Pioneer adviser eager to mentor next generation

Carol Nulman was one of the few women to succeed in the male-dominated world of high finance on Wall Street in the 1970s. “I had 125 men around me who thought I’d fail,” she said of her early days as the only female broker at Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb in Manhattan.
She still is breaking ground here in Providence through her work as a mentor, her pro-bono efforts for nonprofit organizations – perhaps most significantly of all – as managing director of the local office of Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., located in the city’s Financial District.
At Oppenheimer, where Nulman has worked since April 2009, she and her six-member team manage a total of $600 million for national and international clients, both individuals and institutions. It is a responsibility she feels keenly.
“I [exercise] seven days a week,” she said. “It’s a necessity. It’s not out of vanity or trying to get to a size six. It’s my release. You can’t be under this kind of stress without a release.”
Actually, stress is something that Nulman has always lived with, since those days in the late 1970s when she was recruited by the Xerox Corp. in New York City after receiving a Boston University bachelor’s degree in finance and marketing. Within six months of her hiring as a young college grad, she was “fast-tracked” and promoted, she said.
When Lehman Brothers in Manhattan called to recruit her, Nulman was not interested and only agreed to an interview because her father, the late Saul Nulman, urged her to do so. “He was my biggest cheerleader,” she said. Lehman Brothers hired her on the spot and doubled her salary. She was one of 12 Lehman recruits from high-tech companies at the time, 11 men and Nulman. She became a broker confronting what she called huge goals at the high-powered firm in the early 1980s. “We had to open 10 accounts a month, with an initial trade of at least $25,000, which would be about half a million dollars today,” she said.
“I’ll be frank, people around me expected me to sleep around and not get [success] the honest way, so I felt I was constantly proving myself because I was a woman. I was under constant pressure,” Nulman said.
She spent more than 20 years working on Wall Street, staying at Smith Barney for 17 years until she came to Oppenheimer in Providence a few years ago.
Today, the mother of two does “tons” of pro-bono work for charitable organizations, she said, and is most proud of the role she played a few years ago, chairing the capital campaign for Wheeler School in Providence. Some $23 million was raised in 18 months, funds that went for construction of new buildings and establishment of an endowment fund for teachers.
Mentoring also brings her a great deal of satisfaction.
Her advice to young people is that “your success is based on how much you believe in yourself. It’s all about self-confidence,” she said. “If you believe in yourself, you can do anything.”
At the same time, however, she warns against arrogance. The key to combating it is not to take yourself too seriously, she said. “You have to be able to laugh at yourself.” &#8226

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