ICU Nurse
It’s a long way from her beginnings. In her early 20s, Kaplan was an intensive care unit nurse at New York Hospital.

“I loved it,” she says. “To be a cardiac surgery intensive care unit nurse was the most demanding, the most exciting. But it was definitely for a young, single woman. Because everyone there was young. There’s some physical elements to it, but it’s also strenuous. Mentally strenuous. You had to work nights and weekends; you get one holiday off.”

“People were really living and dying on a daily basis. It was just always urgent.”

The ICU was an environment largely driven by numbers rather than nurturing and bedside manner, she says. The field is similar to her current one, she says, in that it requires you to prioritize and remove distractions from your mind.

“It’s an ICU, not an emergency room. The client or patient is pretty much unconscious. And it’s numbers driven. You’re reading monitors, you’re reading vital signs, you’re reading flows of fluids into the patient. It’s a numbers game. Yes, they do wake up, they do stabilize, but then they leave you and go out into a regular room. So the ICU is a very intense, numbers driven place. … In an ICU you have a relationship with all the machines.”

“It was when they were doing heart transplants,” she says. “It was exciting and challenging every single day or night. The downside is that in the nursing that I was doing, you would have to master, let’s say, 150 steps for a certain kind of patient. That took you time to do that. Once you mastered that, that was that. You weren’t using any ingenuity. You weren’t allowed to do anything creative because it was an urgent ICU setting and you had to do all those steps. Whereas in the financial advisory world, it’s very creative. In many ways you’re taking custody of your clients similar to nursing.”

She said the nursing was great for her when she was single and in her 20s, but motherhood made the demanding hours impossible. She transitioned to an industrial nursing job at PaineWebber. Next thing she knew, she was making pals on Wall Street.

“I became friends with a lot of the trading people and it sort of opened a new world. I was friends with a lot of the government security guys, so I was learning a lot about bonds. I just realized how vast the world of investing was. Prior to that, you have some mutual funds and that’s it.” She says it was her mother, an executive secretary, who originally introduced her to investing through a love of Louis Rukeyser. “I just realized the importance of it,” she says. “That money dictates your standard of living for the rest of your life. I realized it was important to understand the market. And the more involved you get in anything, the more interesting it becomes.”

Kaplan took about 10 years between the ages of 25 and 35 to raise her two children, though the phrase “time off” is misleading, since she was actually realigning the chess pieces for her next big move. Though she served her time with Play-Doh, she also took time to get her MBA, which took a bit longer than the average degree program because she wanted to hold out for the best professors.

“Having 10 years off was my intellectual stimulation,” she says. “I had a wonderful time making Play-Doh and doing everything, but intellectually it was perfect because I got my MBA half-time.”

She got her MBA at the Boston University School of Management.

“Sometimes I went days and sometimes I did nights, depending on my husband’s schedule because he would be home with the kids. So a typical day would be either I would go to school all morning or go to school in the evening, and then when the kids were at a playgroup, at nursery school or whatever, I would be studying and doing the preparation for classes, research, things like that, and then I would usually do that at night as well,” she says. Typically [with] the playgroups, you’d have five parents, five kids. And two of you would take care of the kids and the other three would have a couple of days a week off.”

She emerged from the house and landed at Conway & Davis in Needham, Mass., a high-level insurance firm where she worked for eight years. The firm offered financial planning as a “perk” to big executive clients, and the planning biz became Kaplan’s bailiwick. Getting her CFP license and high-level planning experience within the walls of an insurance firm allowed her to meet other people in the field and make the inroads into the industry that would eventually land her a role as president and chairman of the board at the Boston Institute of Certified Financial Planners.

“I really fleshed out my financial planning background,” she says, “as in any professional organization, you learn about the other practices by meeting more people in the field. You see the different things everyone is doing. It helped me define what I wanted my firm to be.”

She eventually realized she was an island at her own firm—handling her own financial planning clients but paying somebody else half her money for the privilege.

“If they had been willing to keep increasing what they were paying me, I would have still been there,” she says. “I think it was a case of wanting to keep what I earned and wanting to do things my own way. They really were more insurance people, so the elaborate steps of my financial planning I think they became annoyed with.”

“When I actually started my own firm, I just went from keeping half of what I was earning to keeping all of what I was earning. So it was really no risk at all.”