Andrew McMahon
Chairman Of Axa Advisors and
Executive Vice President, Axa Equitable Life Insurance Co.
Years in Securities Business: 10

I grew up on New york's Long Island, one of four kids. My older brother and I played soccer, and in the interest of consolidating logistics, my parents pushed me to play on his level. My father ran his own insurance business and had several ventures on the side, including a telecommunications firm.

At 13, I delivered the Pennysaver and the New York Daily News. It meant getting up early and working in the dark, at least in the winter months. The Sunday papers were quite a load. I carried them in baskets on each side of my bike and often fell over.

The papers would scatter and I never knew if I was putting the sections back together correctly. Occasionally I'd get an angry call from someone who was missing a section. Collection day also could be challenging. Some customers would ask me to come back the next day if they didn't have change, which meant repeating my two-mile route. Those were early lessons in patience and dealing with customers.

I graduated from Fairfield University in Connecticut in 1989 with a degree in computer science, despite having decided by my junior year that the field was boring. I'd discovered my entrepreneurial streak, but transferring to a business major would have required an extra year. So I stayed with computer science—one of only about eight who had chosen that major.

After graduating I entered a management-training program at General Electric. At the time, Jack Welch, the chairman and chief executive, was advocating that employees move between divisions. I worked in GE Appliances, GE Capital and GE Corporate, and at NBC in areas such as information technology, human resources and audit. The company also sent me for an MBA. My time there was exhilarating, but I decided I had to leave if I wanted my career to progress further.

So I took a position at McKinsey & Co., where I was elected partner after five years. I especially liked being exposed to several financial services companies and executive teams. While working with them to solve problems, I learned that not all executive teams actually work as teams. Some of the individuals have agendas. Communication and collaboration are key drivers for growth—and on good teams, people know when to check their egos at the door. Good teams manage with facts, regardless of whether those facts are negative or positive. They're analytically driven and use modeling to look at problems from different angles. They also continually measure the success of their decisions and don't hesitate to go back to the drawing board if necessary. That applies to good financial advisors, too.

When I left consulting to pursue my entrepreneurial passion, having been exposed to all those teams allowed me to pick the one I most wanted to work for—AXA, which I thought was among those best positioned for the future.

Soon I'll have been at AXA for four years. Hopefully, that longevity-and the growth we've achieved despite the market this past year-is testimony to my ability and to our advisors' confidence in me. Although I've never been an advisor, I have over 100 years of combined advisor experience on my management team-in our chief sales officer, the president of the broker-dealer unit, the head of our national top-producer groups and our divisional presidents in the field.

I still play soccer in an over-40 league on weekends. In May, I played in a Fairfield alumni game. Only two of us were over 40—the rest were still in their 20s—so it was a highly demanding and challenging game. But with a few weeks' rest, I was back to playing on weekends.

As told to Pat Olsen