Pod Insights Capital Allocators [REPLAY] Paul Black and Mike Trigg – How to Build a $100B Money Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.227) About this episode Paul Black and Mike Trigg from WCM Investment Management are both past guests on the show who have taken an investment philosophy focused on culture and moat trajectory to turn a once struggling boutique into a $100 billion powerhouse.
Paul came on the show a few years ago when WCM had quietly grown to $25 billion in assets, and Mike joined a year ago to dive into their research process. Their colleague Mike Tian shared another perspective earlier this year when he described applying WCM's moat trajectory discipline to investing in China.
In this continued exploration of WCM, we start with the truly unique facts about the firm's rebirth a decade ago and turn to key features of its success, including embracing change, the importance of culture - alongside some characteristics of toxic cultures, hiring practices, telling the truth, integrating new team members, managing turnover, and transitioning leadership to the next generation.
Learn More
Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides https://twitter.com/tseides?lang=en or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedseides/
Subscribe to the mailing list https://capitalallocators.com/
Access Transcript with Premium Membership https://capitalallocators.com/signup
Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant ( https://thepodcastconsultant.com/https://thepodcastconsultant.com https://thepodcastconsultant.com/ https://thepodcastconsultant.com/)
Transcript 12,144 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Ted Seides? Hello, I'm Ted Seides and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can join our mailing list and access premium content at capitalallocators.com. My guests on today's show are Paul Black and Mike Trigg from WCM Investment Management. Paul and Mike are both past guests on the show who have taken an investment philosophy focused on culture and moat trajectory to turn a once struggling boutique into $100
0:49 Ted Seides? billion powerhouse. Paul came on the show a few years ago when WCM had quietly grown to $25 billion in assets, and Mike joined a year ago to dive into their research process. Their colleague, Mike Tean, shared another perspective earlier this year when he described applying WCM's moat trajectory discipline to investing in China. In this continued exploration of WCM, we start with the truly unique facts about the firm's rebirth a decade ago and turn to key features of its success, including embracing change, the importance of culture alongside some characteristics of toxic cultures, hiring practices, telling the truth, integrating new team members, managing turnover, and
1:34 Ted Seides? transitioning leadership to the next generation. Please enjoy this fascinating conversation about how to build $100 billion money manager with Paul Black and Mike Trigg from WCM. Paul, Mike, great to see you guys.
1:52 Speaker 01 Great to see you.
1:53 Ted Seides? Thanks Ted, it's great to be back. So this is kind of amazing. I know Paul, since you last came on, WCM was this relatively little-known $25 billion firm, and I know a couple of months ago you wrote a piece about how to build $100 billion firm. I thought it'd be interesting to get your take on what it took for WCM to get there.
2:14 Speaker 01 Well, I think where you start is with a $4 billion firm.
2:20 Speaker 01 And running a large-cap US domestic portfolio, you underperformed dramatically for five years. You get fired by pretty much all of that $4 billion in assets. And you know, the interesting thing is, you make sure you don't fire any of your good young talent, because you do want to live to fight another day. But you take the income hit all at the principal level. And then you have an operations guy come up to you and say, you know, I was thinking about what we were doing in US large-cap growth. Why don't we launch, since it was so successful in the US, why don't we launch an international large-cap growth strategy? Now, mind you, the gentleman who came up to us was in operations, had zero investment
3:02 Speaker 01 experience, spent time in the industry selling garlic boxes in Gilroy, California. But he had this idea that we thought, hey, you know, we've got nothing to lose right now, let's try that. So we put him in place. And here's the interesting part, you decide, yeah, one money management, portfolio manager probably doesn't work for this, let's add somebody else. So you, you add an inexperienced portfolio manager to the team. So now you have two people that have never run international strategies in their life, they have no portfolio management experience. And just for fun, you add a third person who drops out of Columbia Business School, because they didn't feel like they were learning anything different, who is thinking, I'm going to leave the industry and actually start a hamburger stand. You add him to the equation.
3:47 Speaker 01 And then, you know what you do is you literally say, okay, you've got literally a million-dollar portfolio running here, why don't you go out and sell it institutionally across the board? So they go on the road, they start showing up, they build a five-year track record. That five-year record's phenomenal, but even after five years, we literally had $3 million in the portfolio. And just for fun, remember, you can't look at the founders of the firm for any help, because the loss that occurred from $4 billion to under $1 billion in assets in the US growth strategy, put them into PTSD. So they were no help at all. That's how you do it.
4:27 Ted Seides? Well, it's safe to say that while that is true, it's kind of an unconventional approach. So Mike, when he came on the show last year, talked about thinking differently. What is it about how you've gone about this relative to the industry that's really made it work?
4:45 Speaker 01 Well, I'll start with that. You know, when we started the domestic growth strategy back in 1999, we were very conventional in our thinking. We did what everybody else in the business does, buy those big, large-cap companies that are high-quality, they have huge competitive advantages, and we were trying to buy them at a discount to intrinsic value. And that worked for a little bit until it didn't. And when it didn't work, what we realized is that we had camped too hard on trying to find really cheap companies. So it's interesting, the mistakes that we made with the domestic strategy really helped us when we launched the international strategy, because that whole notion, and we've talked
5:25 Speaker 01 about this before, of buying wide-mo businesses cheaply, I think is flawed today because everybody's trying to do the same thing. So the reality is, we found that if we just keep doing what the conventional wisdom says you should do, we're probably going to get pretty conventional and pretty average returns. So it was at that point, and actually adding Mike to the equation, where he came over from Morningstar, that we began to wrestle with that whole idea of what is important with a competitive advantage. And part of that was it wasn't about the absolute size, it was about the direction of that competitive advantage. As we started working that out more and more, we started having greater and greater success.
6:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think the thing I would add is, when we talked last, and we talked about the core values of WCM on the research team, think different and get better. When we talk about them today, I often describe them as sort of the antidote for what's wrong with the industry. We talked about the long feedback loops in investment management and how that leads to a set of suboptimal behaviors. A lot of group think, a lot of fear of failure or career risk. And so people, as a result, are afraid to stand out or do something different, or they're afraid to admit vulnerabilities or weakness in areas that they need to get better. And so we feel like by building a set of behaviors or values
6:51 Speaker 02 and really encouraging people and making it a safe place for people to think different and get better, we feel like we've found the solution for what's wrong with a lot of active managers. The other part of that story, though, that I didn't tell was really how we actually came up with that. I mean, to some extent, the so-called WCM platform, which I just described, the way we frame that today sort of came later. The reality is when we, as a research team, sat in a hotel conference room seven or eight years ago, and we asked the question, okay, what's really going to make WCM different from an investment or from a research point of view, we arrived at think different and get
7:32 Speaker 02 better. But the reasons that we came up with those two ideas were really kind of a reflection of the experience that we had just gone through. So the firm sort of evolving from a domestic focus to international and particularly an emphasis on growth within the non-US space. People sort of forget now, but back in 2007, eight, nine, 10, 11, that was still sort of an under-allocated within the non-US mandate of public equity portfolios. So we knew that that was a unique approach. There wasn't a ton of competition and that that in and of itself had given us, I think, a chance to have a lot of conversations with folks. Obviously, we had to convince them that we could continue to do what we'd been
8:15 Speaker 02 doing. But that aha, this is a great example of thinking different, and this is what we're going to rebuild the firm on, said, okay, we got to keep thinking different. That's what's gotten us here, and we need to keep the pedal down on that. And then getting better was, we knew we had gotten so much better as a result of the mistakes that we had made with the domestic strategy that Paul was just talking about. And there's certainly, I think, an orientation amongst lots of us within the firm about continuous improvement and that just being how we're wired as people. But we knew that while we had gotten better and we had learned from our mistakes, and that was a reason that we were still able to have enough money to rent a hotel room
8:56 Speaker 02 to have this conversation, that we couldn't stop that, that we had to continue to really press on getting better. And so we codified that, or we just made that a very explicit part of how we wanted to behave. But those two things were less about, hey, that's a platform that we can plug people into and continue to create a lot of value and make people the best version of themselves. That's what it is today. But at the time, it was just like, geez, this is what got us here. Like, we need to keep doing this.
9:24 Speaker 01 And here's the truth. The reality is you can't think different or get better in this industry if you're just thinking conventionally. Because really, as I wrote about in the paper, Why Money Managers Fail, one of the main reasons they fail is because when mistakes are made, people want to point fingers and blame. And you can't get better if you don't try to learn from your mistakes. So we have made every mistake in the book in the early years, and we actually used it as an opportunity to try to figure out the solution to the investment equation. And by doing that, we stumbled upon the idea around really how different competitive advantages need to be evaluated, and then the importance of a
10:07 Speaker 01 corporate culture. Those were all things we kind of intuitively knew. But we also knew because of our failures with the domestic portfolio that we had to pivot and do something very differently. You can't do that in an organization that isn't about change, that isn't about trying to get better, and isn't trying to think different. And you know, the only way that you can do those is if there's this incredible amount of trust within the investment team and the organization, the trust to believe that we're going to figure this out, we're going to get better, and the results will eventually come.
10:38 Speaker 02 And I know, just to sort of pile on here, I'm often surprised by how little time
10:44 Speaker 02 Allocators explicitly really try to dig into a firm's culture. It's oftentimes not even the first or the second thing that somebody brings up. They want to talk about process. They want to talk about philosophy. They want to talk about The numbers. Risk management, your screens, things like that. And it's, this culture is oftentimes the last thing. But I wonder if just kind of a failure to adapt is the reason. And it's certainly a question that we ask today is now a hundred billion dollar plus asset manager. How do we, how do we not repeat the same script that you've seen a million times Ted? With other managers that have experienced a period of success and then they get built up to be something really exceptional.
11:27 Speaker 02 And then five or 10 years later, people have either forgot about them or they're kind of a butt of a joke or something. And I think that unwillingness to change or adapt is a big reason for that. And what I've experienced through my journey at WCM is not only do you have to convince your people on the outside, there's also internal pressures. And there are all sorts of stories we could tell you about us wanting to push the envelope in terms of changing and evolving. And you just bump into a lot of resistance from people internally where it's like, oh my gosh, like you guys want to do this now? Like, why? We're having so much success. You really want to change this element of the process? Or there's just so much angst over trying new things.
12:11 Speaker 02 People worried that we're going to look stupid if we do something and it doesn't work. And so as much as there's external pressures that you have to combat, they're just as intense internally as well.
12:23 Ted Seides? I'm curious, this evolution to start with large cap growth domestically turned internationally. This idea of getting better and embracing change is something that conceptually makes a lot of sense. But when you're externally talking to clients, Clients generally don't like change. And I'm curious, how have you, over the years, effectively either trained or communicated with your clients so that they know that you might not be the same a year from now, two years from now?
12:59 Speaker 02 Unfortunately, we have some phenomenal clients that have really, really bought into this idea that there is an iterative nature to our investment process and that it gets better over time. So the way we think about MoTrajectory, the way we think about culture, the backward-looking work we do, the case studies we do, the investment process. And we ask people to hold us accountable. Like, if you're meeting with us a year from now and we're not telling you some new, novel things that you've never heard, there's something wrong.
13:24 Speaker 01 Actually, because we've put up really good numbers, they're fine with that. If we had not been putting up good numbers and then we said we wanted to continue to evolve and change, they'd say, "Well, your process that you currently have isn't working, so why would I want you to improve or change?" Right? I've never actually seen an industry that penalizes change more than the money management industry. The whole notion is you have a philosophy, you have a process, you've been doing it for 10 years. Theoretically, your numbers are good. Why would you change anything? The concern is if you change the process or the philosophy, that you're likely to underperform. And it's very, very different, let's say, from the tech industry or the healthcare industry,
14:08 Speaker 01 where they, where change and innovation is rewarded. If you talk about tech companies, they might be on their 20th iteration of an idea they've been trying to develop for 10 years. And they might only get it right once, but they're massively rewarded by the marketplace for doing that. It's not the same. You can't survive 19 failures on the money management side and then come back, "And so I finally got it. It's taken me 10 years, but now I got it. You've already burned all your equity and you've burned all your relationships." And you know, to your, to your point, Ted, I think it's really interesting that we had a whole different client base with the domestic strategy than we ultimately had with the international strategy. Because we could not go back to the consultants
14:54 Speaker 01 and the allocators that we had raised money for on the domestic side and then turn around and say, "Hey, I know we got that wrong, but we're really going to be good over here on the international side." So we had to completely pivot. How we actually launched and sold the international and global strategy.
15:09 Speaker 02 I think the other thing to your question that comes to mind is when we talk about change, I want to be clear about this, there are certain things that we hold pretty near and dear. The view of culture and mode trajectory, running focused portfolios. There are certain philosophical pillars of our process that we would never expect to just wake up one day and say, oh, we decided all of a sudden that positive mode trajectory, no longer sort of works or no longer makes sense. It's the effort to continue to find new investment frameworks to identify growing modes or new ways of assessing culture. And that's what I mean in terms of iteration and continuous improvement and constantly get better. It's just finding new tools and techniques to apply those same philosophical principles to the companies that we're looking at.
