The Exchanges

Q Great to see you, Ted. Well, we're going to do a fun perspective on your 25 years here at BBR. I thought it might be good to start with the two bookends. What did BBR look like at the beginning, and what's BBR like today?

A In some ways, the bookend of the start is unrecognizable compared to what it's like today. There were five of us day one, and it was early 2000. If you picture the environment, you had dot-com bubble was raging, no end in sight there. You had five twenty-something-year-olds gathering to be part of that internet rage by creating a business that was nothing like the internet. The five of us had an alignment in terms of what we believed and what we wanted for a business, and so we took that idea and we made some tough career choices to leave the good jobs that we had and start from scratch. So day one was in Brett's apartment. That was where we spent our first few months surrounded by computer boxes and makeshift desks, and we got going. And where we are today is we have a 190 people at the firm. In three offices, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, we manage money exclusively for wealthy families. There are about a 180 families where we're overseeing their wealth, and that's thirty two billion dollars, so the average family wealth is about a hundred and fifty million dollars.

AI assessment note: “There were five of us day one... And where we are today is we have a 190”

Q So if we look between the bookends, what have been the most important milestones in the business that led from those early examples of how you're getting better to where we are today?

A We'll do these in chronological order, not necessarily in terms of order importance. Brett made this point before in oh three or oh four, we hired our first HR director. We were 15 or 20 people at the time. It came from a discussion we had with another friend of ours who looked at our firm and said, your balance sheet only has human assets. You have no physical assets and you have no HR director. Something's not right. And that was like, okay, we really need to focus on talent, focus on hiring, focus on a People focus on career management. So that has been a long time coming, but that was a demarcation, a point that we made. That was one of our early call centers, and we made it. Oh, wait, no nine. That was new. Anybody who lived through that, I can still feel it. I remember the conversations you and I had around, what does this mean for the banking system? Questions that you don't ask yourself in business school, or certainly not anywhere from the nineties and the early 2000 that we had come from. Dot com was totally different. This was a real fundamental stress that the banking system, the financial system isn't going to work the way that it did. And it was a point where our clients were in free fall. They were in panic mode. No matter how much we diversified their portfolio and had lots of strategies that were uncorrelated, it didn't matter. And so learning to get ahead of t…

AI assessment note: “We'll do these in chronological order, not necessarily in terms of order importance.”

Q So what's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family?

A I do trips with a bunch of friends that we call Go West Young Man, and we will go find somewhere in the mountains. We've been to Telluride, Moab, we just got back from Tucson. It's just an adventure experience. We do gravel bike riding, we do trail running, trail racing, and a lot of fun. And I think half the fun is, of course, that you're together with your old friends, the other half is Being in a really cool place where you get head clearing time. And I think these closing questions don't always have to have a moral to the story, but I would say that it's an important part of being successful in business is having time outside of business. One of the principles that Brett and I believed very early on, and we started a sabbatical policy at BBR, that anybody who works at the firm for 12 years has extended time months away from the firm, where They're disconnected. No emails, no texts, no teams, no slacks. You are out there. So we've done our sabbatical, and I try to do these go west trips as a little week here or there as a way to capture some of that.

AI assessment note: “I do trips with a bunch of friends that we call Go West Young Man”

Q What were some of the other important and first principles of your business as you laid it out in addition to this broadly diversified investment approach?

A Well, the principles really were to create peace of mind for wealthy families. Once that's your North Star, you build the whole firm around that, and that's still who we are today. Our services are oriented towards serving wealthy families. Our partners wake up Thinking about how to serve wealthy families. Our employees come to the office every day thinking about wealthy families. Our investment strategies are always thought of from an after-tax family dynamics. We have family education practice groups internally that all are oriented towards supporting what a family needs to feel like everything's going to be okay. And I think one of those early aha moments for us was a few years into the business, and we were meeting with a client who was Financial professional, successful on Wall Street. He said, I want you guys to know something. He's like, I've given my wife your business card. This was the day when they actually, there were business cards. And he's like, I told her, carry it in your wallet. If anything happens to me, that's the number you call. And it's like, okay, everything else has been placed. We've gotten the client in a place that he just feels like everything's going to be okay.

AI assessment note: “the principles really were to create peace of mind for wealthy families.”

Q How do you build the culture of an organization around that idea of providing that peace of mind for your clients?

A It starts with everybody needs to row in the same direction. The idea of assembling a boat of rowers where the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and that's because you've just got to put that together where you've got complementary skills together. This is not to pick on Goldman. They are a great firm. We would not be here if it weren't for them, but that firm is where there's tension. Between the goals of the individual rep and the firm's goals. And we said, that's just not for us. Look, we had a huge advantage. We started in 2000, not in 1862. We could start from scratch and say, nobody at BBR gets paid on commission. Everything's oriented towards team. Put the team together. The person who's involved in a client relationship who's handling moving money is just as vital as the person who's actually making decisions around investment strategies. And when everybody feels a sense internally of Oh, I matter. I care. I impact the relationship with the client. I think it brings out the best in them. That is a big secret sauce of how I wish we could replicate it, put it in paper. I think a lot of it's leadership by example, but in the end, that is what I think differentiates us.

AI assessment note: “nobody at BBR gets paid on commission. Everything's oriented towards team.”

Q So if you take me back, you said you had a few ideas of what this business would be. What were those ideas back at the beginning?

A I'll give you the big idea, which is what it is today, and that is to deliver for wealthy families, is to provide a singular pursuit to give them peace of mind that their financial needs were going to be met. How we were going to do that is very wrong, but what we wanted to do wasn't, and it is exactly what our mission is today. It's part of our culture. It's who we are. What we wanted to do is take the lessons that we had. Brett and I both came from Goldman and our other founding partners also came from big banks and say, there are some flaws in that model. What can we do differently? As a boutique, without legacy issues, without being a bank, to be able to do it better.

AI assessment note: “I'll give you the big idea, which is what it is today”