Ceiling shattered Woman stockbroker breaks mold

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ELLSWORTH – Although she is one of the power players in Maine finance, Bonnie McFee does not wear a conservative navy blue suit.

After 15 long years earning her reputation as a stockbroker, McFee has earned the freedom to sit in her office at Dirigo Investments Inc., wearing a funky straw hat and offering a softer style of brokerage.

McFee never believed in a glass ceiling until she became a finance executive and looked around to realize how few of her peers were female. Perhaps that’s why she’s been able to shatter the glass and find success doing things her own way in a profession dominated by men and their traditions.

“The glass ceiling does exist. We owe it to ourselves to say that we aren’t going to take it,” McFee recently told a women’s investment group.

“Money equals sex and power. It always has,” she said, citing examples of a testosterone-fueled market.

Scrutinize the cable news networks. Count how many women can be seen in footage of the frantic mass of brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Watch a video of “Wall Street” or its ’90s redux, “Boiler Room.” Consider how often finance broadcaster Maria Bartiromo is referred to as “the money honey.”

McFee’s portrait of brokerage as one of the last bastions of masculinity soon starts to make sense.

Women broke onto Wall Street in 1870, when Victoria Claflin Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee, became America’s first female stockbrokers. But in the century between their triumph and McFee’s entry into the field in the 1980s, little changed.

Even today, Wall Street shows a gender discrepancy. According to the National Organization for Women, major brokerage houses, such as Smith Barney – with 87 percent of its brokers male – and Merrill Lynch – with 85 percent male brokers, still hire men to handle the majority of their trades. Several sexual harassment and discrimination suits now pending against those firms contend that companies are trying to keep the male-dominated culture intact.

McFee, however, doesn’t lay blame exclusively on the companies – finding qualified female stockbrokers to hire isn’t easy, she said. She hired all men for Dirigo’s Bangor branch office, because competent women didn’t apply for the brokerage jobs.

“I think women, by and large, make better brokers. We’re more service-oriented, more customer-oriented,” she said. “But they just weren’t out there.”

As a child, McFee never planned on a career in finance, although her parents taught her money management strategies that many women of her generation never learned.

“From a young age, independence was bred in. My mother said to me, ‘Always have your own money,'” she said.

The youngest, surprise child of Maine natives living in Connecticut, McFee’s upbringing was markedly different from that of her older sister – attending college was never a question.

“My dad raised me as the son he’d never have. I went to the Friday night fights and the Yankees games. I wasn’t allowed in the kitchen. I didn’t do the laundry,” she said.

McFee studied at the University of Maine at Presque Isle for several years, working toward a bachelor’s degree in political science with a minor in economics. When a scholarship offer came her way, McFee transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, hoping to see how she would fare at a larger school, far from her New England upbringing.

“When I got off the plane, the guy said to me, ‘Maine? What are you doing here, you Yankee?'” McFee said. “It was just so Southern. The women were all blond. They’d come to an 8 a.m. class looking like they were going to the prom. They were all there to get their Mrs. degree,” she said.

She grew to love the school, with its Texas-shaped library and strong economics program. After graduation, she and a friend moved to the Pacific coast, where they lived in a beach house, casting career plans aside to thoroughly enjoy their youth.

After about six months, reality set in when McFee’s parents said they would cut off financial support unless she learned a trade. She was soon en route to a strict women’s school in Boston.

“They banished me to secretarial school. But, I had no better solution,” McFee said. “As much as it irritated me, I knew it was time to grow up, and I didn’t know how to do that. I have since thanked them for it, but it took me a lot of years.”

She worked as a secretary for a Bangor lawyer, where her political science background and research acumen – if not her typing skills – made her valuable to the up-and-coming jurist. Taking home only $114 per week while trying to pay off student loans, McFee couldn’t make ends meet, so her parents helped pay the rent on a small apartment.

But the lawyer saw a better future for her, and promised to take McFee along to a higher-paying position in the county courthouse when he became a judge – if she attended night school to earn her master’s degree in finance.

