She says job was hers for the asking.

• Position: People - Profile of Julie Garella, co-founder of McColl Garella L.L.C.

At 42, Julie Garella swears she's never written a resume. She's worked her way up the financial-services food chain without one.

Never heard of her? How about her partner, Hugh McColl? He built Charlotte-based Bank of America into one of the nation's biggest financial-services giants. Together, last April, they started McColl Garella LLC, an investment-banking firm aimed at companies owned and operated by women.

Before they met, she had been running two other companies she co-founded in Charlotte: Carnegie Capital Advisors, an investment-management firm, and Fairview Capital Ventures, a venture-capital and investment-banking firm she started in 1999. Carnegie, founded in 1997, had $50 million under management. She sold her stake in both in 2001.

That same year, she asked Pamela Lewis, then dean of Queens University's McColl School of Business and now Queens' president, to introduce her to McColl, chairman of Queens' board of trustees. She met with him shortly after he retired from BofA. He would later start McColl Partners LLC, an investment-banking firm. But his partners thought Garella's experience too different from theirs to invite her to join them. They had worked at the investment-banking firm of Bowles, Hollowell, Conner & Co., she says.

Garella grew up in Northampton, Mass., and studied English at the University of Massachusetts and Smith College. She left college in 1982 and worked in Charlotte for Danco, a Massachusetts-based furniture retailer, opening stores in the...