Signal Seeker

Robbins knows a thing or two about owning a business; he’s formed and sold at least four.

Born in the Bronx, New York, reared in Stamford, Conn., he was playing trumpet professionally in the 10th grade and had a musician union’s card.
He intended to pursue a music career but at 17 was persuaded to first get a college education. Graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, he joined, not a band, but General Electric’s electronic warfare department. This being the Cold War era, his job was developing noise jammers that pulled signals from enemy noise jammers.

While working on his master’s thesis at Cornell University, he saw a newspaper ad placed by a small company already producing the jamming technique he was inventing. And he hopped right onboard Sanders Associates. Eleven years later, he started his own electronics company, LRC, which he sold after five years, in 1976.

In a different twist — but foreshadowing his eventual move to brokerage — Robbins then went into business with a German nobleman as commodity trading advisors. Launching Von Haller and Robbins, he programmed computers for trading and developed software. “In the ‘70s, we had two big signals: gold was going up; interest rates were going up,” he recalls. Meantime, Von Haller taught Robbins “an awful lot about how to cold call and working with wealthy people.”

In 1981, he sold his interest in that firm and started another, New England Microwave, which six years later merged with public company Micronetics.  Afterward, Robbins opened another microwave engineering enterprise, ECM Devices, but soon sold it.

He was ready to retire — and did, for about a second. His heart was set on sailing around the world, but he scrubbed that notion when, out boating one day, he ran into a storm.

Enter: Von Haller (once more). He suggested that Robbins become a stockbroker.  Whereupon the versatile Robbins joined Shearson, MSSB predecessor, though, he says, he wasn’t serious and figured he’d stick with the business only briefly.

“But I’m a competitive person and was pretty good at picking stocks; so I made money for my clients. I built up a clientele quickly,” he says. Apart from that, the career shift turned out to be life-changing.

“As an engineer, you think of people almost as tools [to an end]. When I got into this business, all of a sudden people and relationships became very important,” he says. “For the first time in my life, I felt that I was doing something useful for people. It’s very satisfying to help someone when they have problems.”

Throughout his unpredictable journey, Robbins has never given up music. At one point, he was even head of the New Hampshire Philharmonic and today plays trumpet regularly with The Nottingham Brass Quintet, a band he co-founded.

“When you put on a concert,” he says, “you [pump] a lot of adrenalin. So by the time you get to the office, you’re used to working in a stressful environment.”

But meticulous preparation is the big secret to the process-driven Robbins’ success. “I’ve had ups and downs. But when you’re prepared — sometimes for the worst — confident and have faith, you don’t worry. If there’s a problem, you solve it and go on to the next step.”