15:54 Speaker 02 And then also leaving open the possibility that there could be something else that ultimately becomes a huge source of alpha outside of those two things. We're pretty upfront about the fact that over time, and sometimes you may see this a little bit with what's happened in growth investing and how many people now talk about owning compounders and things like that, that to some extent, mode trajectory may not be the significant advantage 10 years from now that it was 10 years ago. And so we're doing a lot of things internally. We have a, something now called the WCM Artist Studio, which is effectively an R and D lab that we're building inside the research team that's going to spend a lot of time exploring those new fields of compounding knowledge to see if there's new sources of alpha that we can go, we can go after.
16:35 Speaker 02 And so it's change, but it's change and evolution in terms of the things that we really know are important.
16:41 Ted Seides? You guys always talk a lot about culture and it's important in how you're looking at companies, it's important in WCM. When you circle back to that inflection point 10 years ago and thinking about what you saw in other firms that didn't work, what was it that got you to culture outside of Paul, your old, original experience in the old WCM?
17:03 Speaker 01 Well, that was a lot of it because as you know, Ted, we bought the original founder out in 1998 when there were $200 million in assets and the firm had been founded 22 years before and it was run by an individual who really didn't get the importance of culture, much more dictatorial, much more top down. I can't overemphasize the importance of that lesson to, to what we've tried to do here to make it very, very different in a much healthier culture. But some of the lessons we learned really quickly is, you know, everyone talks about culture, especially today, but the time when you really see whether the culture is healthy or not is when performance suffers. And inevitably, performance is going to suffer in a money management firm.
17:46 Speaker 01 And I can tick off at least six or seven companies that have been hundred billion dollar companies and literally half of those are out of business today and the other half are struggling along with just a few billion dollars under management. And what I found, and this is actually a funny story. One day Mike comes into my office and he said, you know what you ought to do, Paul? You ought to literally get on the phone with the founder of every failed money management firm that we can find and ask them why their company failed. Now, think about that. You've got, you've got some high-performance people that have done very well in their life and are they going to want to talk to me about the mistakes that they made? And the answer to that is no, they're not.
18:28 Speaker 01 I probably called four different founding CEOs of companies. I'd get their secretary. I'd say, hey, Paul Black from WCM, love to talk to Mike. Can I talk to Mike or Jim? And they'd say, let me get back to you. They'd put me on hold and then they'd come back, I'm sorry, Jim's not available right now. That happened time and time again. There was this one time when we were in the depths of despair after losing four billion dollars worth of assets and getting down to as little as eight hundred million dollars. We had a six million dollar revenue stream. We were barely keeping the lights on. We had about 20 people. And in my despair, and I was in despair.
19:11 Speaker 01 I actually called up a manager back on the East Coast, well-known value manager, who had written something in a publication that talked about being a value manager. When we went through 97, 98, 99 during the tech boom and we underperformed horrifically, we lost almost 70% of our assets. And by losing 70% of our assets, our firm was on the brink of going out of business. And I remember thinking to myself, oh, my gosh, this guy is going to help me navigate how to get through this. So I called him up and to his credit, he said, look, yeah, I'd be happy to meet with you. I jumped on an airplane. I'll never forget, I stayed at the Ritz Carlton. I had no business staying there because we didn't have enough money to stay at a Ritz Carlton.
19:56 Speaker 01 Stayed at the Ritz Carlton downtown Wall Street and was incredibly excited thinking, you know what, I'm coming to the mountain. I'm going to get a great inspirational speech on how to keep the lights on. So we met at a restaurant for about an hour and a half. I kept asking questions, but he kept talking about himself and he never in the whole conversation gave me anything that would give me any hope that we were able to keep the lights on going forward. Now, never forget that because I was already depressed. And then when I left that meeting, I went into a downward spiral that lasted about a month. I jumped back on the plane.
20:41 Speaker 01 I came out to California and I sat down in my office and I thought, I don't know how we're going to get out of this. I'm so grateful that we've got good people around us because we're going to have to figure this out together.
20:55 Ted Seides? So if these couple of managers that went through what you did weren't responding to you, and then when you did reach out to one, he said next to nothing that helped, how did you go about learning what these other firms did?
21:07 Speaker 01 We had to do a lot more sleuthing by talking really to former employees of a lot of organizations. And the preponderance of the evidence to us. Was that when those tough times came, the true culture revealed itself. And the true culture in most firms where you have a bunch of high performance, highly educated, highly compensated people tends to be a little toxic. And so when that bad performance came, inevitably, portfolio management teams turned on each other. Portfolio managers started pointing out who made the mistakes in the portfolio. And there started to be divisions among the team to the point where even one firm that's
21:47 Speaker 01 fairly well-known divided its portfolio management team between institutional and mutual fund money because they actually couldn't get along. And as you might imagine, that was a death blow to the institutional business because as soon as you show the truth of what's going on relationally within the firm, people are going to flee very quickly, as they should, as they should. That was the main one. The other one that was really important, a lot of firms fail when the founders want to move on. When you have a firm that's worth, let's say, a billion or $2 billion, the difficulty of transitioning ownership from the founding generation to the second generation or third
22:29 Speaker 01 generation is overwhelming because the founders usually want to get a market multiple for what they've done and they've spent their life doing it. It's kind of reasonable, but the firms that have failed have been the ones that have taken on massive amounts of debt in order to finance the buyout of the founder. And that's fine as long as everything's going well. But when it's not, inevitably, the younger people who have all the debt, then you start toying with their temperament because they might be tens of millions of dollars in debt, seeing assets roll out the door. And I don't think there's a rational person in the world that can manage a portfolio with that kind of pressure on them. So those have been two big lessons and it's led to why we think very differently about
23:13 Speaker 01 transitioning wealth from one generation to the other.
23:16 Speaker 02 When we have new people come here, at least on the investment side of the firm, we have them do case studies on their old firms. And we learn, I'd say like little anecdotes that could lead to the possibility of a culture becoming toxic. And all these people have had great experiences at their firm, so they don't come in and just do these scathing case studies on their old firms. It's just like lessons learned and insights that they've had. One of the individuals said at my old firm, the minute that we hired a head of HR, when we look back on that, we'd said, you know, that's when the culture changed a little bit. And to me, that's like always a lesson that stand out. And I don't want to lead anyone to believe that we don't have HR functions here. We have people that do typical HR functions.
