Brian Douglas, CEO – Graham Capital (EP.61)

Hello, I'm Ted Sidies. Explores the inner workings. Through conversation, and the first time. And finance, you'll hear how key operating partners run their businesses. You can join our mailing list. Capitol. At Capital Allocator. McDonald. My guest on today's show is Brian Douglas. Brian is the CEO of Graham Capital, one of the longest running macro investors. Going from CFO to the CEO seat is not a common route in our business, so I was excited to talk to Brian all about it.

Brian's career path started in public accounting, and he spent the last 20 years at Graham moving from the To becoming CEO in twenty. team. Brian uncovers how Graham has built culture over its 25-year history. Scus Graham's evolution from a hedge fund. to its expansion of product into sub-devise funds, usage strategies, and adding discretionary trading capabilities. We then cover key elements of founder level succession planning and how to develop emerging leadership.

And with that, please enjoy my conversation with Brian Douglas.

Well, Brian, thanks for joining me today. I'd like to go back. How did you find your way to one of the longest running macro managers? Well thanks for having me, Scott. It's a real pleasure to be here talking with you. I often say my story isn't really one of big leaps, it's one of steady steps. Going all the way back, my parents moved here to the US from a small farming community in Ireland in nineteen sixty-four. They came here with three kids under the age of five and very little else.

I was born later here in the US, the only natural citizen in my family. My parents had this unwavering belief in America and what it could offer opportunity, stability, and a better life. And I grew up watching them work hard, save what they could and build something out of very little. My father drove a truck in the five boroughs in New York City.

Having grown up on a farm operating big equipment was a natural transition for him. My mother cleaned houses during the day and she worked at night as a nurse's aide. My first job was delivering newspapers when I was ten years old. Back then you had to buy a route. So I bought a paper route from an older kid in our neighborhood and at that time I think it had something like fifteen houses and over the years I expanded it to like fifty.

Then I remember probably when I was about twelve, they changed to morning delivery and that was a shock for me. I did not like having to get up and deliver newspapers before I went to school. But what I remember about it was my mother. There were a lot of days as I remember it where I had trouble dragging myself out of bed early enough to deliver newspapers before school.

She'd come home after having worked all night and she'd spend an hour delivering the newspapers for me before she went to bed. And that was a small thing at the time, but that kind of sacrifice left a mark on me. That type of work ethic is impactful and It's always inspired me to work harder and try to be generous with my time and

make individual sacrifices for a greater good. I studied plumbing and heating in high school. I went to a regional vocational technical school and then out of high school I joined the pipe fitters union and I worked full time as a plumber. The funny thing is I always think about how you can take something from every situation. And so it's not obvious that in my current work there's a lot of skills that would carry over from being a plumber, but

One of the most formative mentors I've ever had was this man named George, who I worked for when I was a plumber. He taught me a lot of life skills. Take pride in your work. Taught me about craftsmanship and discipline. Efficiency was a big one and always thinking about how to operate efficiently and apply common sense. Even though I do something very different now, those are skills that have always stayed with me.

After a few years as a plumber, I wanted to go back to school and further my education. But having gone to a trade school, I had some catching up to do, particularly in math and English. So I enrolled in some night classes for a few semesters and once I became full time eligible I started at Western Connecticut.

applied myself to my studies. I made the dean's list every semester, not because I was smarter than the other people in the class, but just because I knew how much it took to get me there. So I was determined to work hard. I paid my way through school. And I always carried that mindset with me: show up prepared, be consistent, never act like you deserve anything, always try to earn it.

I learned a quote back then that's always stuck with me from Calvin Coolidge, former US president. And he said once, nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not, genius will not, education will not, persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. That's always stuck with me, that grittiness of just persevering. And so it's always been true in my life and it's how I try to shape my leadership in the organization.

After college, I started my career at Ernst and Young. I got my CPA license and Ernst Young was really a great place to start. They have Such a rigorous process for training people. You get such a solid foundation in accounting, in analysis, and presenting analytics and data and learning how to understand and evaluate a company. Their process for professional development advancement is top notch. It's a great organization.

