Core principles have guided advisor’s multifaceted career

“People can reinvent themselves if they open their mind to the possibilities,” says Mary Carroll Murphy, financial consultant and franchise owner of the Charles Schwab branch in Nashua.

Murphy has often found professionals assume that since they have studied a certain subject, they must pursue it for life, and they go into crisis mode if their plans get disrupted due to a health issue, failure at work or even a pandemic, rather than recognizing the opportunity it presents.

Over the course of 40 years, Murphy has navigated a number of career transitions, as well as life-threatening circumstances. Her family’s inside joke is that she is on her ninth life, after undergoing open-heart surgery in fall 2020.

When facing a career disruption, “sometimes you can go on to discover what your true motivation was meant to be,” says Murphy.

Murphy cites investing as the consistent theme in the circuitous path she’s taken in life.

It all started when her father became interested in financial investment as a vehicle to get his young family out of the Hungry Hill neighborhood of Springfield, Mass., and enroll his children in a prestigious Catholic school. He approached a financial advisor, but was told he did not have the minimum investment required, and so he worked three jobs to finally earn enough to meet the threshold. From there on, the financial adviser directed him to read and watch television to get investment ideas.

Her father became primarily a dividend growth investor, helping to supplement his income. However, a significant amount of his eventual wealth was due to government bonds, having invested when interest rates spiked to over 17% in the early 1980s.

A circuitous path

Murphy graduated into the competition brought about by the sheer number of baby boomers entering the workforce in the 1970s and ‘80s. Her career began as a night shift customer service representative for Northeast Utilities, the predecessor company to Eversource, after months of desperate job searching. It paid so little, she says, she had to live at home and pay rent to her parents — though, as her parents had long taught her, she continued to invest on the side.

She put all her effort into the job and eventually was promoted and relocated to the data center in Connecticut to train to become a methods and procedures analyst — a role that included helping automate nuclear reactor control procedures at Millstone Nuclear Power Plant III, “where I almost spent life No. 2 due to a ‘scram’ (a minor nuclear accident involving the plumbing),” says Murphy.

Being exposed to state-of-the-art technologies and software development techniques prompted her to realize, “I needed to move to the insurance industry, as they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year with IBM and were therefore the first to gain access to new products the company wanted to beta test,” says Murphy.

She talked her way into a technical analyst job at ITT/Hartford Insurance Group, where she rose to assistant director of information technology.

At this point, at age 26 and having moved out of her parents’ house, Murphy had enough financial wealth to purchase a townhouse in Connecticut, but the fear of losing her home, should she lose her job, weighed heavily on her.

“One day my IBM representative said to me, ‘You know, you are really good with people and technology. You would make 10 times more money selling computers than buying them.’” But Murphy didn’t immediately take a job for IBM. She moved to California, where she sold regional database software to big companies, such as Bank of America, Levi Strauss and Gallo Wineries.

“One day, I experienced one of California’s frequent earthquakes, and my mom (with uncanny timing) mailed me an article that Digital Equipment Corp. was trying to break into the insurance industry. They were hiring experienced insurance people they planned to train as computer salespeople.

I returned to Connecticut, where I kept my townhouse, and applied to this training program.”

Murphy was charged with the impossible — “penetrate an industry dominated by your competition, IBM.”

She was assigned to Aetna. “Every day they would tell me, ‘Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM, so we’re not buying anything else,’” she recalls.

She was dismayed but didn’t give up. Murphy was able to get on a call with Aetna’s CEO, having convinced his immediate staff they would benefit from products their peers at Digital were using to do the same jobs they did.

Murphy managed to turn the office systems sale into a $40 million data warehouse sale and was offered a promotion to train salespeople in New Hampshire.

She later joined Lotus Development Corp., an early developer of spreadsheets and became part of a team that helped its Lotus Notes grow from 175,000 installations to more than 15 million by the time she left the company.

She was transferred by the company to help with sales in Europe, and shortly after arriving in 1995, IBM acquired Lotus, and she was promoted to take over some of the IBM divisions in Europe and later worked for the global division responsible for building out business-level internet.

At this point, at the height of her career, Murphy’s father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she relocated to the United States to her home in Bedford, NH.

“I used to commute from Bedford to Cambridge for work, then to Springfield every Friday night after work at breakneck speed and quickly racked up three speeding tickets in a row,” Murphy recalls. She eventually moved into her parents’ home to help with the medical equipment and provide emotional support for her mother.