24:01 Speaker 02 But when you hire someone to be the head of HR, what do you do? You start outsourcing, I think, very important duties as a leader. You know, if I suddenly need to let somebody go, I'm not going to go do that. Or if I do have a difficult conversation with somebody on the team that did something that is an issue, oh, have the head of HR go do that, right? And so you create more bureaucracy and layers between you and your people. And you suddenly, I don't know, you just lose a level of closeness to the organization that I think can potentially be really, really bad. When companies get really big and they suddenly have all the resources in the world and they can hire anybody they want, we've heard lots of examples of firms. What do you do? You just go straight for pedigree. All the people that you could never hire back when you were a billion dollar asset manager
24:46 Speaker 02 and you could only pay people 150,000 bucks a year. You go hire all those other people now that you can afford them, right? And you stop and pedigree is one of those things. It's like the easiest thing to identify and track, whether it's like background or education. This is most visible thing, which is why it's the most overrated probably in terms of like the other really critical things like skill, talent, cultural fit, judgment, the other really sort of key criteria that go into making good hiring decisions. And then another one that I just love that we tell a lot is there was a firm that many people had told us they were very similar to WCM. They were a growth manager, concentrated funds, employee owned.
25:30 Speaker 02 And the founder of that firm. His favorite thing to do was to, every day, he wanted to empty the dishwasher in their kitchen of their office. And that was kind of his way to stay in touch with people and people would rotate in and out of the kitchen and say hi to them. And one day, a couple of people came into the kitchen as he was doing this. He had no idea who they were. They looked back and said, yeah, that was maybe in hindsight, maybe a turning point in the culture of the firm. And so trying to be very accessible. I mean, the wonderful contrast to that here is that Paul's office, there's a door to access his office from the inside, obviously, but then there's also a door to go out to the alley behind our building, which actually leads you over to the research team. And it's just become sort of like a throughway, basically. Everyone just loves, rather than walk around the corner and going through
26:15 Speaker 02 the front door when you go over to the main building, myself and probably 30 other people in this firm, just prefer to go in that door. And if it was me, I'd probably hate it, frankly, if I had 50 people coming in and out of my office every day just to say hi for two seconds and walk through. But like, Paul actually loves it. We didn't even design that, actually, when we did it. But it was one of those things, and you've never
26:36 Speaker 01 I love it.
26:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, you love that.
26:38 Speaker 01 I love it because it keeps me connected to people and I see people all the time. And they always stop by and they say a few things. And I get to ask a few questions. And my office, by the way, is about six feet by six feet large. So it's not a big office, but it is a thoroughfare that everybody walks through every day at least 30 or 40 times.
26:57 Ted Seides? If you're an outsider, you're an investor, investing in a fund, an allocator, what are the signs of what a toxic culture would be?
27:06 Speaker 02 I don't think there's a single marker of a toxic culture. When an allocator would sit down with us, it was quite often, actually, that you can just see there's a chemistry, there's a love, there's an admiration, there's a lightheartedness, there's a self-deprecating nature to the way we interact with one another. I can't imagine that if a firm had a toxic culture that you would see that. And that's feedback we've gotten that just, wow, like instantaneously that people would say to us, wow, the chemistry between you guys is just something that We've never seen before. I think we've told that story in the past about many, many years ago, visiting Whole Foods and talking to the founder of Whole Foods, John Mackey, and expressing to him the feeling that Paul and I had upon walking into their offices.
27:51 Speaker 02 And his response to us was, yeah, that's because there's an absence of fear here. And I think that that's something that has always resonated with us. It's something that's kind of hard to put your finger on. But honestly, when I've assessed cultures of companies that we've invested in, it's that same sort of intangible quality that I've seen as well. I think there's other markings that we've learned that an allocator could look out for that could lead to the possibility of the culture becoming toxic, a lack of succession planning, the level of engagement that the founder has, how they think about hiring.
28:27 Ted Seides? Mike, you mentioned the importance of hiring and how some firms do it better than others. What are your current hiring practices when you're bringing somebody in today?
28:35 Speaker 02 Well, I think the thing that we have really stuck to since the beginning is looking for talent in unique places. Paul talked a little bit about the origins of how myself, Pete Hunkel, Sanjay Air, how we were all hired, all of which had relatively unconventional backgrounds. I was writing a newsletter at Morningstar. Sanjay had left business school. Pete had an operations background. And in many respects, all of us are self-taught investors because we didn't go through a traditional training program at a large asset manager. And I think it's created the starting conditions for having people that just think differently
29:17 Speaker 02 and try to somewhat creative and curious. And so we've really tried to stick to that. We hired somebody two years ago that we actually originally found on Twitter. He had a Twitter handle under a fake name. He was someone that we followed, we liked. It was very much, in a way, Paul's experience with me and the newsletter, just saying things that kind of resonated with you personally. And then ultimately, I think we figured out that he lived in London. We reached out to him, direct messaged him. Turned out that he was actually doing really, really well in an investment management firm in London and then just basically courted him to come to WCM. But constantly trying to stick to that, we really try not to use headhunters.
30:02 Speaker 02 We find that to be an unbelievably inefficient, very conventional process. We don't try to overweight background and pedigree in a big way. We've really tried to keep our standards exceptionally high. I think that's, sometimes Paul would argue, maybe I've kept them too high. But I think we've gotten a lot better at hiring over the years. I still find it to be, as the leader of an investment team, I find it to be probably the single hardest thing that we do.
30:30 Speaker 01 If I was going to nut that out Ted, I would say a couple of things. One, the single hardest position to hire for in a money management firm is research. Because at the end of the day, you don't know if that research analyst is really any good. Typically, they don't have a track record, they don't have an extensive body of work. And so I've found that our most successful hirings have been around people that have certain characteristics that I would say reflect a great attitude. Give me somebody with a great attitude, that's reasonably smart, and I can probably work with them. And so, you know, there are really three characteristics that I would define in there. One is you really want somebody that's hungry, that has a lot of passion for investing.
31:12 Speaker 01 I think having passion for investing, maybe they were stock jockeys when they were 15 years old and they started, they got hooked on the business. That's a good thing, because if they love what they do, right, in those very difficult periods of time, they're going to stick with it. I think a sense of humility is really important in this business. This idea that you don't know the answer to everything. If you're humble, you probably ought to keep grinding away at your task and trying to get smarter and better. And so, humble, hungry, and smart. You've got to have smart people, and smart people to us are not book smart. They're people that, that really have a really good sense, a really good common sense, and a really good intuitive feel. For the business and for the markets.
31:54 Speaker 01 And so at the end of the day, I think our most successful hires have been people that have great attitudes and are really good cultural fits. And you can kinda, you can kinda suss that out over a period of time, but it takes time.
