But when an opportunity came along to join the firm, she didn’t say “Yes” simply because of the job. “For the people who work here, this is more than a career,” says Dawn, our billing specialist.

“It’s a family here. And that’s the type of treatment we extend to our clients,” she says.

At Verus, Dawn manages our billing, her role guided by the firm’s fee-only mission to charge clients only a single, transparent fee without pressure to fill quotas or sell products. “Internally, fee-only helps us because there is no pressure to make money, and the focus is on the client,” she says.

Dawn approaches many other operational functions with the same care.  At Verus, many clients over the age of 70 are charitably inclined, so Dawn often facilitates their Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs).

Dawn graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Mary Washington. She and her husband, Stan, have three children. Dawn is also a preschool Sunday School director, and her husband is a volunteer at Cool Spring Baptist Church in Mechanicsville.