And after I was there, I moved into a controller position at a private equity firm and was there for a bunch of years before coming to Graham. Then I landed here. And throughout my career when I think back on it. I've been really fortunate to have some very good mentors, people that took an interest in me, provided guidance along the way. I'm really fortunate to also have married my best friend, right? As I was starting out my career, my wife Tamra's always been

the ultimate thought partner and sounding board for me. So it's a good partnership. That's an exciting and unusual path to the hedge fund world. And how did you hear about Graham Capital? When I was working in private equity, I really liked the firm. I was working at a small firm. And at the time, Graham was going through some exponential growth. They were hiring some more senior people to come in and lead departments.

their accounting department was one where they needed to bring somebody in with some experience. So I remember getting a call from a recruiter that I knew and he said. Well, you have a conversation with this person. He's the CFO at Graham and he's building out a team. Ironically enough, they were two blocks away from where I worked. So it was East. I came in, had a conversation and So it sounds really interesting. I feel like I could make an impact there. And so I came to work.

started as the manager in the financial reporting department and over the years worked up to run that group and then became the CFO and from there moved into my current role. It's always been part of the culture gram. Our chairman Ken is a master at seeing the untapped potential and people crowing people from within the firm and investing in'em. And so it's been a really good ride for me here so far.

you're now the CEO of the company. It's always great to hear how there's a path for us operational people to actually get in that type of role. And I'd be curious of what that path looked like in your own words. I always tell people, in my opinion, there are several things that happen that help you grow in your career. One of them is you always have to invest in yourself.

And you have to work to learn new things and think about not only the skills you have now, but what skills do you need to get to that next level? But opportunity also has to present itself and you never know when that's gonna come. So the best you can do is always be prepared. And that was me.

When the firm decided it needed a new CFO, I was a choice, the COO and vice chairman at the time that our function reported into. I had established a good relationship with them. I think I had built a reputation here for working hard and being honest and being accurate. And so it was a natural transition for me into the CFO role, having my CPA license, accounting. This was my wheelhouse.

But I never stopped there. I tried to always find ways to broaden my mandate, ways to add more value to Graham. In fact, I was the first CFO and the firm's history to be added to our executive committee. And at the time I was added to that committee, I really saw that as. not only an opportunity, but a responsibility to try and bring something new to the table with these other people that were on this committee and were running the firm. I thought about

Where are my strengths? Well, I understand the financials of the firm in depth and I'm gonna bring that. and I'm gonna make sure that the people that run this firm and make decisions have as much information as is gonna be helpful to make these well informed decisions. So I always have tried to

take advantage of an opportunity and do the best I can with it. If you tell me the sink needs to be cleaned, I'm gonna clean the sink. It's gonna be the cleanest sink you've ever seen and I'm gonna do anything in between. Golfer Gary Player once was famous for saying, you know, he's a very accomplished golfer. The more I practice, the luckier I get. I've always taken a slightly different stance and stolen that from him and I was saying the harder I work, the luckier I get.

my path has been a little wiggly and that I come from a non traditional background to be the CEO of a hedge fund. But what's just been consistent is leaning into the opportunities, trying to do the best I can with whatever needs to be done. And thankfully I've always been here at a firm that just sees the value in that, has believed in me and given me the opportunity.

And is that a distinction between being a controller CFO versus a strategic CFO and explaining and sharing to the executive committee and the chairman, here's the value that we can provide. We can look around corners. where controller maybe heads down. I always encourage people at every level to be the exactly what you just have heads up.

Where else can I add value? And that goes a lot into thinking broadly about your organization and you can't be heads down in your department and a successful strategy is not one where you say, I'm gonna focus on my knitting and I'm gonna stay in my lane and whatever else is happening is not my concern. My perspective is a little different. The growth of our organization is everybody's concern and the people who own this organization

They compensate us to be here and make it the best it can be. We all have a responsibility to always be thinking about what's best for your firm. And that is the strategic perspective. Always thinking about how to grow. But the accounting background in me always brings things back to the value proposition and a risk reward. What am I risking and what am I gaining? And does that make sense economically? That's the way I come at it.

