Stacey Barrins on Self-determination

For most of her career, Stacey Barrins hasn’t spent much time thinking about recognition. She has simply focused on the work — helping clients make decisions, mentoring junior colleagues, building a team and moving forward to whatever the next challenge might be. So when she learned she had been named a Morgan Stanley Maker in the Lifetime Achievement category, the recognition landed in a surprisingly reflective way.

“It’s kind of this reminder,” Barrins says, “that all the years of work and things you’ve done actually mean something.”

For Barrins, the meaning of her career has never been about accolades. It has always been about people: the mentors who helped her early on, the colleagues she now guides in return and the clients whose trust she works to earn every day. Long before finance, those instincts began forming in a very different setting — her parents’ restaurant in a small town in Wisconsin.

Barrins grew up surrounded by the rhythms of that family business. Her parents owned a restaurant and microbrewery and, from an early age, she watched how they interacted with customers and employees, how they handled busy nights or unexpected problems and the kind of attention they paid to the people walking through the door. At the time, she didn’t think of it as leadership training. But looking back, it was exactly that.

As a child she was shy — so shy that her parents jokingly called her “the cling-on” because she would cling to their legs when they tried to leave the house. Working in the restaurant gradually changed that. Being around customers forced her to talk to people, read situations and notice the small signals that reveal what someone might need. Her mother, she remembers, was particularly good at that.

“She could walk into a room and immediately know what someone needed,” Barrins says.

That idea — that leadership starts with understanding people — became foundational to the way Barrins approaches her own work. Wealth management, she often explains, is not so different from hospitality. People arrive carrying concerns, hopes or anxieties about their future. The job is not just technical expertise. It’s understanding the person sitting across from you.

One childhood memory illustrates the resilience that shaped her family’s outlook. When Barrins was young, a competitor burned down their restaurant. The building was still smoldering the next morning when her father noticed Barrins’s mother standing outside speaking with a group of people. She was pointing toward the building and gesturing animatedly. A few minutes later, she walked over holding a piece of paper. She had just booked the first banquet for when the restaurant would reopen.

Barrins laughs as she retells the story, but the lesson behind it has stayed with her. Her father later described that mindset as “long-term, non-specific optimism.” It meant believing that —even when something went wrong, sometimes spectacularly wrong — there was always another opportunity ahead.

Barrins didn’t originally plan to work in finance. For years, she assumed she would eventually return home and take over the restaurant. But her father encouraged her to try something new. You already know how to run our business, he told her. Go study something different.

She chose accounting. It wasn’t a passion, but she liked the challenge. After graduating, she joined Arthur Andersen in Chicago, working in the firm’s private client group. When the firm collapsed in the early 2000s, Barrins faced a moment of uncertainty. She briefly explored returning to the restaurant world, even working for a large catering company in Washington, D.C. But she ultimately realized that, while hospitality had shaped her outlook, finance offered a different kind of opportunity.

She joined Smith Barney, which would later become part of Morgan Stanley, and began building a business from scratch. 

The early days were humbling. Barrins was 26 years old, newly credentialed as a CPA, but largely unknown to potential clients. The only way to build a practice was to start dialing. Sitting in a bullpen surrounded by other advisors — mostly men in those days — she spent day after day making cold calls, sometimes close to two hundred in a single day.

“It was embarrassing,” she remembers. “You’d hang up the phone and everyone heard you stumble through the pitch.”

But then she realized all that mattered was she was the one trying. So, she kept dialing. Eventually, one call led to her first client, a young advertising executive who agreed to meet in a Chicago hotel lobby. The account was small at first, but it grew. The client later referred her mother who, decades later, remains part of Barrins’s practice.

Barrins still keeps the call sheets from those early days in her office alongside an index card with a mission statement she wrote when she was 26. They serve as reminders of how her career began and how persistence slowly compounds into something larger.

“If I ever lose perspective,” she says with a smile, “I can look at those and remember what it took.”

Today Barrins leads a successful advisory team at Morgan Stanley — an all-female group she helped build. Much of her role now focuses less on individual tasks and more on designing the structure of the business itself, maintaining relationships with clients, identifying new opportunities and making sure the right people are in the right roles.

What motivates her most, however, is mentorship. Barrins regularly meets with junior colleagues to talk through career decisions, challenges and ambitions. The advice she returns to again and again is simple: If you reach a position of leadership, you have a responsibility to help others rise as well.

“I always say when you get to the top, you have to send the elevator back down and bring someone else up,” she says.

That philosophy is especially meaningful to Barrins because early in her own career she was often told certain things might not be possible — particularly balancing the demands of finance with raising a family. Rather than accepting those limits, she decided to design her life differently.

Today, she balances leadership at work with raising three children at home. The idea of “work-life balance,” she says, is often misunderstood.

“It’s not work-life balance,” she explains. “It’s all just life — it’s how you choose to spend your time.”

Looking ahead, Barrins is less focused on personal milestones and more on the future of the team she has helped build. Her goal is to mentor the next generation so the business can continue thriving long after she eventually steps back. Too many advisory practices, she believes, are built around one person. When that person leaves, the structure collapses.

Barrins wants something different. For her, the real measure of success will be the moment when the people she has mentored take the reins and carry the work forward themselves. The recognition she received as a Morgan Stanley MAKER, she says, feels less like the finish line of a career and more like a checkpoint along the way.

The work continues. And, as she learned long ago watching her parents rebuild a restaurant from ashes, there is always another opportunity ahead.