Wall Street’s woes and the deepening recession last fall hit small investment advisory businesses hard and offered new challenges to financial services companies such as hers, says Trish Cox (MKTG ’90, MBA ’93), chief operating officer for Schwab Advisor Services, a division of Charles Schwab & Co.

Coping with new demands

Cox, who oversees the development and delivery of custodial, operational, and trading support services to some 6,000 independent, fee-based investment advisor firms, says her clients felt like they were under “a bit of a tidal wave…they were under pressure like they’d never seen before.”

After the “phenomenal growth” in demand for their services of the past decade, these advisory firms now had to contend with greater anxiety and demands from their own clients—individual and institutional investors, whose assets the advisors manage. Instead of their usual quarterly meetings with clients, advisors found that they needed to issue weekly newsletters and conduct frequent conference calls with their clients. The firms also had “to make tough decisions around their own businesses and staff that they haven’t had to make before,” as their revenues plummeted in tandem with sharply lower returns from client investments.

“We custody more than $500 billion for these advisors,” Cox says, referring to the assets in the nearly 2 million end-client accounts that Schwab holds, trades, and acts as record keeper for, on behalf of advisory firms. “Traditionally our portfolio runs 8-9 percent in cash.” But, during the six-month period from October 2008 to March 2009, with nervous investors abandoning the stock market, it was more like 17-20 percent—“just massive amounts of cash sitting on the sidelines.”

The recession and the uncertainty surrounding proposed financial industry reforms, she says, have posed new challenges: “we’re trying to understand the changing landscape, what the implications are, and how we can best help our clients navigate them.”

Building a career with Schwab

Cox has served in each one of Schwab’s “client-facing enterprises”—individual investor, advisor, and corporate and retirement services. Joining the company at its Charlotte, N.C., retirement services business in 2000, she led a subsidiary that provides retirement plan recordkeeping and other services to clients that include consulting firms, banks, mutual funds, and insurance companies.

In 2002, she moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she rose to become vice president and chief operating officer for Schwab Retirement Plan Services. She left four years later for Denver, Colo., where she led the client service and support team for investor services, which provides call center and operational support for individual investors. She currently oversees about 1,000 staff members working in five areas in Schwab Advisor Services. Except for sales, she has responsibility “for almost everything day-to-day that we do with the advisors—service, trading, product management, and technology platforms.”

A flourishing career in finance at one of the nation’s leading companies in financial services was probably not what Cox envisaged as a newly minted marketing graduate from Virginia Tech. Active in many campus organizations, including Student Alumni Associates and the Student Government Association (of which she was vice president), Cox had “a really great time” as an undergraduate. “Class was not my biggest focus.”

Even the “D” she received in her sole finance course had thrilled her—the professor (John Pinkerton) “was tough,” she said, but she had at least passed the course and would not need to retake it. While working at American Management Systems in Fairfax, Va., however, Cox came to regret the grade sufficiently to seek redemption—by choosing a finance concentration when she returned to Pamplin for her MBA. “It was one of those things I needed to nail.” (She earned an A in her first MBA finance course and did well in her other finance courses.)

Finding a mentor

A native of Annandale, Va., Cox was fairly content with her job in Northern Virginia when she met Schwab executive Walter Bettinger while both were attending Harvard Business School’s general management program. Bettinger, who at the time had joined Schwab only five years before, after it acquired his company, recruited Cox to Schwab. Now Schwab’s president and CEO, he has been a long-time mentor for Cox. “He has challenged me at different points of my career to do more than I thought I would be able to do,” she says. “That’s a wonderful trait in a leader.”

Having champions—“people who will give it to you straight and help you brainstorm and give you advice”—is important for career development, says Cox, who is in turn mentoring others. But cultivating advocates is just part of the bigger process of building relationships, which is the real key to success, she says. “It’s not just about picking one mentor and having your cart hooked up to that wagon.” Her own ability to forge relationships, whether with other executives, staff members, or clients, may be the skill that has served her best, she says.

That skill and a sense of being part of a community were developed during her student years. “Virginia Tech has a wonderful community, one I still feel affinity for, even though I live all the way across the country,” says Cox, who returned to campus last spring to speak to an MBA class taught by finance professor John Pinkerton.

On the road every week

Her job comes with a daunting travel schedule, sending her to San Francisco, where Schwab is headquartered, twice a month and to Phoenix and Orlando frequently. “We have clients all over the country, and I’m on the road every week.” Denver, she notes, is a “very easy place to travel from—my time zone changes are never too big, and my flights are pretty short.”

She particularly enjoys spending time with clients and considers herself “incredibly fortunate” to work at a company that she says places so much emphasis on customer service. “It sounds a little trite, but we spend a lot of time in our executive meetings talking about what’s the right thing for the client. Each one of us feels a responsibility to the client, we don’t think it’s somebody else’s issue to deal with.”

Pointing out that Chuck Schwab founded his company more than 30 years ago “to democratize investment,” Cox says its mission and purpose is still to “help individuals become financially fit. Every product and service we launch is all about how we help the common person be better able to save and invest.” The company’s approachability, she says, is reflected in its distinctive and “highly successful” advertising campaigns, “Talk to Chuck” and “Do something about it.”

With a 25 percent share, Schwab Institutional is the current market leader, Cox says, “but we can’t rest on our laurels, we have to continue to differentiate ourselves.” Her clients are small businesses in a highly regulated and complicated industry, so service is “not just about how much we answer their questions, but about giving them best practices and other tools to help them run their business.”

It’s this dedication to customer service, she contends, that distinguishes Schwab in the business. “I feel like I’m a salesperson or evangelist every single day about what we do. It’s a special place.”