I wanna back up a little bit and just share a little bit about the gram story and and exactly what you do and where you fit into the ecosystem. We're a global hedge fund. We're currently 20 billion in assets under management, and we focus on macro trading and we do it two ways. We have quantitative macro strategies and we have discretionary macro strategies.

And our mandate is to deliver attractive returns, absolute and risk-adjusted returns through what we would consider diversified investment strategies that span a broad range of markets. We employ rigorous risk management and portfolio construction techniques. like you would expect of any institutional size hedge fund. And our macro strategies, they take positions

based on big picture views of the global economy. We trade interest rates, currencies, commodities, equities across different countries and regions, and we try to identify opportunities based on policy shifts or geopolitical developments or structural imbalances that are present. Macro is interesting in that it's unconstrained. It's not tied to any single sector or asset class. It can go where the opportunity is.

That flexibility allows us to generate differentiated returns across a whole host of different market environments. Our strategies are uncorrelated to traditional stocks and bonds over time and they can be really additive to any well diversified portfolio. Beyond macro, we also employ teams that trade strategies that we would consider orthogonal or diversifying to macro. So specifically single name equities, convertible bonds, corporate credit.

That's what we do at Graham and when we think about Graham and how the firm has grown over time. When I started here in two thousand four, we were five billion in AUM and we had under a hundred people. Today we're twenty billion and we're two hundred and forty two people as we sit here today. The growth story of the firm has been a really interesting one. Growth isn't just about assets and gathering assets. It's really about durability, discipline, impact.

continuous improvement and evolution. When I joined, the firm already had a strong reputation on our quantitative macro trading side. We were known for managed futures programs. But at that time when we were about five billion, our founder Kent Tropin, he's always had this entrepreneurial mindset and always been growth oriented. And he saw that to serve clients better, we needed to offer more than just one approach to macro. He

started hiring discretionary portfolio managers. He hired the first one in nineteen ninety eight. As I was joining in two thousand four, we now had some history with discretionary portfolio managers and we were launching our first purely discretionary fund. Today we run both of those side by side, systematic. macro, discretionary macro, and then we have some products that combine the two together. These are two distinct styles of macro trading at the same firm.

And while the percentage of assets that each one of them makes up changes over time, they've always both contributed significantly to the firm and they do so in an uncorrelated way. In the last twenty years, the correlation between our discretionary macro and our systematic macro is point two. Very low correlation. So they're just really different ways to trade macro. The systematic programs

They're purely data driven. They tend to be a little longer term in nature. They do well in trending market environments. When the market moves or data driven, the quant models tend to handle that well. Our discretionary managers, on the other hand, they're nimble, conviction based. Great at responding to more nuanced, idiosyncratic shifts and opportunities, feel for the market and feel for the momentum in the market.

With a point two correlation in terms of durability, impact, evolution, it's compelling to offer these two things that offer real diversification and give our clients good exposure to macro in very different ways. But we didn't stop there. So over time, in addition to macro, we added corporate credit strategies and quantitative long short equity, also a dedicated solutions business.

That's where we partner with our clients to understand their portfolio objectives and help them identify which of the building blocks we have here at Graham that can help them meet their own investment objectives. working on customized solutions. It's something that been in our DNA since the beginning, customized accounts, but recently we've dedicated more resources in an organized way. And that's a really exciting development.

there's just a tremendous amount of opportunity to help customize and whether it be fitting an account into a regulatory framework like a USITS compliant account or liquid all SEC registered product. These ideas of taking what we do and tailoring them to fit into a specific objective or regulatory framework has always been interesting to us. One of the questions I want to go back to is related to the discretionary piece.

