In this episode of LeverUp, we sit down with Michael Picardi, a mid-career investor relations professional with a fascinating background. From starting his career in fintech with Masterworks and transitioning to private wealth at Alliance Bernstein, Michael shares valuable insights into the world of finance and investor relations.
Join us as Michael discusses his experiences working in a fast-paced fintech startup, the challenges of cold calling, and the importance of building strong client relationships. He also offers advice for those interested in breaking into the finance industry, particularly in investor relations, and shares tips on networking, career growth, and managing time in a high-pressure environment.
Whether you’re a finance professional, an aspiring investor relations expert, or just interested in hearing about career journeys in the financial world, this episode is packed with actionable insights and advice.
Key Topics:
- Investor relations career path
- Fintech startup challenges
- Masterworks art investment platform
- Transitioning to private wealth management
- Building a book of business
- Networking and relationship management
- Tips for success in finance and investor relations
Connect with Michael:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelfpicardi
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Listen to the podcast here
Art, Wealth, And Cold Calls: Michael Picardi’s Path To Success
We are sitting down with Michael Picardi. He’s a mid-career investor relations professional. He’s got a great background. He went to Yale. He was in RTC. I’d love to hear a little bit about your background, and then we’ll dive right in.
Thanks for having me here. I’m excited to be here. Beautiful office, I must say. First time in Tampa, so it didn’t disappoint.
We were picking this out. Everybody’s anti-commercial real estate now. We got a nice place for a good price and have a strong work-from-the-office or work-on-the-road culture. Why don’t you walk me through your background on your career, where you went to school, and then let’s talk about that? I will dive into some places. I know you have a couple of cool interesting things that people want to know about.
I did RTC for four years, but I did graduate from my undergrad at Fairfield with a degree in finance. Right after graduating college, something you know you and the viewers would be interested in. I started my career at a fintech platform called Masterworks.
I hear the ads for them on some of the podcasters.
They’re everywhere. YouTube, Sirius XM, podcasts. They do a great job with marketing over there. For those who aren’t familiar, Masterworks is an art investment platform. They allow you to invest in fractional shares of blue-chip art. It’s an interesting and great way to diversify your portfolio. As someone interested in artwork, it’s a cool way to own Basquiat, Picasso, and other contemporary blue-chip artists.
How long after the company was founded did you start working there?
It was founded in 2017, I joined in January of 2021. It’s cool. When I joined, it was my first job out of college. They teach you in business school to show up in a suit and tie. I was expecting this office building in Lower Manhattan. I didn’t know the city too well. First off, I got lost on the subway. I still showed up early and it ended up being that they own 3 floors of a loft in SoHo. The ground floor was the gallery, the basement floor was operations, and then the top floor was the sales team.
How many employees were there?
I always say around under 30. First off, I couldn’t even get into the building, but I ended up getting in and finding the sales team floor. I walked in with my suit and tie, and everyone in there was in a t-shirt. I was like, “Did I find the right place?” Everyone there was great. It was always fun. I will never forget when my first job showed up way overdressed. The next day, I showed up in jeans.
Better than showing up underdressed. You’re going to go both ways. You got to go to one of them.
Always has, but I loved it there. It was phenomenal. The office was great. Joining a company early on, you learn a lot of skills and wear a lot of different hats. I was on the sales team there, and essentially our job was an SDR. You were calling 200 people a day.
Explain what an SDR is because we are trying to dive into the career aspect.
SDR Sales Development Representatives. You are essentially cold-calling. In my Masterworks, we were calling warm leads, but you are calling clients who have an interest in the product. They haven’t booked an appointment yet with the AE, which is the Account Executive. It’s the person who finishes the deal and closes it. Your job is an introduction. The CRM was HubSpot, and we were going through a list of 200 clients a day. Two hundred calls a day. Calling them and saying, “This is Michael from Masterworks. Are you interested in investing in art?”
You are not selling a timeshare. Somebody ostensibly, signed up for a web form or something. At 200 calls a day, what percentage picked the phone? I don’t pick up calls anymore. What percentage picked up?
I would say we were always aiming for around ten booked calls a day.
You got somebody on the phone, got a booked follow-up appointment with the account executive.
I would say you probably make 200 calls and probably get 30 or 40 pickups. There are a lot of different ways you can measure that and how successful you are. I always thought the biggest measurement of success in that role was talk time. See how long you have been holding these conversations.
Keep on the phone because they are trying to hang up on you.
You could book ten calls in your first hour of the day, but it could be people wanting to get you off the phone. I’m saying, “I will talk to you.”
Then they miss the other appointment.
