Name: Ruth Mullen
Age: 50
Position: President and CEO, New England Trust Co. a Rhode Island-based investment management and advisory firm founded in 1973, whose assets under management have grown from $12 to more than $1 billion. Privately held until 1994, New England Trust is now an independent, wholly owned subsidiary of National City Bank Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio.
Background: Mullen joined New England Trust in 1981 from the Abedon Company as a senior vice president in charge of trusts. She was named executive vice president and chief operating officer in 1988 and partner in 1990. She is on the board of trustees for the Providence Public Library and the Providence Children’s Museum.
Education: Bachelor of Arts from Vassar College, New York (1971); Master of Arts from New School for Social Research, New York (1976).
Family: Married for 23 years to Jim Mullen, one son, John.
Residence: Providence.
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PBN: New England Trust is described as an investment advisory firm. Who are its clients?
MULLEN: We manage money for individuals and institutions. Our typical, individual client would be someone who’s been financially successful, who maybe sold a business, piece of property or perhaps got an inheritance or retirement distribution or some kind of a settlement. Many of our clients are self-made people. We don’t have too many who are in families with inherited wealth. A typical institution would be a pension fund, a retirement fund or an endowment fund. So it would be a fund that would be for the benefit of other people, or other institutions.
We use stocks and bonds, taxable and tax-exempt bonds, depending on the tax situation. Our specific expertise is in large capitalization stocks, big companies that tend to be the ones with the more familiar names like General Electric, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft.
How many people are employed at New England Trust?
Thirteen. There are three of us who make the investment decisions for the company as a whole – that’s me and my colleagues George Wallace and Jim Sweet. The three of us actually have worked together for 15 years. We know each other so well; we’re way beyond any problems that could impede our ability to work well together. The three of us are very different in our approach, in our styles and our personalities, but, somehow it works, and it’s worked really great, particularly over the last five years that we’ve been in charge of making the investment decisions.
Do you have clients beyond New England?
Our individual clients are mostly regional, located in Rhode Island, Southeastern Massachusetts, a few in Connecticut. There are also some in Florida because some of our Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts clients who spend the winter in Florida have friends down there that they introduce us to, so we get to know them. But it’s mostly regional. Our institutional clients are actually across all of North America because we even manage a U.S. stock fund for a Canadian union group.
You have 30 years experience in the trust and investment business. How has it changed over the years?
It’s changed a lot, first of all, from a technology standpoint. There basically wasn’t any 30 years ago. Everything was done by hand. The markets have also changed quite a bit. When I first came into the business in the early 70s, it was a horrible market, a long bear market, for years. People were losing money year after year after year, so it was a real tough way to be introduced to the investment business, but like anything, when it’s difficult in the beginning, it’s always easier afterwards. The business has also changed dramatically for women.
How so?
Well, my first job, at what was then Chemical Bank and is now Chase Manhattan, was in their Trust Department in New York. There were no women in anything above a secretarial job. I was hired as an administrative assistant, which in those days was a step above, you still used the term, secretary. And, the men for the most part didn’t want to have us around. That, more than anything I think, has changed dramatically, because now you’ve got a whole new generation of men who for the most part, at least in my experience, love having women around and working with them. I will never forget my first foray into the executive dining room at Chemical Bank. I and a friend of mine were the first female trust officers at the bank, the first females to go to lunch in the executive dining room. And none of the men asked us to sit with them. We had to go sit at our own table.
What year was that?
1974. On the other hand, because women were kind of new to the executive world then, they also had a little bit more of a freedom of expression. You know, men were in those days, in New York, in the trust business especially, which is a conservative business, were very much button down, white shirt, suit and tie, and their behavior and demeanor had to be extremely conservative. We were afforded a little bit broader method of expressing ourselves, because there weren’t any rules because there weren’t any of us around before then. I didn’t wear a suit until probably the early 80s.
Were you taken as seriously as a male in a similar position?