Having spent a little time at a quant firm and investing in discretionary managers, the DNA of those people are a little bit different. Culture is such an important part of the gram story. How do you get that balance right as you grow and evolve? Culture's everything. It's not a buzzword. It's a system. It's something you intentionally build. Your corporate culture is like a living, breathing organism that requires a lot. But as it relates to

quantitative versus discretionary. It is true that if we generalize the people with those backgrounds can tend to think about things a little bit differently and how you balance that. The quantitative systems tend to be unemotional and mathematically oriented discretionary traders are people and we have to always remember, no matter how good they are, they are people and there's emotions. Everybody has different perspectives on things.

One of the things I try to tell everyone around here is if you work in human resources or legal or facilities where Your perspective on your day may not be a tick-by-tick perspective. The things you work on may not be that sensitive, but always remember you're in a real-time trading environment. There are a lot of people around here who their entire world changes tick by tick with the market.

We need to always have that real-time perspective. If you're a trader and you're staring at your screen and your portfolio is ticking every two seconds. When you ask HR a question. And they don't get back to you for three hours. In their world, it's like, yeah, I'm working on it. I'll get back to them. In their world, three hours is a million miles away from two seconds. I think all of our people here do a really good job of understanding that.

and considering the perspective of the people around them. And you can't answer every question in two seconds, but you can say to them, I got your question. I'm going to work on it. Here's what I'm going to come back to you. The way you make those two things work is you understand people's perspectives and you try to meet them where they are and be sensitive to that. I think it works well for us.

culture is bespoke. And we can talk about culture being a singular thing, but it's really unique. And you hit on some important points there that what's right for Graham is not for everyone. And trying to find that right fit is really important. to find two hundred plus employees that are pointing in the right direction.

It is. I feel a deep responsibility to both the owners of the firm and the two hundred and forty plus people that work here. I think a lot about where those responsibilities intersect, what's good for the business. and what's good for our people. I'm always looking for where that overlap exists and then leaning into it. That's a big part of my day. When people feel a true sense of belonging, it comes through in their work. They perform better. One study I love.

found that employees who feel a strong sense of belonging to their workplace are fifty-six percent more productive and they take seventy-five percent fewer sick days. That's power. I like to move around the office, interact with people, hear what they're doing, say hello, ask them how their weekend was. organic interactions, they're important in building community and they're also very informative to me. It creates this feedback loop for me to know what's going on. Onboarding is another big one.

There's another study I like to reference all the time. And people who work here are really tired of hearing me reference this study all the time. Organizations. They get their onboarding right, improve retention by over 80%. Employees who view their onboarding as successful are something like three times more likely to still work there in two years. It's crazy. Start the way you intend to continue. Our HR team, they're very aware of this. They're meticulous about their onboarding process.

It's important to get all the paperwork right and the logistics right and have the forms filled out and we do all of that. But then they go the extra mile. They take a lot of little steps to make sure people's first days and weeks run smoothly. And that those people know we're excited to have them join our team and we care enough about their first day to be prepared when they arrive.

Their arrival here is not just one of many things happening that day. It's the main event. It's a powerful way to make them know they're welcome and they belong. It's not only important in how you manage your culture because it's just the right thing to do. but it also translates into more efficient and productive environment. It's a win win. We take that really seriously. Every year we run a employee survey. We survey all the employees. It's an anonymous survey. It's not just a check a box.

It's to really listen and understand their experience. We don't just ask easy questions. We ask the hard ones. I want the feedback because that's how we get better. We always want to make informed decisions about every aspect of what we're doing, just as our clients expect us. to be good risk managers and good decision makers in every aspect of the investment process, our employees expect us to do the very same when it comes to employment matters and culture.

