35 Under 35: Laura Bissell, Managing Director, Okapi Partners

By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

“You have to set goals—even if they are little goals—to achieve something. Every day set a goal,” said Laura Bissell, Managing Director of Okapi Partners. She spent her childhood watching her mother, a well-known interior designer in Boston, do just that, growing her fledgling business into a booming one. “My mother started it out of her home and built it into a thriving company. It took her a lot of hard work and blood, sweat and tears but she knew what she wanted and worked for what she wanted. That is where a lot of my ambition comes from.”

Bissell started her career with Globix, an internet service provider, in the “heyday of the technology sector.” There she underwent four months of intensive training in many different technologies, a background she would have the opportunity to use later in her career.

When it was time to move on, she “fell into” the little-known industry in which she would ultimately make her name: the proxy solicitation industry. “I wanted to be in the financial realm because I’ve always been mathematically-minded. I was networking through people I knew from both Colgate University and [her high school] Andover and found Georgeson Shareholder, a well-known name in the proxy solicitation business. I started there from the bottom up,first working as a project manger in the mutual funds area doing the day-to-day grunt work of proxy solicitation business, like talking to the vendors and really just doing the math.”

Building a Reputation

From there, she rose quickly through the company ranks. A self-professed “perfectionist as far as numbers go,” she became an account executive working with clients formulating strategy campaigns for their projects. “I loved that piece…I have a propensity for the mathematic and economic components of the job, [but] I also really enjoy customer service and client relations.”

Management took notice as well, promoting her to VP within 5 years. “It is a fairly small industry and team. Fairly quickly, I built a reputation among clients as someone who would take their priorities very seriously and make sure they would have what they needed before anything else.

She also helped to build the tech platform at Georgeson. “A lot of reports that I wanted when building client strategy weren’t available, so I worked closely with the tech team to build the applications that would give me what I wanted.”

Bissell then decided to try her hand at client relations with Sungard Data Management Systems, where she worked with some of the top banks and brokers on the investment management side. But she missed the strategy involved in proxy solicitations. So, when Bruce Goldfarb, current CEO of Okapi Partners and former head of M&A and General Counsel at Georgeson, called her early in the summer of 2008, to tell her that his new proxy solicitation company, Okapi, wanted her to head up its growing mutual fund practice, she jumped at the chance to join them.

Bissell has now been with Okapi for about 1 ½ years. In that time, she has leveraged her tech background and vast network in the investment management space to grow the practice. Leveraging her tech savvy, Laura has focused on using new communication methods in innovative ways to help overcome individual shareholder apathy. “While many of the people who’ve been in the proxy solicitation industry for a long time are using the old ways to reach out,” said Bissell, “we at Okapi have also begun looking at how to use the new technologies to change the proxy industry and to get the attention of shareholders.” That includes using social networking and marketing utilities like YouTube and Twitter to reach younger shareholders. As she did with Georgeson, she’s also helped Okapi make its platform more robust, working with IT to create a better client interface and better systems for recording and monitoring.

Working in a Niche Industry

Yet, despite all the activity, it is an industry of which few are really aware. “My mother still doesn’t exactly know what I do,” laughed Bissell. “[Before finding the job with Georgeson,] I had no idea that this industry existed.” She added, “The industry is small – everybody knows everybody, which is good and bad. But I like that it is a niche industry. We are kind of like lobbyists. I really like that people don’t completely know what we do.”

She also particularly enjoys the “thrill of the win” in the proxy fight. “As a project based business, you see results—whether you won or lost— in a pretty quick time frame,” said Bissell.

Bissell said that although there are only a few women in the industry, she doesn’t see any barriers to the advancement of women. “I’ve been able to break through by hard work and being really being detail oriented. And those two qualities are always rewarded.”

She added, “I’m not great at tooting my own horn, but it is essential to do: if you want something, you have to make it happen. When you first start out, you expect people to just recognize the work you put in and your achievement. But you have to make sure people around you know what you are doing and make things happen for yourself. That is something I think you learn over many years.”

Advice for Young Women

She advised young women to “pay attention to and keep in touch with your peers from school. That is one of the biggest things people in school don’t pay attention to although it is what is going to build your professional network later in life.” That includes making contacts in the volunteer realm. Bissell’s “second job” for the last six years has been volunteering with New York Junior League. She currently heads up the League’s New York yearly Golden Tree Event, a holiday shopping event which last year raised nearly $250,000 for the Junior League’s community projects.

Still, she said, “Okapi has been the place where all of my strengths have been put to use. I’m able to grow every single day and think outside of the box.” Bissell continued, “Coming on here as a Managing Director and heading up a department to start something new and getting our name out in the industry during this rough economic time has been my greatest professional achievement. And now that the economic world has settled down a little bit, it will be great to see the business grow based on all the work we’ve put in over the past year.”