I think I was and I wasn’t. I was also young, so that worked against me in a lot of cases, because I think that a lot of the older clients, and in particular, the older male clients, wondered how I could possibly know anything. But ultimately that worked for me, because I realized, well, I’ve got to prove to them that I can do it, that I do know what I’m doing, and I did. So you know, I guess in every challenge there’s an opportunity.
How did you break into being a trust officer?
Well, I guess really by doing a good job (as an assistant to trust officers) and then in the mid-’70s there was starting to be some pressure to start promoting women. Feminism as a movement was really picking up steam so by the mid-’70s there was a lot of public pressure anyway to start promoting women.
Were you interested in making money as a young child?
No, I fell into it. My undergraduate degree was in sociology. The reason I got that job at Chemical Bank in New York was that when I graduated from college I wanted to live in New York, and Chemical Bank was recruiting for their trust department on campus. I didn’t know the first thing about a stock or a bond, or really much about economics. I’d taken economics, but I didn’t know that much about it. So, I had a lot to learn.
You seem to have learned to love it.
Well that’s it. Investment is a fascinating business; it really is. It’s challenging every day, no day’s ever like the day before because the markets change every day – the world changes every day, and it’s really about everything that’s going on, not just about money. The investment process takes into account obviously the markets and obviously business but it’s also about innovation, it’s about geopolitics, it’s about sociology, demographic trends. It’s about federal and state legislation. In a way, it’s about everything. You need to have a curious mind. And, you need to love a challenge.
One image of an investment advisor might be this sort of stern-faced suit in an ivory tower, removed from what’s happening in the world. It’s not like that?
Well there are people like that and mainly they end up working for big institutions, possibly big banks or insurance companies or big investment management firms. And they would be the more analytical types who maybe do the research on the companies and come up with opinions on stocks, that sort of thing. At New England Trust we’re sort of at the front lines so to speak, right with the clients, so in order to succeed in this job, you have to like people, because it’s a big part of it of what we do
The market has been quite volatile of late – have you seen these kinds of ups and downs before?
I’ve seen good markets and I’ve seen bad markets, but I’ve never seen this level of volatility. It’s not necessarily bad. Volatility can be actually good. It usually indicates some kind of a change in direction and it doesn’t have to be a direction down, it can be a direction up. I think what’s causing it today is that there are either real believers or real disbelievers. It’s almost like a tug of war is going on. However, something very important has happened in the last six weeks. And that is that there is a tremendous amount of speculation and overexuberance in the markets, and an awful lot of that has been washed out. And that is actually a good thing because valuations of a lot of companies had just gotten too high. The companies that have gotten hurt the worst in the last two months roughly are the so called dot com companies, many of them Internet businesses that went public and immediately jumped to $200 a share and more on no earnings, no promise of earnings anywhere in the future.
The market — investing in general – seems to have caught the fancy of the mass media. We see it on CNBC, we read about in Time and Newsweek. It seems to have come a long way. Has that changed who is investing, or how people are investing?
It definitely has, and there again, it’s good and it’s bad. The good part is that it’s broadened the pool of possible investors. CNBC I think has done that almost single handedly, really. The bad thing is that it has led to a proliferation of that kind of speculative trading and a lack of fundamental research. Even though they always say, do your research, know your companies, people who trade for their own accounts tend often not to do the in-depth kind of research that we would do. Plus the ongoing research that you have to do to maintain your investment in that company because there again, things change, which is something that just an individual, just sort of going on line isn’t able to do. I mean, they certainly can get access to information. That’s much more available today than it was even five years ago let alone 25 or 30 years ago.
So has this increased access and attention being paid to the stock market made your job easier?
Actually, we like it because it has made our clients more intelligent. Many of our clients have the stocks in their portfolio up on their own computers at home and they follow them. And while it can be more challenging because they will ask us more questions, we think it makes it more fun, because we get to talk about it and we love what we’re doing.
