Member Spotlight

"The First Woman of Finance"
Muriel Siebert

Legendary financier Muriel “Mickie” Siebert – the first woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1967 – has a message for women entrepreneurs in today’s global recession: be mercilessly realistic about your business plan and take hard numbers to your banker.

Ms. Siebert, founder, president and CEO of the NYSE discount brokerage firm Muriel Siebert & Co. and founder of a Personal Finance Program for New York high school students, in an exclusive interview with the National Association of Women Business Owners said women entrepreneurs now more than ever need to take responsibility for their business and lifestyle choices in light of how sweeping the current downturn has become.

“I have never seen times like these,” Ms. Siebert told NAWBO. “What we’re seeing now is the effect of globalization as we never have before.  The subprime mess started in this country and look how it spread around the world. Japan is the second largest industrial nation and it’s in a recession, the Euro is being hit badly.”

Ms. Siebert says a “lousy” market makes it more incumbent on women entrepreneurs to proceed judiciously. While she’s always on the lookout for promising acquisitions, the firm is staying its conservative course: all in cash with no debt. With her New York office adjacent to Bernard Madoff’s, recently arrested on charges of carrying out a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, she takes seriously being a prudent role model as “The First Woman of Finance” for women entrepreneurs.

“If I got into trouble, it would be in the headlines; they’d have me for dinner.”

In the meantime, the former Superintendent of Banking for the State of New York under Gov. Hugh Carey says her “soul” and much of her time is with the personnel finance curriculum she finances herself through the Muriel F. Siebert Foundation.

The curriculum, entitled "The Personal Finance Program: Taking Control of Your Financial Future," is now being taught as part of the required Economics course for high school seniors in New York City's public schools. It has received laudatory reviews from the Archdiocese of New York, which has introduced it in its high schools. In keeping with her personal agenda, Ms. Siebert hopes to see this program established nationally.

The lessons include managing a checkbook, understanding credit cards, budgeting, identity theft, taxation, financial planning, banking services, paycheck deductions, the difference between a car purchase and lease, and more. She is planning a version for eighth graders as well.

As banking superintendent, Ms. Siebert said her deputy for consumer affairs would introduce her to teenagers or young adults in their early twenties who were flat broke, often after unwittingly misusing their credit cards.

“Nowhere on the credit card did it say if they paid the minimum payment on last night’s pizza dinner they’d be paying for it for 15 or 20 years,” she said.

She vowed then if she ever were in a position to change young people’s knowledge of their personal finances, she would do so.  Had young and middle-aged people nationwide had a more realistic idea of the mortgages they could or could not afford, for example, the current subprime crises might have been mitigated or averted.

“Knowledge,” she said is the key to both personal financial and entrepreneurial success.

Ms. Siebert, who began her career as a $65 a week trainee in research at Bache & Co. before becoming a partner at Finkle & Co. and Brimberg & Co., said her trajectory to Wall Street’s pre-eminent woman business owner has been based on simple principles grounded in personal responsibility and careful assessments of opportunity.

“I’ve said the only difference between “charwoman” and “chairwoman” is the letter “I,” she said. “If something has to be done, you do it.”

Women entrepreneurs increasingly need to provide rigorous budgets to impress financial institutions, she said. That means assessing the minimum needed to run a business after factoring in living expenses and other sources of revenues, such as a husband’s income.

“Banks tell me women come in and they don’t know the numbers and you need the numbers, what I call a realistic budget…You have to know the banker, and go in with plans and these plans have to be written down.”

Ms. Siebert, who grew up in Cleveland and watched her uncle lose a real estate empire and regain it from revenues generated out of the country’s most successful gas station, said she has learned through fluctuations in her own business the difference between “needs” and “wants,” and to largely stick with the former.

“I have friends who go through tough times and still buy a $2,000 dress,” she said, remembering years when she put off a new car purchase or eschewed the corner office for cheaper work space to build up her business that now includes seven branches. “I didn’t let pride get in my way.”

Ms. Siebert says she has enjoyed watching women like Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy rise to CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies. She takes pleasure in her firm Siebert Brandford Shank & Co., LLC, a woman and minority company that is now ranked in the top 20 among public finance firms in the U.S.  She adds business women have come a long way in the last four decades, and today are mostly judged on merit and listened to by men.   

But, as the only woman to have built such a large Wall Street firm she says it gets a bit “lonely,” and that she looks forward to the day when more women entrepreneurs gain more clout.

She urges NAWBO and other women organizations to step up their advocacy for Small Business Administration loans for women to provide relief in a credit market that’s the tightest she’s witnessed.

While she doesn’t see the economy picking up any time soon, she said some relief may be around the corner if mortgages drop low enough to tap into the pent up housing demand and if President-elect Obama can effectively address economic issues from job creation to the automotive crisis.

Meanwhile, women entrepreneurs can position themselves by taking stock of their talents, experience and knowledge and then looking for “voids” in available products or services. Then, she said, it’s up to you.

“Whatever you do, as the owner you’re the best sales person.”

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