(Editor’s Note: This article appeared on the Morgan Stanley Smith Barney Multicultural Financial Advisors Forum on April 18, 2011. Harrison Hoyes graduated from Blindness: Learning In New Dimensions (BLIND), Inc. in 2009 and is now part of a financial advising team that manages over $5 billion in assets.)

Harrison C. Hoyes is a Registered Marketing Associate with the Rasweiler Group in Morristown, New Jersey. Previously, he was a Financial Advisor with AXA Equitable.

Harrison, whose parents are Jamaican and Jamaican-Chinese, was born in the U.S. and raised in Singapore. Just as significant, however, is the fact that he is legally blind. Yet as he explains, this is something that has never really held him back.

I understand you have an interesting cultural background.

I’m Jamaican-Chinese. My mother's grandparents moved to Jamaica from China. My father is also Jamaican, although he was born in New York. I was born in New Jersey, but when I was six months old, my parents moved to Texas. Then my father, who was working at Citibank, was reassigned to Singapore, so I grew up there until I came back to the States to attend Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Tell me about your visual impairment.

When I was about 15, I was diagnosed with a degenerative disease, retinitis pigmentosa. At the time, it didn't really have a significant impact on my life, but I'm losing more vision every year. I was able to get through college without help, but it was a struggle — I couldn’t see the board very well. I wish now that I had been more open about it with my professors, but as a 19-year-old it wasn’t something that I wanted to share.

As a result, I can’t drive, but it was never really a problem until I finished college.

What happened then?

I went to work as a Financial Advisor for the retirement planning group of AXA Equitable, working with public school employees. At first my region was Lancaster City, so I could get around taking public transportation. But then my region expanded, to Harrisburg, Lebanon County, and Philadelphia, and I was not able to get to all those locations easily. When we worked in teams, the other person would drive. But it wasn’t something that was going to work long-term.

Were you having other problems, too?

I wasn’t carrying a cane, and there was no indication that I was visually impaired. But seeing the computer screen was becoming more difficult, and I found myself having the client fill out all the paperwork. I would explain the whole retirement plan and the different investments, but then people would ask me questions about the application and paperwork, often pointing to something that I couldn't see, and I would stumble. Or someone would show me something on the computer and I'd have to pretend I could see it. It was becoming very uncomfortable.

Did you tell your employers about the situation?

Initially no. But once my region changed, I took a leave of absence and went to Blindness: Learning In New Dimensions (BLIND) Inc., a training school for blind and visually impaired people in Minneapolis.

That must have been an emotional decision.

Yes. They were telling me most people typically stay there from nine months to a year. I was in a relationship at the time, and all my extended family was on the East Coast.

Was your condition also a secret in your personal life?

My family knew. But only some of my close friends knew. It was still something I tried to keep to myself.

So tell me about the program.

It was an amazing experience. They do everything with sleep shades on, so you can't see anything. You have to get around the school, get around the city, do everything blindfolded. I knew that's where I'd end up eventually, so I needed to prepare.

How long did you stay there?

About seven months. I was a little more determined than most. Braille is something that many people struggle with, and it takes a lot of practice. But within two weeks I had a very good comprehension of Grade 1 braille — the alphabet and numbers and all the punctuation and symbols. Then a month later, I finished Grade 2 which has a lot of abbreviations — kind of like shorthand — and takes most people four or five months.

We had a wood shop class and an independent living class where we learned how to manage ourselves in the kitchen. We also had a travel instructor who took us around Minneapolis, riding the bus and walking. And we had a technology course where we learned to use the computer, with programs like JAWS, a screen-reading program, and Kurzweil, a scanning software.

It sounds like you pushed through very quickly.

Yes, I wanted to finish that program and get to the next step in my life. And I had never met someone else with my condition until I went to that center. So it was great to meet other people who were making it work.

How did you get this job?

The gentleman who ran our careers course, Dick Davis, put me in touch with Rich Crawford, a successful blind financial advisor who used to work with Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Sioux City. Rich has the same condition I do but his progressed much more rapidly — he lost his vision when he was about eight years old.

Rich asked me to come down to Sioux City to visit him and see how he does his job. He was so kind. It was great to see someone so successful in this line of work, who had been doing it without vision his whole life.

How did he do it?

Like everybody else. When he first started out, like many brokers at the time, he got a phone book and just started calling people. When you’re speaking to someone on the phone, he or she has no idea if you’re sighted or not.

Over time, he started hitchhiking to work. I wouldn’t want to do that in New York City, but Sioux City is friendly and people are generally nice to blind people. So the drivers he was catching a ride with, he'd give them tips or tell them what was happening in the market, and they'd become his clients. I think he still does that to this day.

Wow, that’s a new marketing technique!

Yes, he is truly amazing. We got along very well. So at the end of the visit he says to me, “I know this guy in Morristown, New Jersey who is looking to hire a blind or visually impaired person.” And he introduced me to John Rasweiler, who's now the person I work for. My grandfather lives three train stops away from John's office in Morristown, New Jersey, so when I finished my program, I moved in with my grandfather and went for the interview, and in May 2009, John hired me.

It was pretty amazing that I started out in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, went to a training program in Minneapolis, and got introduced to a guy in Sioux City, who knew a guy who wanted to hire someone just down the road from where I was going to live.

Why was he looking for someone who was visually impaired?

He's involved with The Seeing Eye, a guide dog school here in Morristown. He knows that blind and visually impaired people are discriminated against, and he is adamant about equal opportunity.

What do you do there?

I started out as a financial advisor, working particularly with our international clients because I have international experience. We actually have quite a few clients in Singapore. But we just restructured our group into teams. Mine has two advisors, I'm the registered marketing associate, and we also have a sales assistant. Now I'm more focused on working with the Financial Advisors — running financial plans, getting information out to our clients about various investments, and finding different opportunities within the client base.

Do any of the clients realize you are visually impaired?

I have only mentioned it to two of them. One knew another student at BLIND Inc., and the other was telling me that he'd been injured in an accident and was having trouble with his eyes. But outside of that, none of them know. We mostly deal with people over the phone, and I don’t think you can tell by speaking to me that in the future I won't be able to see very well. I now have an enlargement software program that magnifies everything, so between that and the computer reading to me, I can pretty much do everything that I need to do.

Have the multi-cultural aspects of your background helped you?

Our group works solely with a large global corporation, so many of our clients have traveled around the world and many have been to Singapore, so I’ll certainly mention that to them. Because I’ve also traveled around Southeast Asia quite a bit — to Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan and Korea, I can speak with almost all of them about something that is happening in most of the major cities there. It helps to build the relationship.

Is there anything you’d advise someone else who has a disability?

The most important thing to do is to get proper training, and to learn how to operate in a work environment. Technology is a big part of that. So is knowing how to read braille. And so is being able to get to and from work.

It sounds like it’s perfectly possible to succeed with the right equipment and support.

Absolutely.

This also sounds like a more interesting job than your first position.

Yes. Even if I wasn’t visually impaired, this is probably a step that I would have taken. Things are looking very positive.