Corinne McNally spent most of her professional life in corporate finance and management, largely in the telecommunications industry. But, when the business experienced a severe downturn in the early 2000’s, she decided to become a Financial Advisor at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. Now, she’s a successful Investment Management Consultant in the Cincinnati area, thanks in part to her focus on helping clients going through a divorce and some savvy marketing innovations.

McNally started out working in the trust department of a bank soon after getting married. She took off ten years or so to raise two sons, worked part-time in a variety of jobs, earned her BA and MBA, then went back to full-time employment in 1988 after going through a divorce. She worked as a technology industry analyst, then became a senior manager of business and finance at a major telecommunications company, where she was in charge of a unit doing $150 million in business.

But, around 2000, the industry entered a downward spiral, made worse after the September 11th attacks. McNally decided it was time for a change. In 2002, she entered a training program for Financial Advisors at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Cincinnati. “It was a great ground floor for me to enter,” she says. “And it gave me the chance to help people with all they were going through at that time.” To build her book of business, she drew on connections from her previous jobs, including colleagues who had lost their positions. “There were a lot of people in the tech world who were going through a lot of changes and needed help with rollovers and pensions,” she says. Three years later, she moved to an office in Northern Kentucky, still in the company’s Cincinnati complex, and formed a team with a female colleague.

A New Focus

Then, about five years ago, a client went through a complicated divorce. It was an eye-opener. McNally worked with the woman’s attorney in order to divide up the assets and, although she had gone through a divorce herself, saw clearly for the first time the need for a finance expert to be involved in the process of drawing up the final agreement. That meant a financial middle person: a professional who could help both the attorney and client, particularly in the areas of dividing up assets, making financial projections, and retirement planning. “Attorneys practice law, they don’t necessarily focus on the financial aspects of divorce,” she says. “They don’t think about how decisions being made today will impact clients’ financial lives later on.” she says. She also earned a designation of Certified Divorce Financial Analyst.

In addition, she became more involved in “collaborative” divorce, a process through which a group of experts in law, finance, psychology and other areas work with the divorcing couple to create a mutually agreed upon solution, without resorting to litigation. She’s on the Board of the Academy of Northern Kentucky Collaborative Professionals and is also a member of the Northern Kentucky Bar Association.

Divorce-related work now accounts for about one-third of her business, with referrals largely coming from attorneys, mediators, therapists and local religious organizations. But McNally also gets referrals from her team’s client advisory board, which she formed with her partner about a year ago. It meets four times a year to discuss such issues as how to improve service and marketing and how to best position their team for opportunities in the Northern Kentucky area. At one meeting, McNally learned that some of her clients didn’t realize she did extensive financial planning. Thanks to that intelligence, she decided to step up marketing those services. Recently, she and her colleague ran a seminar on social security and retirement planning, and are planning to give a long term care seminar in May. To date they have acquired over a dozen high net worth clients as direct referrals from these marketing efforts.

For McNally, her profession is an ideal one for women. “We’ve all done the juggling act—working and paying the bills and raising our kids. We understand what it’s like,” she says. “And we have the ability to reach out to people, to listen. We’re good at that.”

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