We do a series of small group luncheons that I host with junior team members, people who have recently joined the firm, either right out of university or shortly thereafter. These people bring a different perspective to the office. than maybe some of our more experienced professionals do and I wanna hear it. Their perspective is valuable and I wanna make sure we as a firm don't have any blind spots and we're not overlooking something. It's an incredibly competitive

environment for talent. And it's really hard to find the right people and retain them. We want to work hard on that and we wanna make sure we're hearing from these people. All of this ties together. Surround yourself with good people, always be willing to listen to them. give their opposing views due consideration. That's how the best decisions are made. That's such a critical piece. I'm curious to really fold this into

the growth of the company itself. You're Row Eight in Connecticut, which is not a typical place for a hedge fund, but also you've grown offices. I'd love to hear the interplay of your growth and how do you keep that intact as you're opening up new offices, whether it be in the US or elsewhere? One of the things that's always been important to us is if you're in a gram office, it should feel like you're working for gram.

Different offices shouldn't have their own subculture. We want our culture to permeate. The majority of our employees are here in our headquarters in Rowan, Connecticut. We're about an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes outside of New York City. So in Fairfield County suburbs. We also have an office in West Palm Beach, Florida. We have an office in London. And recently, this past March, so March 1st of 2025, we opened our first office in New York City. Which was really exciting.

Trying to always be cognizant of first of all the physical aspects, the look and feel of the office and the comfort of the office, how that translates through the connectivity of the office. Really easy to call people in other offices, just like they're here with. One extension and the way we connect over Zoom or WebEx and everybody's accessibility to that. But then it goes more in the culture and it comes to senior leadership. We need to be in all of these locations and we need to be

culture carriers. The most recent ad, the New York office, was an interesting one. We're in our thirty first year. We went for thirty years without having a New York City office. One might say, well, why now? What changed? Being an hour from New York City, we historically haven't felt like we needed to have an office there. But what we know now is Number one, the competitive landscape for talent. It's very, very competitive.

What's always been true is there are lots of people that live up here somewhere in Fairfield County that don't want to commute into New York City. Equally, there's lots of people that live in New York City that don't want to commute up to Fairfield County as it relates to recruiting and retaining talent. Especially since we came out of a covet world post twenty twenty, twenty twenty one where everybody worked remotely, flexibility around work location became a more important thing.

We feel it's important to have the members of our workforce in an office and be together. And we're better when we're together and there's synergy that's created. And so we want to make that easy for people. And opening an office in New York City accomplished a couple things. It removed one simple barrier around location for a portion of the workforce that doesn't want to commute to Can I get gram as a viable option for those people.

And the people who work here who don't want to commute up here from the city every day, maybe now they wanna be in the New York City office or they wanna do it occasionally. Also, it gives us better access to our clients. Most of our clients are accustomed to coming up here to see us and have been doing it for years.

But there are times where maybe they're traveling through New York City and they're not planning a trip to Connecticut. And so now we can meet them there. It makes us a little more accessible. If we think back to the inception of the firm in 1994, today, as we sit here with 20 billion assets, We still have some clients that have been with us from the very beginning. We're really proud of that, that idea of long-term partnership.

We always want to be accessible to our clients and having these different locations does that. London is the same. I try to spend time in each of the offices all of the other members of the executive committee do the same and try to carry that culture through and make sure we're always mindful of everybody.

I do wanna share the fun fact about the headquarters is a historic landmark. Is that correct? It is a historic landmark. It was built in the early nineteen hundreds as the summer residence to a big corporate executive, the president of US Steel. And then over the years it became some different things, but at one point it was owned by the Rand Corporation, which then became Sperry Rand and a unique story is

If you've ever been here and you see it, the building does look like it was a big summer residence for somebody. It's a Tudor style mansion. And across the street, what's now the Row Aiden Library, that was the horse barn way back then. And we have lots of really cool pictures of it. The Rand Corporation was working on building the first computer in the US in that barn across the street way back when. So there's a really cool technological bent to the building we're in now.