32:07 Speaker 02 And I think the other one, curiosity and a learning aptitude is just another really big one that I think's been consistent with our best hires. You know, because ultimately when you're hiring somebody, you're trying to project what they're going to be like in five years or 10 years. And people that are just, like when you talk to Mike Tean in this firm, you just are struck by the level of curiosity and on a given year, the new things he's trying to learn from one year to the next. And I think that and being a highly self-aware person, I think are two of the really big things that have been consistent with successful people in our team.
32:41 Ted Seides? So, once you've brought these people in, you've talked about this super positive culture. Paul, one of the things you've talked and written about is this idea that there's an element of truth-telling that's really important to keeping that culture in a positive way. And I'd just be really curious for you to dive in a little bit on how you learn that and then how you express it within WCM.
33:04 Speaker 01 It's an interesting question because it is not a natural part of the firm. It's something we're really wrestling with now because we've been very, very good at caring for our people. To me, if people really know they're cared for and that we would go to bat for them, and I've got a couple of terrific stories about that, where we really have gone to bat for people initially. If people know you have their back and that you truly care for them as individuals and people, you're going to have, I think, a lot of success with that individual. But part of that, and this is the part that I'm trying to get better at too, is truth-telling. It's having those hard conversations that say, you know what, I'm disappointed that
33:46 Speaker 01 you really haven't measured up in this particular situation. It's, it's having that discussion, let's say with a sales guy, that you know, you've made a lot of money, you've done really well. But are you working as hard today as you were working 10 years ago? Let's just be truthful about that. And, and those are discussions that we're increasingly have because we almost feel like we've gone too far, frankly, on the caring for people side. And we haven't gone far enough on, look, part of caring for people is telling the truth and being candid, and that's not going to be as fun for you. But you know, we're going to be really better for it at the end of the day. I mean, Mike, if you want somebody to tell the truth to you, then work with Mike Trigg.
34:27 Speaker 01 Mike Trigg tells me the truth very candidly all the time. And most of the time I accept it really well and I work really hard to change either my behavior or not my attitude, because I have a great attitude, but mostly my behavior and how I interact with other people. It's a work in progress and it's very difficult. Caring's easy, I think, for us as an organization. Truth telling, which we're working on, is much more difficult, but we're getting far better at it. And we're at that point now where if you don't do it with 75 people, you're going to have a lot of more issues across the board because not telling someone the truth affects other people in the organization in a negative way.
35:09 Speaker 02 One of the things we've wrestled with recently is in the past, I think we've been quick to sort of describe WCM as a family. And actually Toby Luckey, the founder and CEO of Shopify, which is an investment of ours, had a, actually a great internal memo that got leaked last year that talked about and clarified the fact that Shopify is not a family. And it really resonated with me while I thought the same thing about the firm in the past. I really view this to be just a group of people that really care about each other, but a group of friends more than a family. I mean, the reality is we're all born with an own family. You've got a mother, you've got a father, you've got siblings, you've got children.
35:54 Speaker 02 That's your family. And it's like, you can't really do anything about it one way or the other. But being a WCM really is a voluntary exercise. No one's forced to be here. I mean, I have the choice not to have a brother or a sister. But don't mistake the fact that I'm saying that we're friends to say, to mean that we can't still deeply care about each other. In fact, I have always said that a group of friends, some people have said, well, if you're all friends, nobody's going to want to hold each other accountable. And you're going to just be having fun all day and messing around. And I said, it's actually the exact opposite. My experience in my life with my friends has been that I don't want to let my friends down. If I have a boss who's a complete pain in the ass, and he
36:35 Speaker 02 treats me terribly, or she treats me terribly, would I probably not lose sleep over the fact that I didn't really go the extra mile for that person? Yeah, probably. Yeah, if I didn't like the person, it probably wouldn't bother me that much. But you know what? If it was a friend of mine who really cared about me, who was really invested in me, who'd gone the extra mile for me? Yeah, I don't want to let that person down. And so we're having a little bit of an internal discussion even today about our firm, particularly as we get bigger, about is it family, is it friends? And I'm kind of gravitating more towards this notion of just being a group of friends that deeply care about each other, because I think it still speaks to that desire and that need to go the extra mile and be there for one another.
37:14 Ted Seides? One of the things that's been interesting over the last couple of years, when we first sat down, you were $25 billion, and most of that was in one strategy. And today, you have more than that in a variety of other strategies. And I'm curious, outside of that original strategy, as you've brought in some other teams, some other people, what have you learned about what it takes to integrate someone who isn't just investing in international growth stocks with expanding modes with good cultures into a firm that was built on that one philosophy?
37:48 Speaker 02 Well, I think the, before we even think about indoctrinating them in our investment philosophy, I think the hardest thing is to indoctrinate them in our way of doing things and our culture. And I love telling this story, but when we were first coming out of our abyss, I guess, we started to have, we do a lot of retreats with our different teams and with our whole firm and Paul would inevitably get up and he'd start crying at these things. And at one point I was like, would you just stop it? You know, I'm like, listen, like, we're rebuilding this thing. Like, stop getting up there and like, talking about the past and crying. It's, let's go, man. Like, and I have done a complete 180 on that because,
38:31 Speaker 02 and I've acknowledged that I was wrong about that. And the reason is because it's those stories and explaining them to people over and over again and letting them understand where we've come from and giving them an understanding of why we do things the way that we do. That's really the only way we're going to be able to scale the culture beyond the core group of people that have been here for a long time. So it's a lot of storytelling, but it's also in the moment, vulnerability and openness as well. We had our retreat this year, took the whole firm to a ranch up in Montana. And Paul and I had, there was a bunch of stuff going on in advance of that retreat. And at one point, Paul had
39:15 Speaker 02 been asking me a bunch of questions about things that have absolutely nothing to do with WCM. And at one point, I took him outside onto one of our patios and I just, I was tearing up and I said, would you just stop it with all these questions about this real estate deal that you're thinking about doing up in, I don't know, was it Idaho? Coster Ranch. Idaho or something. And I said to him, I go, this firm is a gift. And it was, I think a bit of a splash of cold water in Paul's face at that time. And I think I got the outcome out of that that I was looking for, which was to get him, get him focused again. And the only reason I'm really telling you that story is then that Paul then, on his own,
39:58 Speaker 02 And he actually said this at the end of the conversation. He goes, you know what? You just helped me make my speech to the entire firm. And so then Paul, on the first night of that retreat, basically got up and told that exact same story to the entire firm. And it was just like showing that kind of vulnerability and practicing it day in and day out is really difficult, but it's the only way that you can continue to help new people. We can talk all about old stories and there's a little bit of, I always were, there's a little bit of like the Abraham Lincoln. When I was your age, I walked eight miles to school there and back every single day type of thing. But then when you can also show that in the moment, examples of what the leaders are going through to keep this thing
40:41 Speaker 02 going and keep it pure and keep it the way we talk about it. I think living it out every day and talking about that is critical.
