Voice of Experience: Sandra Urie, President and CEO of Cambridge Associates

By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

“Figure out what you really like to do. Don’t do things because other people expect you to do them. If finance is your passion, then absolutely jump in fully. (Go ahead and get that CFA and MBA because they give you true credibility from the start.) But it is most important to do what you love,” advised Sandra Urie, the President and CEO of Cambridge Associates.

For her part, Urie said, “I love mission-driven, non-profit institutions. These institutions don’t exist to make money; they exist to achieve a mission, but they need money to do it. I strive to help these organizations have greater financial stability so they can focus on advancing their missions. I think there is a great psychic reward to doing that.”

Growing Up Feminist

Urie was born and raised in Massachusetts, where, she says, she “grew up in the company of women as one of four sisters.” She explained, “My parents were the first feminists I knew. They really inspired us to understand that the only limitations we had were the ones we put on ourselves and that we shouldn’t allow the world to tell us what we could be or do. In the 1950s, not many parents were communicating that message. My three sisters and I grew up thinking the world was our oyster.”

Urie attended high school at Abbot Academy, an all-female boarding school (now merged with Philips Academy) in Andover. “I left home at the age of 13 to go to school. It was an unusual choice for parents to make, but it highlighted their belief that providing us the best education possible was worth the sacrifice they had to make. And it was very liberating to be in an environment where being smart, working hard and really having an intellectual life was truly valued. That reinforced the values that my sisters and I learned from Mom and Dad.”

Upon graduation, she decided to head out west to study, choosing Stanford University, much to her parents’ dismay. “In 1970, email and cell phones did not exist. You didn’t talk to your parents every day — you wrote letters. It was a different world. So, for someone from the East Coast, choosing to go out to California was an adventurous move. My parents really viewed it almost as a form of rebellion. I just thought the time had come to branch out.”

Urie — who was, by that time, already fluent in French and Spanish and was learning Russian — decided to further pursue the polyglot path at Stanford. “I really liked getting to the point where I could read literature in the original language rather than in translation. At that time, I was most interested in Russian literature. I thought I might become a translator so I earned a translator certificate while earning my undergraduate degree. At the time I thought about teaching or government work in something like the Foreign Service. But in my senior year, I learned that Andover had a teaching fellowship program through which they recruited and hired teachers for a one-year appointment. I decided to try out teaching and applied for a fellowship at Andover.”

Since Andover did not need another dedicated Russian teacher (they already had five), Urie joined the school in a combined role: Russian teacher and Admissions Officer. She ultimately moved fulltime into the administrative side of the school, working in development. “It was a lucky decision—I ended up spending nine years there, with positions of increasing responsibility until by the end of my time at Andover I was managing the school’s annual giving and alumni affairs program at 29 years old. It was a big job. And it was clear that I had successfully migrated over to the administrative side of running a non-profit institution.”

During her time working at Andover, she married and had a daughter. Then, just a few months after her daughter was born, she separated from her husband. “I suddenly found myself as a single mom with a newborn. It was somewhat destabilizing,” she added facetiously.

Entering the Workforce as a Young Mom

She realized she needed to do whatever she could to fix “real gaps in [her] education” and enrolled in the MBA program at the Yale School of Management. “Yale’s approach was to merge non-profit, public, and private sector management education into an integrated program – lessons to be learned across three. I only applied to Yale because it was the best fit with my background and the way in which I thought about management; I was fortunate enough to get in.” So, in 1983, with her 13-month old daughter in tow, she left Andover and moved into the cinder-block-walled, tiled-floored student family housing complex in New Haven. “We needed the cheapest place possible. But [despite the tougher conditions], we really had two great years there.”

In the summer between her first and second year of business school, she did an internship in corporate finance at First Boston in New York City. “For me, that was as far away from the non-profit/education world as you could get. And I realized I loved capital markets and investments, but I always felt that I was doing just enough to get the deal done, which didn’t satisfy my need for more comprehensive research. That led me to think more about consulting because, in consulting, you really do have an opportunity to gain mastery of a broad range of topics.”