They were talking about correlation a long time. Absolutely. As you grow, how do you think about communication and how that has changed going from early days of tacit information flows? Any inflection points that You could relay to others as they think about their own growth. Growth for us has been slow, steady, and calculated. It's sustainable.

thinking about building the firm with respect to the next step and scalability and responsibility. Growth has never been just about the asset grab. It's been about strategic growth, sustainable growth, and where we meet our clients, as we talked about that durability, that discipline. I think on the technology and the infrastructure side, building the right foundation from day one is really important. Set up your operational infrastructure to scale. Always think about the trust.

your clients are placing in you when they allocate money for you to manage. And with every decision, you've got to ask yourself, is this what the clients expect of me? Is this the type of control environment and platform that they want, that they expect and that can scale? It can be really tempting to wait till you need something to build it.

But when you take that approach, there's always a risk that by the time you realize you need something, you might have missed an opportunity. You've got to think about that growth perspective. Make your compliance function strong. Your reporting functions gotta be clean. Your tech stack has got to be scalable and secure. Those are the things that will build long-term trust. And in our business,

Trust is everything. A perspective that's helpful is when you're thinking about building things, systems, processes, et cetera. think about it in a way that assumes you're gonna be successful. I learned that perspective from our chairman Ken many years ago. It doesn't mean apply too much confidence or hubris to your decisions, but it does mean build things that will scale and work into the future, not just the present. On the people leadership side, I have three sons.

And I'm always building a leadership playbook for them in the hopes that maybe someday they might be interested in reading some of it. My advice to leaders and to them is the same and they've heard it from me a thousand times. Be of service. Be generous. Make sacrifices for the greater good. Earn your success. Earn your place. Never show up thinking you deserve something. Put people first.

Earn their trust and always look to add value. Life is a relationship business. Be genuine and operate with integrity. Good things will happen. And you guys do a fair amount of community work and love to hear a little bit about that. Philanthropy is always been an area of focus for our chairman and something that the firm models really well.

Ken has always been generous to people in need and that's inspirational. He currently serves as the chairman of the Robin Hood Foundation. If you know that foundation, it's an organization dedicated to fighting poverty in New York City. He spends a lot of time volunteering there and that's inspiring work and Tamara and I are proud to be supporters of that cause as well. In my personal life

My partner Tamra and I we support Ability Beyond is a real passion project for us. I sit on their board and they're a couple committees, Finance Endowment Committee. That's an organization that serves Over three thousand adults with disabilities in Connecticut and New York. Their mission statement is their job is to discover, build and celebrate ability in all people. And I love that. The people who work there

I find them inspiring. The CEO there has been at the organization for forty years doing this work. The staff, they're these kind people who make you want to be better because of how they engage and how they care and how they meet these people in need with dignity and joy. It's the kind of work you just wanna support when you see it.

I strongly feel adults with disabilities are an underserved demographic in our society and helping an organization that provides them with support, whether it's a day program or

a group home or independent living, employment training and all these other services. It's really important work and it's impactful. And while we're all really inundated with our day to day work, it's really important to think about society as a whole and try to see how we can share our time, our treasure, our talents for the greater good.

It's great to hear that you guys are still closely interacting and I'm curious on the thesis of succession because it's something that we all talk about and think about. I'd be curious to get your thoughts on what were the key elements of a successful transition. From one CEO to another. Succession planning and successful transitions, they're important to the long term health of an organization. It's really important to be something that's done well. And I think to do them well

It can be difficult if you don't have a strategy and you don't have a plan from the onset. Obviously over an extended transition period. you run the risk that you may need to adapt and evolve, but you have to have a plan. At Graham, we've had a lot of success.

ensuring sufficient overlap. Our long term strategy of promoting from within wherever we can helps in this regard. That's how it works for me. When I move from the chief financial officer position into my current role, I had the benefit of working closely with our then CEO and COO over a year long transition period. I had reported and worked closely with these two individuals for many years. I had a good working relationship with'em. But during that year

I was able to really pick their brains, dig into how they thought about things. And I also received a ton of guidance from our chairman who was always generous with his time as well. Having been at the firm so long and having had such a history with so many people at the organization made my transition a little bit easier than it otherwise would be. I think one of the most important things you can give a succession plan is time.

