Reviews
Bobbi Carrey — Renaissance Woman
By Sherri Schwaninger
Spring, 2004
Simmons women can do it all — and some actually do! One who has is Bobbi Carrey ’84. Carrey came to the SOM after earning a bachelor’s degree in romance languages at Tufts and a master’s degree in visual studies at Harvard. She had already established herself as a successful photographer, entrepreneur, and university professor when she began the Simmons MBA program.
Carrey received her MBA in 1984, was her class valedictorian and won the Beekius Award for highest academic achievement. After Simmons, she spent several years at Bank of Boston (BKB) as a commercial lender and then ten years with Fidelity Investments where she was a senior vice president responsible for evaluating venture capital investments, launching new businesses, and planning and implementing Fidelity’s first ethnic Marketing initiative. Now she is a professional cabaret singer and founder of nowandthen Productions.
How did the SOM impact the course of your career?
I surprised myself mightily in that I loved finance (nothing in my background prepared me for this phenomenon). I became a lender at BKB in the communications group (cable TV, radio, films, cellular) and loved what I did. We were often the lead bank in very large deals and so it meant that the BKB loan officer was like the producer of a show, coordinating the company, banks, lawyers, etc. heading towards a closing. But eventually, I needed to be in a more entrepreneurial setting. I moved from the debt side to the equity side by leaving BKB and joining Fidelity.
And after a hugely successful career spanning almost 15 years at BKB and Fidelity, you decided to change careers again and focus on singing. Did you wake up one day and decide to leave corporate America and embark on a music career?
I’ve always sung; but I grew in a nice middle class family where education was the number one priority. Singing was something you did in your spare time. So that’s what I did. When I graduated college, I kind of wandered in through the back door to a career in photography and the arts. Then business school. Then Corporate America. Then life as a single mom and not surprisingly the music stayed as just an avocation.
Like a lot of things in my life, the career change evolved from the confluence of key events. I’d had a great run at Fidelity; fabulous jobs at a fabulous company. But there was a changing of the guard and my boss and mentor was reassigned and it just seemed like the right time to go. I had a few transition jobs after that, but within a few years I knew that if I didn’t pursue the music professionally that it would be one of the few things I would regret. I don’t mean to make it sound like the choice was easy or that the transition was easy. It wasn’t. But it had deep passion going for it.
Now you sing professionally, and are also building a business enterprise around your singing career, including teaching courses and consulting.
I confess I’m one of those people that has to have both my “right brain and left brain” functions in action. Throughout my life it’s often been a dilemma on how to keep both my creative and cerebral sides in balance. I began my new music career as a performer, but it wasn’t long before I was also producing CD’s, teaching courses like “Business Boot Camp for Musicians,” and working with organizations to create customized shows for special events. Bobbi Carrey soon evolved into nowandthen Productions.
What are your next goals? No matter what I’m doing, I tend to be very goal-oriented. I love having a vision and then doing the nitty-gritty work to make it happen. My first goal was to gain credibility as a singer and make a CD, and I successfully released “Between the Wars: Music from 1918-1941” last year. This year, one of my goals was to perform at Scullers Jazz Club, and I managed to do that this past February. Now I’m trying to grow my company, nowandthen Productions, in ways that take advantage of my business background and contacts. I’ve been having a lot of success with creating customized performances and CDs for special events for both profit and non-profit organizations - fundraising benefits, conferences, corporate retreats and annual meetings. Given my background, it just makes sense. And I’m working on a new cabaret show called Business Blues, which might turn out to be a musical version of this article.
A core set of skills and values has consistently brought success in each of Bobbi’s career reincarnations: confidence, integrating past experience into new ventures, and networking. Her February show at Scullers received rave reviews from Boston Herald critic Aiden Fitzgerald, who said the show “transported listeners into a daydream, blurring the lines between romance, wit and melancholy.”
To learn more about Bobbi Carrey and nowandthen Productions, go to www.bobbicarrey.com.