InvestmentNews Honors Yusuf and Sydney
Excellence is the standard at Yeske Buie, and we’re thrilled to see it recognized. It is an honor to share that two of our advisors have been selected by InvestmentNews as Excellence Awardees for 2025 – Yusuf Abugideiri for Advisor of the Year in the Southeast Region and Sydney Woodward as NextGen Advisor of the Year. This recognition places Sydney and Yusuf in the top ten of their respective categories, and the final winners will be announced in June 2025.
Yusuf and Sydney’s dedication, leadership, and passion inspire us every day, and we encourage you to continue reading to learn more about their impact on our Clients, our team, and the profession below.
Congratulations, Yusuf and Sydney!
Yusuf Abugideiri, CFP®
Yusuf Abugideiri is the embodiment of the word ‘leader’. As a financial planner, he serves his Clients by acting as an anchor in their lives. As a teammate, he leads with strength, humility, and infectious energy. And as an owner, he approaches his responsibilities to our Clients with the utmost gravity and care.
Yusuf is the lead advisor for one-quarter for the firm’s Clients. Additionally. he welcomed many new Clients to the firm last year, many of whom were second or third generation family members of his existing Clients in alignment with the firm’s goal of serving multigenerational families to care for Clients to the fullest extent.
Outside of the firm, Yusuf has been diligently building relationships with CPAs, estate attorneys, and insurance agents so he can serve his Clients as part of a full team. Many of these relationships have come from his engagement in organizations including the Financial Planning Association (FPA), CFP Board, and the Washington D.C. Estate Planning Council where he’s served as a member of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force and as a member of the Council’s Board of Directors.
As Chief Investment Officer, Yusuf is responsible for all Client portfolios. How he meets this responsibility takes shape in many forms, but perhaps some of the more unique ways include daily reading of five publications including The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, presenting quarterly live webinars to our Clients, intuiting timing and writing messaging for Clients during times of market volatility, digesting economic data daily via yCharts, and actively engaging with media contacts from CNBC, ThinkAdvisor, Marketwatch, InvestmentNews, and others to provide quotes and insights for their publications.
Yusuf’s care for others also stretches beyond Client needs. As two examples, he participates in the Foundation for Financial Planning’s Pro Bono for Cancer initiative and volunteers to teach financial literacy topics to elementary school students and Junior Achievement programs.
Sydney Woodward, CFP®
Sydney Woodward is a powerhouse next-gen financial planner: she is intelligent, resourceful, detail-oriented, compassionate, generous, committed, and a true team player. She has been at the firm for almost four years and is building authentic relationships with nearly one-quarter of Yeske Buie’s Clients. Examples of ways that Sydney goes above and beyond for her Clients and the firm include:
Proactively connecting with a Client who lost her dream job amidst federal job cuts.
Sending a personalized care package to a Client recovering from an accident.
Introducing a firm initiative for personal outreach to Clients who lost a loved one during the year and may be struggling emotionally during the holidays.
Both her Clients and teammates recognize her exceptionalism. Sydney has earned praise from Clients in as early as their first year of working together, and her teammates have publicly admired her timeliness, accountability, engagement, diligence, and patience.
Sydney is also deeply involved in her professional community. She is passionate about making financial planning accessible to under-served communities and is internally nicknamed our ‘Pro Bono Queen’. She serves as the Director of Pro Bono for the Financial Planning Association of San Francisco, contributed to the Foundation for Financial Planning’s “Pro Bono in Practice” case study which included presenting on a panel to discuss her pro bono initiatives, and recently participated in Advocacy Day in Sacramento, CA to speak to state legislators about important topics impacting the profession. She has also been appointed as President-Elect of the San Francisco FPA chapter and will serve as President in 2026. Previously, she held the role of Director of Technology.