By Sonia Bhasin
Staff Writer
Shannon Sutherland works as a financial advisor and accredited asset management specialist at Wachovia Securities in the Beverly Hills office. Shannon took the UCLA personal financial planning curriculum and certification. She entered the world of finance by taking a temporary job at PaineWebber in 1998. In 1999 she accepted a full time position, and has been helping investors ever since.
BBR: Can you tell me about the different jobs you have held?
SS: When I was in college, I was a financial aid counselor. I moved to Southern California to go to school. I waited on tables.
I have shot 35 millimeter cameras and worked for a stock footage company where I would log video shots and film time-lapse. I’ve produced film and video projects including working on teams creating a specialized marketing campaign. I worked in a department store for a while selling clothes.
I owned a small production company in Santa Monica where I worked on advertising agency campaigns. I won a few awards for marketing and for my short film that combined live action with animation.
Today I am a financial advisor with Wachovia Securities. I am passionate about collaborating with my clients and love seeing other people succeed, and helping them succeed. Clients become friends and these people work and live all over the world.
BBR: Why did you decide to change career paths?
SS: Some people need structure in their life. They need to get up and do the same thing every day, go to the same place, driving the same car, and take the same bus. Anything new is not comfortable for them. But for me? I love trying different things. I love experimenting. I love new things, whether its travel, people, or basically anything that I haven’t mastered yet. In regression analysis, if you put different variables together, there is a reasonable probability that you will have a certain type of outcome. Analyze the variables and then put the variables in place that will give you the highest degree of desired outcome.
I did start to realize that some of my other life goals were not being met before I became a financial advisor. You can always make more money; however, when I got married, my goals immediately changed. Spending more time with my spouse and fewer all night work sessions began to matter. Working for a large corporation provided more benefits than for a smaller company.
BBR: How did you end up getting involved in the finance industry? That seems like a big career change.
SS: By taking a chance, and being open to new ideas. I met a woman who changed my life. Christine was this amazing woman who was very inspirational. She was a vice president in Paine Webber’s Century City office. In short, she said to me, “Shan, come work with me, come run my business, come organize my life, and I will teach you the ropes. If everything goes well, this business will be yours in a couple of years when I get ready to retire.” Well you don’t often get an offer like that, right? Investing in stocks was enjoyable and I had a lot of interest in it, so I thought, sure, why not, let’s give it a try.
And then tragedy happened. Christine was riding with her motorcycle club, and had a tragic accident. She was airlifted to the hospital, where she spent the next several months recovering. My invitation into the world the finance was out of the fire and into the flame. I would go to the office in the morning with my workday starting around 7:00 and ending around 5:00, and then I would go to the hospital to tell her who had called and what had happened She would give me instructions on what to do the following day. She ended up taking an early retirement.
Knowing nothing, I continued to grow her business.
BBR: What are some of the biggest challenges you have had to deal with along the way?
SS: One of the biggest challenges that I have had to deal with in my career is the left brain, right brain conflict. I am a very creative person with a lot of analytical talents. There are many creative engineers for example, but the financial business world, for the most part, does not think abstractly. The intangible is summed up as “goodwill” – a line on the balance sheet. I turned this challenge into a niche business by joining the two sides and becoming a bridge between people that think and communicate in a left brain manner, and think and communicate in a right brain manner in order to work together to achieve desired results.
Other challenges have included people along the way within you path who don’t want you to succeed and will put roadblocks in front of you for whatever reason. Realize that it is their problem. My advice is stay far away from these people, and don’t let their idiosyncrasies affect what your goals are. Of course, we all have to be nice and learn to play and work together, but these are the same type of people who will not benefit you in the long run. Learn social skills, make friends, make allies.
One of the biggest challenges that I think anyone will face in their personal life or in their business life is when you run into an abusive person. Abuse can come in the form of mental abuse, and I always considered myself very strong-willed and not susceptible, but it can happen to anyone. There have been disagreements with colleagues, as I thought what they were doing was certainly unethical and borderline illegal. I have distanced myself from them.
People will try to mentally squash you to control you. Or they may try to control you to keep you from succeeding past them. Having a good friend or a good alliance to help bring perspective back into your life is really important. Don’t let other people’s fears beat you down if they’re caustic, if they’re negative, if they’re controlling. You can choose to get away from them. Avoid being reactionary. Think about what you’re doing, what your next best action is. Once again, regression analysis is simply mixing up a different set of variables to produce different set of outcomes.
BBR: What do you see as your biggest challenges in your career now?
SS: My greatest challenges now include fulfilling the goals I’ve set for myself and finding the time to match family and work.
BBR: What advice do you have for somebody who might want to move along in their career, but it just doesn’t seem to be happening at this point?
SS: The advice I have for somebody who feels stuck in their current career would certainly depend on the age of the person, their commitment to their current endeavor, and their expectations of what each workday should be like.
Having realistic goals are important. Do research on the career that you are interested in. Even if you have already started on a particular career path, obtain information to make informed strategic decisions about what the future can be like. Do you know how much money you can make and how much time is going to be involved on a daily, weekly, and yearly basis? There are other intangibles that should be thought about, such as where you want to live – in a different state, or perhaps a different country?
You may use emotions to tell you what will make you happy. And then use analytical skills and not emotions to make informed decisions. Analyze the prospects of how you can actually make a living doing what makes you happy. Following your heart and following your instinct are both important for being able to make quick decisions.
Do your homework. Make informed decisions.
If for some reason you find yourself stuck, make a picture of what your perfect day is. What are you doing and who are the people you interact with? Once you have that picture in your mind, then start breaking it down. Start building a ladder and start figuring out what you need to get to the top. What information do you need to obtain to have that type of career? One of the easiest ways to start is to find somebody, make a call, find out what people in that particular profession are currently doing and what steps they took to get where they are. It is not that hard. You just have to be willing to reach out, ask for help, and listen.
Knowing what you want may be the most difficult or the easiest decision depending on the importance you give the desire. The good news is that you can always change your mind. Guts and conviction. Be prepared to lose. Whatever it takes to get you there. Prepare to take responsibility.
