The Resistance

You began your career as an investment banker in the late 1990s, then you went to Merrill Lynch to become a financial advisor, that's where you created a team of financial advisors to focus on bringing in new assets to the firm from the LGBTQ community. At the time, this was brand-new, no other major Wall Street firm had that kind of focus. What was your process for selling Merrill Lynch on that idea?

Well, when I did come to Merrill, as anyone who is familiar with private banking knows, the model for private banking is that a private banker has to bring in, at that time, a million dollars a month of new assets and the firm gives you the opportunity to put together a business plan, and for me, I looked around and I thought, gosh, at that time, in the United States anyway, there were over a 1,049 rights at the Federal level that gay and lesbian couples did not receive because marriage equality was not a reality, and most of those, almost 90% of those 1,049 rights were focused on financial, so everything from taxes to estate, and I looked around and not a single Wall Street firm as you just mentioned was focusing on that opportunity, and the opportunity not just to bring in clients but to actually help these couples protect their assets because the government did not, and so I put together a business plan so that we could actually, as an organization but just starting with me all by my lonesome, start to focus on this market, and I started partnering with an organization called Lambda Legal which is the nation's largest and oldest LGBTQ civil rights organization. They focus on impact litigation in the courts to advance LGBT equality, and we started doing domestic partner planning seminars which I actually wrote the seminar that Merrill Lynch used or that we used at the time, and in the first 12 months, I brought in $100 million dollars of net new assets which far exceeded my goal of $12 million.

That's extraordinary.

In five years, we brought in almost $2 billion. Thank you, yeah, it was a structure and a strategy that worked.

So, over all over time, you brought in $1.5 billion worth of new business for Merrill Lynch from the LGBTQ community, so your efforts were obviously very successful, but along the way, was there resistance to your idea and how did you deal with that?

Interestingly, there's always resistance to any sort of new idea, but I found then and now that the more you can tie the idea to a business outcome, the less the resistance becomes. So, more often that not, if you can say, "Look, we're going to go after this market because it matters for our bottom line and it matters to our clients, it matters to reputation, it matters to all of these different ROI impacts," or what I like to call 'we'll turn on equality,' your resistance tends to sort of fade away. I find if you don't have a business rationale that something feels like it's just for the sake of political correctness or it's some sort of nice-to-have, when markets go down, the nice-to-haves go away, and so while there was probably a little bit of resistance, it was very small and when the market opportunity proved itself and the business model proved itself, the resistance went away and it actually shifted into how can we do more?