“I took the decision to put my career on hold while I became a full-time caregiver,” says Murphy. “It was wrenching, quite frankly, because it was a very big family financial decision, so I had to sit down with my husband and talk it through.”

She planned to return to her high-tech career when her father passed away, but then her mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, “and I knew I needed a job that required less international travel,” says Murphy.

She also wanted a job that was more fulfilling and would make a difference in other people’s lives, the way that financial advisor had helped her father change his family’s destiny.

So Murphy decided to obtain a master’s in education from Rivier University “to fulfill my parents’ wishes to become a teacher and my own need to give back to society and spread financial literacy.”

The degree was costly, and her position as a math teacher in Bedford paid $35,000 — that was three times less than what she earned as an executive.

From that experience, she advises clients, “It’s important to determine the cost-benefit of your new career prior to taking on the costs of more education. However, career transitions can also be exciting because you are learning something new and learning potentially valuable skills or knowledge.”

Murphy recruited an economics teacher to join her in offering the first afterschool Investment Club for Bedford, Hooksett and Manchester students. She taught them her investment system and the criteria she uses to screen and select the most promising stocks to put in a portfolio.

But, having encountered bureaucracy in the education system, Murphy was persuaded to leave teaching to become a financial advisor, so she could more directly help others by offering workshops and educating clients on how to become better savers and investors. She became an independent financial advisor with Mass Mutual.

Three years later, in her early 50s, Murphy was hit by a distracted 21-year-old driving a pickup truck while she was walking into the Manchester Country Club.

Murphy’s left ankle was broken and required a plate. She lost part of a toe and walks with a limp due to the excessive damage to her feet.

“That was a huge setback,” says Murphy. “I ended up spending the rest of the year in a nursing home and my own home wheelchair-bound, and I think the clients were frightened, they were worried I wasn’t coming back.”

That’s when she saw advertisements that Charles Schwab aimed to make wealth management advice more acceptable to the masses and was looking for people in small communities.

“I was faced with having to rebuild my client base,” says Murphy. “In 2011, Charles Schwab launched its Independent Branch Franchise program, and I realized that this program might help me accelerate rebuilding my practice because of their very strong and trusted brand.”

Murphy was awarded the franchise and helped “pioneer this new model in the industry, which minimizes any potential conflict of interest between us and our clients by not paying us directly on any fees our clients pay to Schwab,” says Murphy.

“This is unique in the industry and puts us on the same side of the table as the client in trying to reduce fees and taxes to maintain the growth of client assets,” rather than encouraging continuous movement in assets to rack up fees as payment.

An active role

Murphy circles back to the core principles of her success (and lessons learned from her mistakes): be adaptable, obtain objective knowledge to recognize and act on opportunity, and secure your finances through investing.

“It is really, really important to have your financial house in order at all times,” Murphy says.

The pandemic has shown Americans how quickly unforeseen circumstances can upend their income. Having a diversified financial investment plan and eye for career opportunities can create more stability during uncertain times.

“It’s good to have investments helping you. It’s like having a second stream of income without having to go to an eight-hour job and being exhausted,” says Murphy.

Some people are good at spotting industry trends, but Murphy recommends having a set system of criteria to evaluate stocks versus making decisions based on emotions.

“We encourage people to create multiple streams of income for themselves, and with the internet, it’s easier more now than ever.”

One client, a young woman, sold artistic leggings through eBay and Amazon in competition with Lululemon. The business grew to over $1 million in receipts, and she was trying to determine if she and her husband should leave their teaching jobs and employer-provided healthcare to support the business full time.

The business was growing so fast, and they had so much cash flow, Murphy saw they could buy the healthcare premiums and write it off.

“I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but it was a huge challenge to get to where I am,” says Murphy, whose parents encouraged playing it safe by working for an employer or the government, as Murphy’s brother did.

But there are benefits to entrepreneurship. “When you own your own business, you are not as vulnerable to layoffs or being fired. You are more in control of your destiny, and there is an enormous satisfaction in building a business that sells products or services that benefit fellow Americans,” says Murphy. “The pandemic has created a huge opportunity for Americans to start businesses to lessen our dependence on China and other countries.”

Liisa Rajala can be reached at lrajala@nhbr.com.