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MICKIE SIEBERT: PIONEER
The forum started out appropriately enough with Murial "Mickie" Siebert, the grand dame of women on Wall Street. Mickie's primary claim to fame is that she was the first woman to apply for and get a seat on the NYSE, back in 1967. She also turned her eponymous firm, Murial Siebert & Co. into one of the first, if not the first, discount brokerages. She later became superintendent of banking in New York City. She has been truly intrepid and innovative, and both men and women can learn a lot about leadership from her life story, which was published by Simon & Schuster in 2002: Changing the Rules: Adventures of a Wall Street Maverick.
Siebert Recalls Her Mentor, Her NYSE Battle
There wasn't a more moving moment than when Siebert revealed that her close friend and business mentor Gerald Tsai passed away last week. Tsai was her sole supporter during her battle with the old boys' club at the New York Stock Exchange, a group she, ever the lady, simply refers to as "the gentlemen."
"On December 28, 1967 I acquired my seat on the New York Stock Exchange. But it was Gerald's idea. He ran Fidelity Capital and encouraged me to buy my seat," said Siebert, who was making about $130 a week at that time, and had obtained her first order by accident. Who would trade with a woman after all?
Apparently Tsai sensed times were changing.
"Gerald said to me, 'You should buy a seat. I don't think there's a law against. it.' So I took home the NYSE constitution and studied it that weekend," she recalled.
Obtaining that seat was an uphill battle all the way through with "the gentlemen." What should have been a proud moment in the NYSE's history is instead one of its most shameful.
Although she had risen to a partnership in a leading brokerage firm and had made big money for her colleagues, her attempts to get a seat on the stock exchange were patronized, ridiculed or openly opposed by many men on the Street. She was turned down by nine of the ten men she asked to sponsor her application. The NYSE required her to get a letter from bank saying they would lend her $300,000 and the bank required her to have been admitted to the exchange before they would do that. After a period of wrangling, she passed the exam and was accepted. "The day we were sworn in, all the men received a scroll and a badge," said Mickie, who is still very active in the industry. "I received nothing and didn't get a scroll until the next chairman of the exchange signed one for me. I can't tell you how that made me feel," she exclaimed. "And so it went."
Siebert eventually received her badge and scroll through a subsequent NYSE Chairman – "maybe he knew how to spell my name, I don't know," – but he was not without his biases either. Muriel noted she was in a New York City restaurant one evening, on a date, when that chairman walked over to her table and told her to "A-B-C" her seat, meaning, essentially, to subcontract it out to a male. His statement: the men didn't like a woman on the trading floor.
"So I said to him the day I A-B-C my seat to a man without it being my idea, I'll hold the biggest conference!" Muriel recalled.
Although women now occupy responsible positions in financial services, only about 30% of advisors are women. Back in 1967, there were hardly any women at all. Siebert has met the challenges of being a rare woman on Wall Street with remarkable aplomb.
ON WOMEN: "When I started out men were not taking advice from women. Today they respect the intelligence we bring to this industry. We have a long way to go, but we have gotten somewhere."
ON FINANCE: She lamented the elimination of the uptick rule, which required investors to short stocks only when its value had just risen: "That was a bad mistake and I hope they change that rule because investors now can just bash a company." She also decried the system that created Enron and recurring derivative crises such as the current subprime mortgage fiasco. "These things couldn't be done without the banks and Wall Street. Some of this financial engineering is just not right. We have to make sure that we keep our integrity. We need tougher regulation."
ON ADVISORS: "If you help your clients know more about what they're doing, they'll never leave you," she said.
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WOMEN RAINMAKERS: SOME GEMS
This was a panel moderated by our own Frances McMorris, the editor-in-chief of On Wall Street. The four women on the panel discussed how they started out and how they acquired and dealt with their wealthiest clients.
The Panel featured Karen Altfest of LJ Altfest, a fee-only planning and investment management firm in New York; Carrie Coghill Kuntz, CFP president and co-founder of DB Root & Co., a wealth management firm in Pittsburgh. (She was in Barron's top 100 Independent Advisors in 2007 and top Women Advisors for the past three years). Alyssa Moeder, vice president and private wealth advisor with Merrill Lynch Private Banking and Investment Group; and Margaret Starner, CFP and senior vice president of The Starner Group, an invitation-only affiliate of Raymond James.
Acquiring Clients
Altfest: "We market to our own clients first, they're our best advocates.
Starner: "Marketing is finding out what your client wants and giving it to them." "I was not a natural rainmaker type. I was kind of geeky. But I saw an article in the Journal of Financial Planning about a tax attorney from Mississippi, where I'm from, so I called him up to have lunch. I told him I was looking for attorneys to refer my clients to even though I didn't have any clients at the time. I said I want 'access to your knowledge and expertise.' He became a huge source of referrals."
Kuntz: "You build and earn trust by showing people you know what you're talking about. Being well educated is the most important thing. I spend a lot of time in the library. I read everything I can." "This [the current emotional turmoil] is a great time to be an advisor. The hardest time to get clients was during the dot com boom."
