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During difficult economic times such as these, people must return to the financial fundamentals, said Stephanie Neely, ’89, treasurer for the city of Chicago. “We need to stop immediate gratification and we must live within our means,” Neely said during a keynote address at the annual fall conference of Chicago Women in Business at the Drake Hotel on October 17.
Current students should not panic about their job outlook, she said. “When I was a first-year MBA student, the market crashed on Oct. 19, 1987,” Neely said. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m never going to get a job.’ But remember, as the mayor said to me after his budget address, ‘We will get through this.’”
Neely got her current job as treasurer in an unusual twist of fate in which, as she puts it, “I was minding my own business” as vice president for institutional sales for Northern Trust Global Investments. In October 2006 Mayor Richard Daley’s Office asked Neely, a political outsider, to visit the office as soon as possible without providing any details.
After Neely failed to persuade a security guard to let her into City Hall on a Saturday, Daley himself arrived and escorted her to his office, where he casually invited Neely to run for city treasurer on Daley’s ticket in the February 2007 city election. “I looked behind me because I thought I was on a hidden camera show,” she said. “Then he went through this whole story about how there had never been an MBA as city treasurer. Can you imagine that? Managing a $7 billion portfolio without an MBA?”
Neely’s three primary responsibilities as treasurer are to keep the city’s money safe, provide liquidity for daily city expenses, and to earn interest on her investments of the funds, she said. “The mayor and aldermen approve projects, but they don’t have any money,” Neely said. “They approach me with the vouchers they approve and I transfer money to the comptroller, who writes the checks.”
The mayor appoints the city’s chief financial officer, budget director, and comptroller, Neely said. “But I am elected by the citizens of Chicago to protect the money, so no one person controls every process of the cash-flow system,” she said.
Among Neely’s “passions” in her position is making sure small businesses have access to affordable capital, she said. Her office offers such access through two programs, including loans through revenue generated by leasing the Chicago Skyway toll road, Neely said. “In the other program I actually deposit money into different city banks, and those banks are required to loan money back,” she said.
Neely appropriately emphasized the need for businesswomen to support each other as they climb the corporate ladder, said second-year student Stephanie Terifay, co-chair of the student-led Chicago Women in Business. “It’s not about special access or privilege as a woman,” Terifay said. “It’s just about building yet another network of support – friendships and professionals – that we can leverage and make more fulfilling for all of us.”
Phil Rockrohr