Do you learn from your clients?
Oh, all the time. Our clients for the most part are really intelligent people, many of them have business experience. Our doctors tell us a lot about pharmaceuticals. We can read research on them, but the doctors know whether they really work and whether they are prescribing them and whether they are really doing the job. So they give us real life information that we couldn’t get from the research. Other business people who just have a good sense of business are great to talk to about whether investing in a particular company or industry make sense. There are a lot of stocks out there, we don’t follow them all. Many of them will bring ideas to us that we didn’t know about, and we’ll talk about them back and forth, and maybe we’ll even use them in the portfolio maybe we’ll just use them in that one particular person’s portfolio.
What is your take on the online investing phenomena – people investing from their home? That must not be good for your business.
I guess from a competitive standpoint we’re not really worried about it, because they probably wouldn’t be our clients anyway. They would be people who want to manage their own money and the heart and soul of our business is we manage money for others. Generally speaking, those who trade online seem to be interested in a class of stock that isn’t the kind we own anyway. Online investors are just a different category of people who would never be looking for our services anyway.
You say a different class of stock. What does that mean?
I mean they tend to be smaller companies, startup firms or recent IPOs, initial public offerings, and we tend to use companies that have track records and histories and have been earning money for a number of years. We specialize in the large capitalization companies. Sometimes paying dividends but at least exhibiting growth that we can project forward.
Males have long dominated your industry, and yet you have risen to the position as president at New England Trust. Has there ever been a sense on your part that is has been harder to get where you are than maybe it should have been?
Not in a big way. I’ve had tremendous support all around me for as long as I’ve been working. To me, that’s been the key. My husband has been unbelievably supportive for as long as I’ve known him. He has always wanted me to succeed and he has helped me as a husband, as a father and as an advisor, too. He helped me understand a man’s world from a man’s point of view. The founders of this company (Ernest R. Famiglietti and Devon W. Deyhle) were wonderful mentors to me and helped me understand this business, from a man’s point of view. So I think my gender has helped me as much as it’s hurt me.
Do you feel any responsibility to encourage young women in high or college to take the investment industry seriously as a career path?
I think there are tremendous opportunities and that many of the obstacles that I might have faced as a young woman don’t exist anymore. As a matter of fact, I think the wind is at their backs now. Because women are good at investing.
How so?
Because most women, anyway, have a natural sense of inflow and outflow, of budgeting, that when money comes in you need to manage it so that not too much goes out. I have come across so many women who don’t think they understand the investment process but intuitively they do. Particularly women who have run households, who have managed families, so to speak. They’re the ones who get it, and I’m sure there are many young versions of those women who would have a natural affinity for it. I didn’t know I did until I landed in the business.
It’s like that old stereotype where women shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads about money, instead just let the men handle it.
It is, and it’s too bad. Many of our new women clients are women like that who have had powerful husbands who were successful in business. This is fading as the generations go on but it’s certainly true of people in maybe their 60s and 70s. They let the husbands handle everything financial and all of a sudden, especially if they die unexpectedly, the women are caught up short and don’t know what to do. Obviously we can help really well in circumstances like that, because we sit them down, they often are very happy to talk to another woman rather than another man. That a wonderful opportunity for women coming up in this business, that many women would prefer to talk to a woman about finances rather than a man because you don’t have that paternalistic sort of relationship. Exactly what you were talking about, that, you know, don’t worry honey, I’ll take care of this, because you probably can’t figure it out.
So despite the great strides women have made in the investment world, there still are not a lot of Ruth Mullens in Providence?
Yes, still, when I go to meetings, other than board meetings, I am often the only woman in the room. But, I’ve always liked men, and I think that’s fun, so it doesn’t bother me. And there are more and more women coming up in the ranks, so to speak. We’ve been able to develop some women here, even for a small company, into middle management positions that I think they would agree that under other circumstances they might not have reached.
