” Fox told AFROTECH. “I realized that no matter how long I stayed in my Wall Street job, yes, I was making perfect money, but our clients had at least $25 million or more, and I felt like I deserved to be on the other end of the table.”

At Wall Street, Fox said the biggest lesson she learned was that to effectively build wealth in the United States, one must create ideas or invest in somebody else’s ideas.

“We are taught to go to school, get a job, and then you have to get a job to pay for school and buy a house. So many of us have been taught that the key to success is to work hard, but we still aren’t wealthy. We still aren’t financially free and still aren’t at ease, but we deserve to be. There has to be something more than just working hard,” she said.

Her desire to become an entrepreneur was deeply rooted in her aim to transform people’s perceptions of wealth and create opportunities for others.

“The idea of money and wealth creation isn’t solely about information. It’s about the thought process and the mindset you have,” Fox said. “First, you have your thoughts, which trigger emotions that then lead to action. If your thoughts aren’t right, then your actions won’t either. Just telling people what to do and giving them the solution isn’t going to solve the problem. Their thinking has to change with it.”

She eventually created Empify with the goal of helping millions of people become investors while changing people’s perspectives on buying stock and building real generational wealth.

“Building wealth is like learning a new language, and just like any new language, you have to speak it, you have to read it, and you have to be around people who are constantly talking about it for you to become fluent,” said Fox. “When it comes to investing, we have to speak it, read it, and be around people who are constantly talking about building wealth.”

Empify is a combination of the words “empower” and “modify” that educates people about financial success including adults and children as well as those who are incarcerated and hoping to change their lives. According to the entrepreneur, over the next five years, Empify will be both a brick-and-mortar and online platform that gives adults and children access to the financial tools and resources they need to manage, grow, and pass down their wealth.