Mark Sutterlin remembers the financial crucible he encountered at the launch of his career.
It was September 2008, and Sutterlin — six months out of the University of Michigan — was answering phones on the trading floor of what was then called the Merrill Financial Advisory Center. Bank of America had just agreed to acquire Merrill Lynch, and the firm’s service-level target of keeping callers on hold for less than two minutes had collapsed overnight.
“The call queues were up to two hours,” recalls Sutterlin. “It was chaos, and as young advisers we didn’t know any different at the time.”
That baptism — 150 advisers ranked monthly against each other, clients calling in panic to ask about retirement accounts as the market cratered, a 22-year-old learning to sound credible to people twice his age — is not the origin story most executives volunteer first. But for Sutterlin, now a senior leader in alternative investments at Merrill and Bank of Amer