More reps, more scenarios come up over a longer cycle. And if you get a chance to test your thinking and approach with the benefits of the experienced thought partners

who you're taking over for, that guidance and perspective, it's invaluable. Of course there's scenarios where one may not have the benefit of time, and that's okay too, but it certainly underscores the importance of the transition plan and a timeline around how you're going to assume responsibilities and equally important, who are the people around you you can rely on for institutional knowledge, for historical lessons.

for what worked and what didn't. And it's important to make sure you have a real alignment of interest across your entire leadership team. It's important to always be growing and evolving. But it's equally important to never forget about the past and the lessons you've learned. That's a real balance trying to be on that knife set. Specifically to Graham, another key component of succession is redundancy. Much of our governance is structured around committees.

whether it's our executive committee or our daily risk committee or investment committee that makes allocation decisions, having groups of key decision makers together always puts multiple people in each conversation. And that really helps build a deeper bench by sharing the knowledge and more participants in a conversation.

it creates that redundancy and it builds a broader knowledge base across the whole organization. Our chairman has been committed to hiring and growing the next generation of leadership for a long time. He's still actively in the day-to-day of our firm, but he wants to make sure the firm is set up to prosper for many years to come. Committees, knowledge sharing, overlap, good mentoring are all super important parts.

In the past year, we hired a new president and co CIO who joined our firm, Jens Forenbach, and he's working side by side with our previous CIO now our co CIO with the rest of the leadership team. Another example of that succession planning. He's just been a great ad to our firm and brings with him So much energy and a new perspective and and next.

chapter of building out our leadership team. I'm really excited about the dynamic we have across our whole leadership team. It's special. Looking at your leadership style, what makes for a good hire at Graham that integrates well with your own leadership style?

Succession is also not only about the long-term health of the organization, but it's also about maintaining that trust that clients. place in us and the institutional nature that they expect us to run the business. I think about strategic levers, the different pillars that I think about in addition to culture, quality of alignment over quantity of investors and making sure we're partnering with the right investors. Over half of our AUM is currently dedicated to customized accounts.

back to that idea we talked about solutions and where we talk to our clients about what they need and build the right solutions. The next one, integration, efficiency, technology is one that's always big to me. And then there's the other two. There's Sustainable growth and how we think about growing, every dollar raised should strengthen our firm, not stretch it.

That means we need to have the discipline to scale thoughtfully. And especially in our discretionary business where it requires more people, we're never interested in just amassing large amounts of capital, but rather developing these longstanding partnerships with our clients. and figuring out how we can help them. The fourth

fiduciary responsibility. That to me comes into succession planning and not only making sure we have all of the right thought leaders across the firm, but that they're training their replacement and they're training the people behind them. We like to frame succession sometimes in this proverbial if this person got hit by a bus, which is this generic way of saying if this person becomes unavailable. The reality is

people can become unavailable to make a decision for lots of reasons. And sometimes we don't get to make that choice as to when we are or not available. So it's really important to have that deep bench and have that succession plan. so that our clients can expect the same service risk management. fiduciary responsibility the good stewards of their capital, regardless of what's going on with any individual. And so that's been the idea of building out

the leadership team a little bit more. Leadership is a lot about connecting the dots, making sure everyone is aligned on mission. Everybody understands what the others are doing, why it matters. And how we execute that together. I try to manage the connective tissue across the firm and try to always have a feel for the pulse.

Best way to do that is to be present. I like to think of myself as boots on the ground, shoulder to shoulder type of leader. I like to move around the office, talk with people, hear what they're working on, how they're feeling. Leadership's also about service and that idea for me comes from my faith. My Catholic identity drives a lot of my thinking.

my North Star and it drives me in giving back however you can, sharing your time, sharing your knowledge, sharing your talent with others, that permeates throughout the firm and how we think about things, how we approach our work. Sometimes people say, Well how do you approach your day? What's your schedule like?

preparation for a day starts the night before. I always review my calendar for the next day before I leave. My assistant sends me this really nice snapshot and it's easy to digest. And I always ask everyone Send me an agenda at least twenty four hours before our meeting so we can make the best use of our time by being prepared. I wanna be sure I'm in a position to bring my best self to our discussion. And that's how I show respect for people's time.