40:49 Speaker 01 You want to get the best out of people. As a leader, you show vulnerability. If you show your vulnerability and your honesty about your life or what you're doing at this firm, people will respond to that and they will take it to another level. That's been our whole story, just open vulnerability from leadership. And you will get a lot more out of people than you could otherwise. I love the story, Mike, if we have time, if you can just tell them about Greg Ice. The first year he was here, he couldn't even understand this MOOC trajectory concept. He couldn't understand the culture work and he was actually ready to leave the firm, right? And you had to talk with him at one of the retreats, which by the way, are the most powerful
41:34 Speaker 01 events that we consistently do because you get more out of people with a little alcohol and a little fun than you're going to get out of them otherwise. But I love his transformation.
41:43 Speaker 02 We could get on the list of people on our team that honestly, you hire people that have come from other firms. In many cases, in his case, it had been a couple of firms that had been difficult experiences. And so he's on his really impressive background, but this is his third stop and he's getting a little older. And I think in the back of his mind, wondering, okay, what if this doesn't work out? And and yet we're talking about all these things that, you know, he looks back at it now and laughs because he's like, How could I be wrestling with this culture thing when it actually explained, you know, why my prior two firms had struggled so much? Often has, which requires a lot of patience when people don't initially get why like caring can be a competitive advantage.
42:28 Speaker 02 As you guys know, I'm originally from Kansas City and a big Royals fan. And there's this great quote by our president of baseball operations. And he says, I tell people all the time, there are a lot of smart people in baseball and we're just not going to outsmart them. We're not smarter than anyone else and we're not going to work harder than anyone else either, but we have to care more than anyone else. That's our best chance. We have to care more. And that's the types of people that are typically attracted to this industry. That's a hard concept for them to get their, their heads around. So, yeah. And then what's been great about someone like him is you've seen him sort of evolve into a leadership position where he's managing people. And then he's going through his own challenges of somebody that may not originally be getting
43:11 Speaker 02 it and being patient and seeing that cycle play itself out again. And that's ultimately how we're trying to scale the whole thing.
43:17 Ted Seides? What happens in the situation where people want to be at WCM, doing great, having a good time, but in your evaluation of someone's work product, it becomes clear over time that for whatever reason, they need to be voted off the island. How does that conversation go?
43:36 Speaker 02 Well, those are never easy conversations. I think the truth is in our experience that it's really been cultural complications and bringing the people around you down that has ultimately led to us to say it's time to part ways. We give people an enormous amount. I mean, my own experience at this firm was, and I've said this before, it's not like I came into this firm and just started shooting the lights out. And so you go into it knowing that you need to give this person time and a long leash to make mistakes and make sure they understand it's okay to make mistakes. The important thing is that are you acknowledging them? Are you learning from them? Are you getting better from these mistakes?
44:18 Speaker 02 And making it clear to that person that hiding mistakes and you'll go further in this firm faster if you actually acknowledge that you've made mistakes. And so we do a good enough job, I think, on the front end to make sure we don't encounter too many of those situations. But the funny thing is Paul and I actually had lunch with somebody a couple of weeks ago and we were sort of chatting about this. But what I don't think people probably totally appreciate about leadership is Oftentimes, when you let someone go in your organization, Paul or myself might have to be the one that has to do it. But you know what? The reality is, nine out of 10 times, your people tell you that that needs to get done before you actually have to make that decision yourself. And that's been, I think, in almost every case I can think
45:03 Speaker 02 of, people coming and saying, "I can't function as well as I was anymore because of this person. They're bringing me down." Or saying, "Hey, I know enough that this isn't the right situation anymore for the firm. It's not good for the firm." And then frankly, it becomes, "Okay, now I know I need to do something."
45:19 Speaker 01 It's a very difficult question for me to answer, because the truth of the matter is, when you look at the history, and certainly the last 20 years or so, my answer to that question would have been, "Okay, I've got an underperformer, but as Mike said, they've got a good attitude. They fit all right culturally. They're kind of not doing a great job." And I've always said, and this is probably management 101 wrong, I've always said, "You know what? That's okay. They're good people. They've got a family. I'm not letting them go. I'm just not letting them go. We're going to build around them." So I'd hire somebody around them and bring somebody else in to help fortify the work that they were doing. And I can tell you that in the last 20 years, I've probably done that seven or eight times, where I've
46:01 Speaker 01 just built around somebody that was weak, as long as, as Mike said, they weren't toxic to the culture. The moment they start bringing down your stars is the moment you've got to move. Now, a classic example is, we had a research analyst that was actually here before Mike was, that Mike worked with for a lot of years, and we kept trying to get him on board. "Hey, we're going into international. We're moving more towards MOPe trajectory. We're moving more towards the important work on culture." And this individual is just completely committed to DCF modeling and wide MOPe businesses, right? This went on for five years. Every six months, I'd talk to him. I'd say, "Hey, you've got to really get on board. This is where we're going. This is what we're doing."
46:44 Speaker 01 But he had three kids and I didn't want to let him go and eventually Mike came to me one day and he said, you know what, I'm really, really being brought down by this guy on a regular basis. It's really bringing me down. Well, as soon as that, then I finally wake up and I go, okay, it's time to move on. We ultimately let him go. So we're much better now. We will still build around weakness as long as it's not toxic and they're a good cultural fit, but we're getting much better at saying, you know what, it's probably better if you leave and go find something you're more suited to. Very hard decisions and this is a people business and we care about people, but we do take that to the extreme sometime.
47:23 Ted Seides? I want to circle back to this conversation about generational transition. You've had this incredible success over this last stretch of time here. How are you thinking about that down the road?
47:35 Speaker 01 Well, let me go back a little ways. You know, at one time Kurt Winrich was the primary owner of the firm. In 1998, he basically owned 100% of the company. Today Kurt owns 20% of the company and we went from basically one owner in Kurt to I believe at the end of this year, we're going to have 50 different owners in the firm. All those transitions of wealth have been done at book value within the company, which you know, basically is the computers, the sofas, the desks and the chairs. It's not very much. So Kurt has deluded himself from essentially 100% down to 20%, all at book value. So there was really no money made by him on the transaction to delude himself. Now, obviously he owns 20%
48:18 Speaker 01 of a $105 billion firm versus 100% of a $200 million firm. It's really worked out well for him, but that's been kind of our model across the board. We will grant shares to people that have obviously demonstrated the ability to add excess return to the portfolio or somehow move the needle on the profitability side. Now, as many people know, Kurt Winrich is retiring at the end of this year. He owns 20% of the company. Part of my work on other money management firms was trying to figure out the best way to transition Kurt's wealth that is literally worth hundreds of millions of dollars right now to the next generation. And we could sell 10% more to Mike, but Mike would have to borrow $200 million to do that.
