And she did just that by landing her first job after college with Merrill Lynch, but at another office in New York. “I didn’t want to be in the same office as my mom because I wanted to see if I was good at it and not embarrass her if I wasn’t,” she says laughing.
Two years later, Smith and her mother teamed up at Merrill and they’ve been together ever since.
Corrine Smith was a bit of a pioneer in the very male-dominated brokerage industry of the 1970s. “It was a Mad Men world, so I had to focus myself on my own responsibilities and my own ambition and motivation, but the things going on around me were so unfair,” says Corrine, 72. “But it’s the way things were at that time, so you needed to find a strategy to work within it.”
For example, Corrine says, in the late ’70s at Merrill Lynch everyone had to share a Quotron machine––a sort of rudimentary precursor to the Bloomberg Box––to get stock quotes. “When I went to turn it to get a quote on a stock, the guy next to me would swing it back toward him and look at me like I did a horrible thing. I had to wait till he was busy with something or went to the men’s room to use the machine.”
Corrine previously was a teacher and had started a couple of businesses, and she chose to enter this field and was determined to make it work. “As I started to see how the business works, I realized there was a holistic view that wasn’t male-oriented,” she says. “They were hawking stocks to anyone and everyone, and nobody thought about suitability. That never made sense to me. I knew I wanted a broader approach of having a relationship with clients. It’s now what people do, but back then women weren’t respected for that approach.
“I still handle clients the same way for years, and some of my clients have been with me more than 30 years,” she adds.
Going Solo
Together, the Smiths went from Merrill Lynch to Paine Webber to Wachovia. In 2006, Michelle and her friend, Alexandra Lebenthal, scion of the legendary bond house Lebenthal & Co., which was eventually taken over by Merrill in 2005, decided to break away from the wirehouse world and co-founded an independent wealth management firm called Alexandra & James (named after the first names of Lebenthal and her father).
Eventually, Smith’s growing desire to build a practice around her divorce specialty didn’t quite mesh with the program, and that resulted in what she describes as a friendly spinout from A&J. “Alexandra and I sat down and said we want to do a couple of different things,” she explains. “I wanted to specialize in specialties and divorce, and it wasn’t a fit for them. It was great building that business with her; otherwise, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to spin out in 2006 from Wachovia on my own. So I learned a lot from my partnership with her. Then I was really ready in the summer of 2012 to get out and build a firm for specialties.”
Lebenthal, for her part, went on to reacquire the rights to the Lebenthal name from Merrill for her diversified financial services firm. Smith says the company is Source’s manager of choice for muni bonds.
When Michelle founded Source, she brought over with her a handful of Alexandra & James employees, including her mother. And she got a lot of help from Dynasty Financial Partners and its integrated wealth management platform services for independent advisors.
“Dynasty is an RIA swat team,” Smith says. “They did this whole transition map of things to do by certain dates. They can help with branding; they’re very much responsible for helping me come up with the name Source for my firm. We spent a half day talking about the client base and what really matched, and they came up with four concepts. We all looked at it and said ‘Source––you’re the source for divorce and people going through financial transitions.’ They helped us pick the best custodian and recording engine for us, and gave us options to help us pick the best practices for our firm.”
The Specialist
December 1, 2014
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