And I want them to come prepared and that's how they show respect for my time. At home, Tamara and I will always talk about what's happening the next day. And before I go to bed, I wanna know what's going on in my household or what's going on with her, what's going on with our kids. And I like to know that it builds that connection, family, work. My day is one universe and it not only gives me perspective, it reminds me why we do this. It grounds me. When I get up in the morning,

First thing I do, quick check of markets, headlines, emails. Then I like to start my day with exercise, get the blood flowing. I'm a strong believer. There's a connection between strong body and strong mind. That early movement clears my head, sets the tone for the day that follows. After that, spend a few minutes in prayer. Then I have a healthy breakfast. Fuel matters, you gotta fuel the engine.

I'm a big believer in showing up to your day, rested, nourished, ready for action. From there I'll check in on markets and portfolio a little more detail, maybe deal with any emails and knock out any pressing items before I leave the house. And then during the commute, I'll catch a few market related podcasts.

I have a couple apps that summarize major financial headlines. That way when I show up at the office, I'm ready to dig in on whatever's happening. Of course, like everybody I show up with my own agenda. But there's lots of other people around me that need my attention and help. And so I wanna be available to them and ready to help wherever I can slot in. Being a servant leader is a really important role today.

You've been at Graham for more than twenty years. What excites you going forward? So much. It's such an interesting time. There's so much going on in the world that creates opportunities and macros. It's a really good time for what we do, and it's a really good time for us to be in a position to add value to a lot of our clients. I'm energized. The launch of the New York office was a big step for Graham, providing that flexibility and access to our clients.

The opportunity set for macro is really exciting. We're seeing a lot of allocators that want to talk about macro understand what we do. That's really exciting. And then for me, also focused on balance. The markets are twenty four seven. It never stops. So it's important to find the right ways and places to create some space, some

stillness, family time, time with my, as I mentioned, my thought partner, my wife Tamron. And by doing that, I feel like I'm in a position to show up to work and at home the same way, open and available, show up with integrity.

Not everybody in the workplace wants to blur the lines between personal and professional and that's okay. We respect that. But for those that do, for those that want to develop A more personal, professionally appropriate relationship, I want people to know I'm here, I'm present, I'm open to that. What's next for me? What excites me? It's that helping people become the best version of their professional self.

Helping others grow, listening closely, because that investment we make in people is what makes our firm great and it's what's gonna continue to grow. A lot of great things going on here and the great leadership team to work with. What I say to people when I interview them is there's two hundred and forty something people at Graham and

I would love to have lunch with any one of them and that's unique and special. I just love the people in this organization and that makes coming to work a lot of fun. The other question I have is what one book would you recommend to others? I recently started using this app called Blinkist. Because there are just so many good books to read and way too little time for me to do it. So Blinkis takes a book and

chops it down into thirty minutes of just the salient points. So if you're reading books about learning things, it boils it down for you. And then you can always obviously read the full book, but Outside of blankest books, for me, from modern to the classics, there's a few. Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering is a really impactful book to me. We spend so much time meeting and collaborating. This book really reminds us to be thoughtful in how we prepare ourselves.

and how we get the most out of that time. And then another one for me, What Got You Here, Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. He's just done so much work, extraordinary work on people science and performance. And then on the lighter side, I like to periodically go back and read Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. That one's a little off the beaten path in this conversation, but Dickens does

an artful job of creating an understanding of the French Revolution. It is just a great reminder to treat people how you want to be treated, which is the exact opposite of what the two distinct groups in that story do. And you see how it works out. Life is a relationship business. People matter. Well, Brian, this is really insightful. I appreciate your time and it's great hearing the Graham story and your role within it. Scott, thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for And see you next time.