49:01 Speaker 01 We could say, look, the firm will fund you, but you still have the overhang. What we concluded is the best way to transition wealth is the founders have to be generous. The founders ultimately have to take a significant haircut in order to make sure that the company continues to prosper. So we've chosen to basically sunset Kurt. That means for the next seven years, he will receive his dividend every year for the next seven years. And then that will retire into treasury and it'll be accreted to everybody else. Now, the downside on that for Kurt, of course, is he could probably go out now and sell his 20% in the market for 10x EBITDA.
49:42 Speaker 01 At the end of the day, if you're essentially selling it for 7x EBITDA at an income tax level versus a capital gains tax level, he's actually receiving about 4x EBITDA for shares that are worth an awful lot of money. So we've just concluded that if you want to keep this going, the founders have to be generous and the founders have to be willing to walk away with a much lower multiple than they otherwise would have made. And I think it's the best model that we found. There's a big company in London going through this very same thing where it's a $50 billion company. There are a couple of founders that want to cash out, but they want a market multiple. And nobody can afford to pay a market multiple for a $50 billion firm. And what's happening? The talent is leaving.
50:27 Speaker 01 They're losing PMs, they're losing top research analysts. That firm will be worth a fraction of what it once was because the founders aren't willing to be generous.
50:38 Ted Seides? And why do you think it is that you've chosen that path, that Kurt's chosen that path? When that's just so different from other people in the industry. And you look at, if that's what it takes, just walking away from an enterprise value that you've built over the years in order to sustain a business.
50:58 Speaker 01 Kurt will tell you, it is not all about him. It is not all about him. This firm was not built by Kurt Winrich. This firm was not built by Paul Black. This firm was not entirely built by Mike Trigg or Sanjay or Pete Hunkel. This firm is the collective efforts of a lot of people. Now, you can argue, okay, we were founders. We were there in the early days. We were there when we were trying to keep the lights on, when we were suffering performance from the domestic strategy. And there's some value to that. But ultimately, we know that we've all done extraordinarily well. We won the lottery, and we don't need to get every last dollar off the table. I'd much rather leave something, and Kurt's this way, he'd rather leave something to me and Mike and Sanjay and Pete and Sloan
51:41 Speaker 01 that endures and goes on than he would trying to get his last hundred million dollars. It's a mindset and it's a life philosophy that really is about caring for others more than you care for yourself. I mean, it sounds corny these days, but it's a living example of caring about other people more than yourself. And Kurt will tell you, he has been wildly overcompensated for the last 20 years, and he's happy to do it. So it starts by the core values of the person themselves.
52:10 Speaker 02 How do you think about leadership at WCM going forward?
52:14 Speaker 01 That's a great question as well, and it's interesting. The good news about Kurt stepping away, he's going to remain chairman of the board. So he will still be with myself, Mike, and Sloan at our leadership training retreats that we go to periodically throughout the year. We'll see him once a quarter for board meetings. And he's actually still going to stay engaged. It's funny, here's the former co-CEO and chairman of WCM. You know what he loves to do? He loves to edit the quarterly newsletters and the quarterly updates that we do. That's what he loves to do. He's that guy that loves to be in the background. So he's going to continue to do quite a few things. He won't be in the investment strategy group anymore, but Kurt's influence is so ingrained in this firm today, based on his
52:58 Speaker 01 love for people. And we all embody that, and he'll be around enough. So I don't expect a lot of changes. I'll miss seeing him every day, but I'll see him enough during the year, and we'll still get a lot of his wisdom. I just called him up the other day on a compensation issue, saying, Kurt, you know, I know you really well, and I know you could go one of two ways on this. What do you think? That relationship will continue on. And that's where he's, you've got 35 years of wisdom that we can still tap into.
53:26 Speaker 02 I think it's a scaling question, how to continue to do. More of what we have and create more leaders in the firm. I think that's a big focus of mine. Things around equity and compensation, creating a lot of upward mobility for people. Talking to them about the idea of being a steward of WCM and having an ownership mindset. One of my favorite things to do is to still write internal thought pieces that touch on maybe some of the behaviors and values that I think have been essential to our success. I wrote one last year called "The Other Stuff", which talked about some of the unspoken core values of the firm like scrappiness and irreverence and humility.
54:06 Speaker 02 And then we're doing things to think about how to become better coaches and mentors. We started an advisory board that's sort of a group of people a layer below our leadership team and spending more time with them and trying to groom them into the next set of leaders in the firm. For me, leadership is really just a pretty simple concept. It's make situations and people as successful as they can be. And that's, I think, as we become more successful and there's more people that are having lots of success. I think one of the things that Paul and I talk about a lot is, and this started from Kurt, and it's something that we have to carry on. It's really to get people to think about others more than themselves.
54:47 Speaker 02 And it's really difficult in the type of environment that most asset managers find themselves in. And the way I've tried to describe it to people in the past is like, okay, you've landed on the lily pad of investment management at WCM. You have nothing to worry about anymore. Let's relax. We've got your back. You can make mistakes here. We're going to support you. This should be your last job under most circumstances. And if you can get people to really buy into that and believe you and trust you on that, then all that's really left to do is then focus on the other people around you. And if we can have, say, an investment team of 12 or 15 people where everybody walks in the door every day and their number one objective is to make everyone around them better.
55:34 Speaker 02 As an individual, if you have 14 people that are, that's their sole focus every day, you're going to go a lot further, faster than you could ever do if you were just focused on yourself. And so if we can continue to kind of preach that message and get people to live that out every day, then I think we're just going to have more examples of leadership and people just making situations, stuff that Paul and I'll never see and ideas and situations will improve. And, and we can keep this going, I think, for a really long time.
56:01 Ted Seides? It's such a great story. Now, Mike, Paul, I can't let you go without a couple of closing questions. And it turns out, Paul, it was a couple of years ago that you came on. The closing questions are completely different. So I'm going to ask you a bunch. And then there's a couple that Mike didn't answer last year. We'll go at the end. So Paul, what's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family?
56:19 Speaker 01 I've thought a lot about this and I've come up with watching Ted Lasso.
56:24 Speaker 01 Have you seen Ted Lasso?
56:25 Ted Seides? Best show on television.
