- Being a female founder in the financial services industry
is actually everything to me.
I feel like it's been an industry that's needed change
for a long time, and I love that I get to be a new voice
in a very old, antiquated industry.
I am Shannon McLay, founder and CEO of the Financial Gym,
a physical place where you can go to kick your assets
into shape, and your bad money habits to the curb.
I grew up in a small town on Long Island, in New York.
It was a blue-collar neighborhood.
I actually grew up in a HUD house.
I didn't know it was a HUD house growing up,
but my parents couldn't afford a home.
I loved growing up in that community.
When I was 14 years old, I got my first job.
I wanted to make real money, I wanted to work with adults,
not children, so when I was 14 years old, I was with my mom
and we walked into this bagel store,
and they had a help wanted sign in the window.
I worked the weekends and in the summer times,
I worked 6:00 am to 2:00 pm,
and I did that job until college.
I have always been a type A, overachiever, always.
I loved getting good grades in school.
I loved being the teacher's pet.
I enjoyed college like most college kids,
although unlike most college kids, I also worked a lot.
I started working at Best Buy as a cashier,
and I did that for the last two years of college,
and I remember I was working on my resume
'cause I was at the process of applying for jobs.
I wanted an investment banking job,
and when I was talking to the career counselors,
they were asking what else I did,
and I said I work at Best Buy, but I'm just a cashier,
it's no big deal.
And they said, well how often are you working at Best Buy?
And I said, I don't know, between, depends on the week,
between 35 and 40 hours a week.
He said, wait, you work 35 to 40 hours a week,
essentially a full-time job, and you have a 3.6 GPA
in the business school, you need to put that on your resume.
And I had interviews with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley,
Merrill Lynch, all the big investment banks.
Every single person asked me about that Best Buy experience.
I had six job offers before Thanksgiving of my senior year,
and I took an offer with Bank of America
to work on the trading floor, after college.
I was 22 years old when I started working
on the trading floor at Bank of America,
and I loved it.
I found it very exciting, I found it very challenging,
there were 265 people on the trading floor,
and only 15 of us were women.
I liked to joke that my favorite women's bathroom location
is on a trading floor, never a line,
it is like a ghost town in there.
So, I cried a few times in that bathroom.
When I first started working on the trading floor,
one of the other, the seniors managers,
told my boss, thanks for decorating the trading floor,
meaning that I was something to look at while I was there.
There was a happy hour where I was called a bitch
because I was doing better than my male counterpart.
So, there are plenty of stories, and I pushed through them
because there are also really so many exciting things
that happened in my career.
I was given a number of opportunities.
I worked on trading floors
for the next 10 years of my career.
So, at 33, I became a financial advisor,
and to work with me at Merrill Lynch,
you had to have $250,000 in assets.
I ended up, in that period of time,
becoming the worst financial advisor ever,
because I was building this business of pro bono clients,
that I loved.
I loved the people with no money,
and I was working and less enthralled
with my high net worth clients.
And I was doing that on the side,
and I literally was doing that for a period of time
until I came to an a-ha week of my life.
I had a meeting with a woman, a pro bono client,
and I did a financial plan for her, these secret plans,
and at the end of the meeting, she stopped,
she looked me in the eye, and she said,
you know you're saving my life, right?
And it was, the a-ha happened.
It was this, everything came to me at once.
I said I need to build a business for people like this.
So, for the next two years of my life,
I left Merrill Lynch to start building this,
and those were some really dark years.
I left this six-figure career to help people with no money.
The 401k was wiped out, no personal savings,
I literally had nothing,
it was a very low moment in my life.
When we first raised money for the Financial Gym,
we had 126 clients and our revenue was about $72,000,
and as of last month, we have over 2,000 clients
and our revenue is $1.8 million.
People ask me all the time, what is the Financial Gym,
what does it look like, what are you doing there,
are you on treadmills, barbells,
is it pure bar, what is it?
And I always tell people, our workout equipment
is wine and kleenex.
We go through a lot of it here.
We want our clients to feel comfortable.
We know that they're sharing
their financial dirty laundry with us all the time,
and it's highly emotional.
Seventy percent of Americans
are living paycheck to paycheck, so they are not alone,
and that's what we see, and we want to create this space
where people can come, bring their dogs, bring their kids,
bring their friends, however they wanna come,
and just work on their financial challenges.