The panel will feature four female financial advisors who have risen through the ranks, gathered substantial assets and learned key lessons along the way.
We caught up with our multi-million panel members ahead of the conference to find out how they each got their start in the industry, and what makes their career unique.
Lee DeLorenzo, President, United Asset Strategies Inc.
On how she got her start in the industry:
I had been a bookkeeper at a local manufacturing lighting plant from the time I was 14 to 19. I took a short time off for secretarial school, and my father worked for Connecticut General’s estate planning division, and he said, ‘I want to hire you.’ So after we negotiated salary I went to work for him. And once I started to work for my father, [we] branched off right away into becoming certified financial planners, stock brokers, started a pension company, and long story short it took off.
On facing her biggest challenge:
I guess the biggest challenge for me came during this period of time where my father moved off of Long Island 2,000 miles away to the Virgin Islands. I had my third child and at the time we had three businesses. I was totally beside myself with the volume of work and the new responsibilities put on me. Suddenly I wasn’t just managing this company. I was also supposed to be the sales person. I was also supposed to be the executive. It was just overwhelming, and then with the three kids it was just a really dark period in my life. It wound up that I sold one of the companies, and that was the beginning of what became one of the solutions, was to examine what the problems were, come up with some action plans, and start to implement them, and just by taking one step after another you get empowered.
On advice she gives women looking to break into the industry:
I do recommend that women try to get mentors, and I do recommend that they try not to limit themselves to just one sex, that they have both men and women in their life, and that they also have experience and age to split it, someone old and someone in the middle, so they could have the best of both worlds. A man and a woman, one older and one in that go go stage. If a woman does have the experience of having a glass ceiling and trying to get through it, a man doesn’t. You might have two different perspectives, whereas one had all sorts of challenges to overcome, the other one didn’t see it or feel it and just plows through.
Carrie Gallaway, Senior Vice President of Wealth Management / Financial Advisor, The Sorensen Group, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney
On how she got her start in the industry:
Right out of college, I started with DLJ Direct, which no longer exists. It was the online brokerage firm for DLJ, and it was a really great learning experience. It was as hard as could be, because I started in the summer of ’98, which was the Russian debt crisis, long term capital management then blew up in the fall. We went through a training program for getting licensed, and it was training for customer service. I really took the job because I needed a job, and it ended up being the best first job ever. We were forced to be on the phone with clients who were irate at times. Literally irate. There were people who would be screaming and you developed a really tough skin right away. And that was really good for me.
On her biggest career-defining moment:
I had one manager when I first started who was not very supportive, and then I had another manager who was very supportive. It was amazing when you had a manager who had more confidence in you. For me, it gave me confidence to even do better. That really, for me, was one of the biggest career-defining moments, to have that manager who knew that I had value and had supported me tremendously, recommended me for a promotion, and then that really gave me even more confidence to continue and realize that I had value to add.