56:27 Speaker 01 It's the best show on television. Love Ted Lasso. I also love reading investment books. I've probably read every single classic investment book. In fact, I'm reading one right now called Capital, written by Charlie Ellis about the Capital Group. Really one of the better investment books out there. If you're a asset manager and you want to know more about how to run a $2.5 trillion firm, read that book. So I like to read thoughtful books on the investment business. But first and foremost, watch Ted Lasso.
56:59 Ted Seides? What's your most important daily habit?
57:02 Speaker 01 Watching Ted Lasso.
57:07 Speaker 01 I would say taking time every day to break out and try to just sit and be thoughtful about something that has to do, in this case at work with the firm, or being thoughtful about the portfolios and how their portfolios are being run. But I would say in general, for me, it's just taking enough time each day to sit down and think about where are we going as a firm and what can we do to make sure the culture's healthier? There are a lot of aspects to that, but it's really just being still and quiet for a period of time to be able to think.
57:41 Ted Seides? What's your biggest personal pet peeve?
57:44 Speaker 01 By far, lack of gratitude.
57:48 Speaker 01 We have so much to be grateful for. As Buffett said, you're born in America, you won the lottery, you're in the money management firm, a great money management firm that's had a great deal of success. You should be incredibly grateful. And what to me, with gratitude comes responsibility, and that responsibility is making sure that you give back.
58:13 Ted Seides? How about on the investment side? What's your biggest investment pet peeve?
58:16 Speaker 01 DCF models. People that anchor to DCF models is by far my biggest pet peeve because I do believe back in the early days when we made mistakes, we spent an inordinate amount of time on DCF models and we were precisely wrong, by the way, 10 years later.
58:35 Ted Seides? All right. Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life?
58:39 Speaker 01 That's a hard one for me, Ted, because one, I would say 25 years ago, I tried to quit the industry because I was a Bank of America and it was a very miserable time for me. I had a really good mentor and friend who walked me around a lake in Oakland and convinced me not to quit. If I had quit and went and become a camp counselor, I wouldn't be here at WCM doing something I absolutely love to do. I'm sorry to give you more people, but I'd throw Kurt Winrich in there for sure, Mike Trigg and Sloane Payne. These are all my partners. We have a leadership team that is second to none. There's just something
59:18 Speaker 01 magical about what we each bring to the equation and they've all had massive impacts on my life.
59:26 Ted Seides? What's the biggest mistake you made and what did you learn from it?
59:29 Speaker 01 Don't rely on DCFs. DCFs are-
59:34 Ted Seides? DCFs and Ted Lasso seem to be the two predominant things.
59:37 Speaker 01 I'm sorry. DCFs, Ted, you know this, our business worships at the modeling of discounted cash flows on businesses. And everyone thinks the magic is in the DCF and very, very little of the magic is there. That's just a tool and that tool is only as good as the input. So from my perspective, I think there'd be a lot better asset managers out there if they would focus more on the business and the culture versus the valuation.
1:00:10 Ted Seides? Mike, I'm going to turn to you because now we can get both of you guys in here. What teaching from your parents has most stayed with you?
1:00:17 Speaker 02 I think not to judge, not to be judgmental, to try to understand that we're all flawed individuals. At the end of the day, I've made certainly my fair share of mistakes today and to have your parents extend you grace and forgiveness and to understand the power of that. And then to be able to be in a position to in turn extend that to other people around you in your life. I think is something that I think just is necessary to have a, have a healthy, happy life.
1:00:48 Ted Seides? Paul, how about you?
1:00:49 Speaker 01 It's really the idea around keep showing up. Now, it's interesting, I just kind of naturally did that. I have multiple examples of where I need to keep showing up in order to ultimately have success. But yeah, my parents were all about, hey, you just keep showing up every day. And you know what? Eventually something good will happen. And that is just, my life just defines that. You know, there were so many times I could have quit at something, but the fact that I kept showing up and doing good things each and every day has been remarkable for me.
1:01:25 Ted Seides? All right, Mike, last one for you. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?
1:01:30 Speaker 02 The importance of just balance in your life, I think, is something that I've really learned to appreciate, particularly probably in the last few years. It can't be all about work all the time and. I know in my life, and I've certainly experienced this with people around me too, when people don't have balance in their life, you drive the people around you crazy. I've certainly done that. You get in your head about some issue or something at work, and then you, it's the typical thing you think about when you can't sleep in the middle of the night, and then you wake up in the morning, you're like, wow, I can't believe I didn't sleep for three hours because of that stupid thing. And I think you have fewer of those kinds of moments when you have a lot of balance in your life. And I
1:02:11 Speaker 02 would conclude spirituality as another key component that's really helped me understand the importance of what really matters the most at the end of the day. And a lot of these little things, they're outside your control, and you can't do anything about it. And you need to just show up and do the best you can every day and try to live a full, balanced life.
1:02:29 Ted Seides? All right, Paul, why don't you bring us home? What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?
1:02:34 Speaker 01 It's the same answer that I gave to the prior question, which is, keep showing up. Because I did not keep showing. The one time in my life I didn't keep showing up, I have regretted for 35 years that I didn't finish it out and see where it might have gone. I was actually a pretty decent college football player, Division One. When I got to the team, they were ranked 16th in the nation. And I played a year and then realized I didn't really love it as much as I used to love it. I was fairly gifted in terms of talent. And I've always wondered, I ended up leaving my senior year, and I've always
1:03:15 Speaker 01 wondered, what would have happened if I would have given it everything I had for at least 12 more months? And I short circuited myself. And it's one of those things I've always regretted. But you know what? What's come out of that is, in my professional life, I never quit. I never, ever stopped because I've so regretted doing that one time when I was in college.
1:03:41 Ted Seides? Mike Palk, congrats on all the success, and really excited to see what comes next for WCM.
1:03:48 Speaker 01 Thank you, Ted.
1:03:49 Ted Seides? Thanks for listening to the show. To learn more, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com, where you can join our mailing list, access past shows, learn about our gatherings, and sign up for premium content, including podcast transcripts, my investment portfolio, and a lot more. Have a good one, and see you next time.
1:04:13 Speaker 03 This testimonial is being provided by Ted Sides and Capital Allocators, who have been compensated a flat fee by WCM. This payment was made in connection with Capital Allocators' testimonial and production of podcasts, and does not depend on the success or level of business generated. The opinions expressed are solely those of Capital Allocators and may not reflect the opinions of others. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Please visit wcminvest.com for WCM's ADV and further information.
Previous [REPLAY] Paul Black - Gratitude, Fun, and Growth Stocks (Capital Allocators, EP.51) Next Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467) Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