In anticipation of a post-graduation position, she interviewed with several finance and consulting firms, but kept her daughter out of the discussions. She explained, “At that time, as more women were entering the financial field, you kept your private life private. So I didn’t tell people when I was interviewing that I was a single mother because I didn’t want them to make their own judgments about whether or not I could handle the job based on my personal situation as opposed to my professional skills. My mission was to learn as much as I could about each position and then to make sure to communicate that I could meet the demands of the job.”

During the process, she recalled her days at Andover, when she was part of a financial planning team for the school that retained and worked with a small consulting firm called Cambridge Associates. She reached out to Jim Bailey, one of the founders of the firm, and asked for a meeting, which landed her an interview and, ultimately, a job. “My classmates looked at me like I was off my rocker when I decided to join this small, very specialized consulting firm, which at the time employed about 40 people. What persuaded me – I was trying to be honest with myself about what mattered to me and about what would get me up each morning with energy and enthusiasm – was it became clear to me that serving the non-profit sector was really important to me.”

Said Urie: “Coming to Cambridge Associates, I saw many similarities between what we do as a firm and what teachers do. It is about communicating complex issues – there are significant communications/teaching moments in consulting which built on the experience I had as a teacher and administrator at Andover. And I have found colleagues at Cambridge as deeply committed and as rigorous in thinking and intellectual pursuits as anybody in academia or on Wall Street— simply because we are applying our skills in service to our non-profit clients does not make our work any less rigorous.”

In 1989, after an extended period of time during which Urie was on the road four days a week, she decided she needed to cut back to spend more time with her daughter. “I was happy to do all that traveling at the time, and I loved what I was doing for my clients, but the travel required to meet the demands of my clients at that time did not allow for a good balance with the needs of my family. I needed to take a break, so I decided to work 80% of the time (with the pay reduction that came with part time), reduced my client load by half, and started to take on responsibilities for the management of the firm.”

Eighteen months later, she was ready to go back full time, and returned to the firm as part of its management team, eventually becoming COO. “I often say that being a part-time, stay-at-home mom was such hard work that I had to get back to a full time position at Cambridge. It was a good time to return to full time employment. I had a formalized role on the management team, and my daughter and I were in a place where it was no longer necessary for me to be at home with her as much.” Urie and her daughter were both happy with the decision, as evidenced by a comment made by her daughter to a group of stay-at-home moms with whom she and Urie were dining: “‘My mother is a great mom, but if she were spending 100% of the time focused on me, I would need therapy. She needs to work and I need her to work. I don’t need all her energy and attention on me.”

Said Urie of her approach to work and life balance, “It’s a marathon more than a sprint so we need to take a long term perspective and train,” said Urie. “Marathoners have to work hard and have to deal with hitting a wall and getting beyond it. I think of what we do and of life in general as a marathon. If you hit an obstacle, you need to pick yourself up, figure out how to get around it — sometimes stop and rest — and then keep on running.”

Working in the Finance Industry

One current challenge, said Urie, is the public’s perception of the finance industry. “I don’t like how much people in the financial industry are being vilified right now. There are plenty of excellent practitioners in the investment world. There are many generous, hardworking, thoughtful people in the financial services professions who are thinking beyond how much is in their paycheck.”

Urie wouldn’t trade working in this industry for anything. “I often repeat what I once heard a speaker say because it is good advice. First, do what you love. Next, be good at it, which you often are because it is what you love. Then, try to figure out ways to make a living out of what you love. And, finally, make a contribution to the world. Those are not bad principles to live by.”

She added, “There is a fair amount of serendipity in the world, so be open to new opportunities. When I was offered the development job at Andover, I took it. I didn’t say that I only wanted to be a Russian teacher. That opened up tons of possibilities for me. So my most important advice is to think broadly about the path you are on, be open to new opportunities as that will likely lead to some good but unexpected places.”