“He said, ‘You’re wasting your life here,'” she recalled.

So McFee enrolled at Husson College, took the job, and refined her ability to manage finances.

“I knew that I had a talent for money – both spending and investing,” she joked. “My father always said I could stimulate the economy all by myself.”

McFee tripled the value of her own small portfolio by graduation, and earned a position at a Bangor brokerage firm by demonstrating her money management skills. But she was ill prepared for the sales aspect of the business – particularly during the slim years that marked her entry in finance.

“I became a stockbroker in July 1987, just in time for the freakin’ market to crash in October,” she said.

McFee briefly tried cold-calling, a favored approach among some of her fellow brokers. Of four calls, one contact wasn’t home, two people were dead, and the third was a grieving widow who was in the middle of her husband’s funeral.

“It didn’t take long to figure out this can be an ugly business,” she said.

But McFee found a way to meet her quota and keep her self-respect. She wrote dozens of informational stories about investment, and submitted them to local media, including the Bangor Daily News. People read the stories, remembered her name, and, suddenly, McFee had a client base.

Being alternately doubted and hit on by clients, working under constant pressure to produce took its toll. But as the sole female broker in her office, McFee refused to show any sign of weakness.

“It’s a brutal business. There were a lot of days when I’d go in the bathroom and cry my little eyes out. But it’s a male-dominated business, so you get out the Visine, and make sure they never see you cry,” she said.

Fate again intervened when McFee was injured in a car crash about 10 years ago. The thought of her clients being abandoned to “bucket brokers” concerned primarily with their own commissions made her take a chance and found her own company, Dirigo Investments in Ellsworth, she said.

“Of course I wanted to make money – this is business. But I wanted a place where people could come and be treated well. I come from a long line of small-business owners, and they’ve all said, ‘Take care of your customers and you’ll do well,'” she said.

Dirigo has always taken a long-term approach to investment, helping clients find a balance between fear and greed, she said.

“The Zen of Dirigo has always been, help people understand that you can’t spend it and keep it, too,” she said. “We all have a responsibility to be financially responsible, regardless of how many zeros there are after our salary. It’s important whether you’re a single mom or a doctor who makes a bazillion dollars a year.”

When McFee founded Dirigo in 1990, she partnered with another broker. The two later dissolved their partnership and then in 1999, McFee accepted an offer to take her client base and merge with Bar Harbor Banking and Trust Co. to found a new full-service financial company called BTI Financial Group.

Dirigo forms the brokerage arm of BTI, and McFee holds three titles within the conglomerate: president of Dirigo Investments, managing director of Block Capital Management, and vice chairman of the BTI board of directors. Today, her Dirigo brokers in Bangor and Ellsworth are responsible for managing about $100 million in investments for their clients.

McFee’s reputation in eastern Maine played a major role in the bank’s decision to merge with Dirigo, said Paul Ahern, president of BTI.

“She was the person who had single-handedly made it successful. In brokerage, the person is the product,” Ahern said. “In my opinion, if Bonnie had left, Dirigo wouldn’t have survived.”

Three years later, both companies are still adjusting to a cooperative arrangement between the diverse worlds of banking and brokerage, McFee said.

“I’m learning to play well with others, which is not my specialty,” she said.

But McFee has found her niche. Her professional life is as calm as it’s ever going to get, particularly with the current unstable economic situation.

“The things that were broken before September 11 are still broken,” she said. “It’s a tough time, because we have to try to look into our crystal balls to predict the future.”

So McFee often escapes to the gardens that surround her home in rural Orland.

“There’s no completion here [at work], it’s just fluid all the time. A broker needs to have a hobby where she can get that sense of accomplishment,” she said.

As a friend put it, McFee makes her living, “selling the wind.”

“We don’t even know what the box is, never mind being stuck in it,” McFee said. “None of us are right 100 percent of the time. The markets have made me a really humble person.”