Moeder: "This is probably the best time for us as advisors. Even sophisticated clients are confused. We've been on the phone constantly with our clients."
How Did You Get Your Biggest Client?
Moeder: "We had a large nonprofit with 100% of its money in cash that wanted to be invested in something more than CDs. It took years of educating and investing in the client [before they signed on]. You need to be an expert in your target client market. Educate yourself and then your client." Moeder also was able to keep one big client by persevering in getting him institutional services, when the institutional side at JPMorgan didn't want to provide the client with a certain derivatives transaction because the client was an individual. By following up on every objection and not taking "no" for an answer, she broke through the red tape that was largely a silo issue. The institutional side said they couldn't work with an individual for compliance reasons, but she found out it wasn't a compliance problem. She worked for six months, tearing down objectives and building her allies and was therefore able to keep the client.
Altfest: The firm had a call from a church that was fairly disorganized and asking for RFPs from various firms. The primary thing that won the business was that "we were the only ones to talk about investment policy statements."
Starner: She had a wealthy family that was squabbling about money. "By taking each issue one by one in each meeting and breaking it down we were able to resolve some of them."
Education, Education, Education
So what really works when it comes to getting your business off the ground? That's what the crowd wanted to know.
Education took the first prize among the day's guests. Carrie Coghill Kuntz says she built up her practice by becoming well educated and being opinionated. "You build trust by showing people that you know what you are talking about," says Kuntz. Alyssa Moeder agrees. Educate yourself first and then others, she advises. "You need to be viewed as an expert in your target market," Moeder notes.
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SHATTERING THE GLASS CEILING
The second panel moderated by Financial Planning Editor-in-Chief Marion Asnes concerned barriers women face in the financial planning industry. The panelists included Mary Barnaby, executive director of Private Wealth Management at UBS Financial Services; Colleen O'Callaghan, executive director of Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management; Nancy Rooney, the national investments practice leader for the Northeast Region for JPMorgan Chase; and Jaleigh White, senior vice president of Fifth Third Private Bank
All the women agreed that it was a barrier to them that there weren't other women in their businesses to look up to and emulate, that they had no role models on the job.
A big barrier for Nancy Rooney early on was "looking young." Rooney: "I would sit in front of people who had sold their companies and they would look at me and start talking about their granddaughters. I had to establish credibility. I bought and wore glasses even though I didn't need them. I had to be unbelievably up to speed on all the stats and pepper the conversations with the index returns and movements. I would say things like 'clients similar to yourself who I've worked with before' to make them think I had experience and 'we're seeing a market similar to that in the 1970s;' even though I wasn't alive I could know about that market.
Jaleigh White started out as one of two women accountants at Arthur Andersen. She worked with 37 men partners. There was no pregnancy leave policy or anything. As a tax attorney, she was perturbed when she found out that her second child was due on April 14th. " I hid the pregnancy as best as I could as long as I could," she said.
She had to learn to rely on her husband, who luckily was very supportive. That meant letting go of a lot of control and accepting the fact that her husband let their children sleep in their clothes while she was traveling. She would say: Would you please make sure they don't go to school in the same clothes. But this same husband took responsibility for getting all the childcare and housework taken care for the first year of Jaleigh's new job when she switched to Fifth Third Bank. Perhaps not all husbands are as supportive.
When asked by yours truly why the percentage of women in the business doesn't change from year to year, even though women have great relationship-building skills, often considered superior to those of men, Coleen O'Callagan said "The answer is the glass ceiling has shattered in the corporate environment, but not on the home front."
Another question from the audience concerned a sexist environment: "There are only four four women in my firm, and I can't get past the chatter about how bad Hilary is and the endless talk about the prostitute with Eliott Spitzer, and the managers just 'turn the other cheek' and let this go on." The women basically advised her "to have a thick skin," "to act like your in a foreign country and don't understand the language," and "try to joke with them."
Mary Barnaby talked about feeling the responsibility every day to make the workplace a better environment for women and O'Callagan, who just had a baby, bought a new house and switched jobs from Lehman to Morgan, was frustrated that there were fewer women in recruiting: "Women get scared when you interview them and they don't see other women out there."
What Distinguishes You as a Woman?
Rooney: "I listen more and figure out what people's biases are that they bring to the table. You have to sit back and figure that out or else you will just sound like you're making a pitch. I'll often say I don't know enough about you yet to make a recommendation. So often it's about demystifying something they believe that may not be true and then reeducating them about how to think about it."
White: "I had one client who just sold a business for $10 million and he just kept getting frustrated with me because he just wanted a proposal. I said I won't give you a proposal, I don't know what you want. He went away and I didn't sleep for four nights worrying about losing him as a client and whether I had done the right thing. And then he called back after he had talked to his wife and said 'You're right, we have a lot of issues to work through.' "
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ADDITIONAL VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS
SALLIE KRAWCHECK:
The CEO and Chairman of Citi Global Wealth Management gave an inspiring keynote address. CLICK HERE TO WATCH HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS ADDRESS
