Entrepreneur of the Year
Given to women who have pursued, and succeeded on, an entrepreneurial path in the financial markets.
Ivy Zelman, chief executive officer, Zelman & Associates
For Ivy Zelman, owner and partner at Zelman & Associates, the pivotal moment to branch out on her own came in 2008, when the U.S. housing market went bust.
I had just had my 40th birthday and realized I wanted something more, Zelman recalled. At the time, she was working at Credit Suisse, running her own research group, and was able to write her own ticket.
After blowing out the candles on her cake, she left the bulge firm-where she had spent the last 10 years of her career-and opened her own boutique research firm. The road to ownership and self-employment was most certainly a challenge and required a team effort, Zelman told Traders Magazine. She enlisted the help of her husband, who runs the operations side of the business, and has her sister Allyson provide child care and watch her home while away on business. Her assistant Kim takes care of Zelmans personal and corporate matters. She relies on her team, and for most of her career its always been about fostering a sense of teamwork and esprit de corps.
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Zelman & Associates, an independent research firm catering to the institutional equity investor, has only 11 research staff, so teamwork is essential to compete with bigger firms that have more staff and resources. Zelman places a very high value on teamwork and recognition, something she learned about in her early days working at Salomon Brothers in 1990. Back then, she also learned and had to contend with something every entrepreneur faces: risk.
For Ivy Zelman, risk equaled fear of failure. And for her, failure was not an option.
I wanted the good life and had to prove myself to get it, she said of her early days working at Salomon Brothers. I was among a group of 70 hires, and all were from Ivy League schools. I graduated from George Mason University. I felt I had to work so much harder as the kid from GM. Ive always been driven to succeed by the fear of failure.
It was this fear of failure that pushed Zelman through the hypercompetitive Salomon training program, where she endured two years in the financial analyst program, supporting investment bankers by modeling data and providing them with the tools they needed. Fear pushed her to work harder and longer than her co-workers, earning her the right to join the firms transportation group. When the Treasury bidding scandal of 1991 erupted and staff left the firm in droves, she stayed on, providing research on homebuilders and housing.
I was working 100-hour weeks, building the bridges and swimming in the deep end of the pool, Zelman said. I was proving every day that I was as good as any Ivy League graduate.
For some, the kite just cant fly high enough.
So in Zelmans case, she just kept flying. She left Salomon in 1998 and joined Credit Suisse, where she worked for the next 10 years. There she built up its equity research and housing platform, doing forward-looking proprietary research and developing her reputation as an out of the box thinker. But the work did not equal the reward, Zelman said, for her or for her team. Hence, she left and opened her own firm.
They were great to me, she said of Credit Suisse. I was so well respected, but was at the point where I just wanted more. It was time to remove my franchise and make it a stand-alone.