That doesn’t look good for you. You wasted the AE’s time. It’s a waste of money. A good measurement of success in that role is how long you are on the phone. If you were having two hours of talk time a day and you were booking maybe less than that, 5 or 6 meetings, that was still good because you were getting these people engaged. Then most likely, they show up to the next meeting.
Back to what I was doing at Masterworks. I did that for a year. I also had a lot of hats there. Like I said, I joined when we were under 30 people working out of 3 stories of a building in SoHo. Around maybe five months into my career there. The company exploded. I remember every week for those first 5 months, we were hiring 2 new SDRs, maybe 1 or 2 new Account Executives. Then I was involved in the other aspects of the business, the operational side, but also hiring countless people in those divisions.
Time Management
This is like a part startup. Part cold call boiler room a little bit. You had to get your Series 7 and Series 63. All this going on at once. How do you prioritize your time when doing all that? Were you studying at night? You are still working 12 to 15 hours a day. How does that go?
I’m not working 12 to 15 hours. It was a good 9:00 to 5:00, very good work-life balance. We were in the office every day. It was interesting. I graduated in 2020. This is my first job. It’s a peak pandemic. You are in New York City. The bars aren’t open. It’s only outdoor dining. You still have to wear masks on a plane. We are showing up to the office five days a week with no masks.
It was interesting. All my friends I went to college with had offers rescinded because the offices were closed. Some of them were getting these massive work-from-home packages. Six monitors, VPN but they are working out of their childhood bedroom because they didn’t want to move to the city and pay rent. Why would you? Nothing’s open. Here I was commuting from Long Island to Manhattan on an empty train every day. There’s no one on the subway. No one in Manhattan.
What month did you start there?
I started the first week after New Year’s in 2021. Nothing was open. I can tell you a funny side story about a place we found a little bit, but nothing was open. It was a real shock to me that we were in the office, but I wouldn’t trade that for the world. Being in the office five days a week teaches you business. You are meeting your co-workers, and you are just learning a lot.
Learning Cold Call
One of the things I have gotten a lot of feedback on X is that there are people who will die on the work-from-home hill. Walk me through what it’s like being a new investor relations professional. How would you learn how to cold call at your house?
I don’t think it’d be possible. We had a script we would read, and I would take notes on calls, and try to listen back to how I sounded but without someone without the SDR manager sitting next to me, or another SDR on my other side giving me feedback in person, hearing it in real time it’d be hard for someone to succeed in one of those roles working from home.
You generally get lazy. In any job, there are ways you can skirt the system and work from home, being an SDR, you could call someone, let it ring once, and then hang up and I’m pretty sure on most CRMs that counts as a dial. There are two aspects of that. There’s one if you are not a good employee, you can profit off the system. Two, professional development-wise, you are not going to learn anything if you’re at home.
You said you measured yourself on talk time. What were you formally being measured on? Do you guys have KPIs and metrics?
The KPIs were calls and meetings booked, and then also, at the end of the month, we would review the revenue that was brought in based on your calls.
Such a lagging indicator but that’s what matters.
We had a great manager there. He always motivated us and he looked at the holistic picture. He stressed that talk time was important, which is good. I did not think it mattered. The more time you are on the phone, the more you are explaining the product, the better you get at it. That was huge.
Advice On Cold Calling
What advice would you give to someone who’s taking a job like cold calling? It’s inside sales. What advice would you give them? What did you learn from it? Is it a useful thing to do as soon as you get out of college?
Let’s start with how it’s useful. It’s useful because it’s relationship building and management. You are talking to 100-plus people a day from all walks of life, and it’s a double-edged sword. You are going to call people who are interested in the product, and you are going to have insightful conversations with them and build those relationships. They are going to ask you, “Why is this painting a good investment,” or, “Why is this company a good investment?” “Tell me what you think about this in the art market.”
On the other hand, you are going to have people who you call and say, “I didn’t sign up for this. Lose my number.” You are going to have rude people. It teaches you how to deal with those different situations. In college, they make it so finance seems glamorous. They make it seem like you are working like Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street.
Let me tell you about Masterworks.
Making a few hundred thousand dollars in investment banking out of college is where you are being wined and dined by prospects but that’s not the truth. At almost any job, you have to put the hours in first. You have to learn the game. I do think it’s helped me in every aspect of my career by teaching me how to deal with people.
What’s the worst call you’ve had? The rudest person, what did they say to you?
I have called this guy. I’ll never forget. If you signed up on the platform and you didn’t schedule a call with an AE within ten minutes, we’d call you twice immediately. This is a great tool we used. We wouldn’t wait until the next day. You were a warm lead, so we’d call you right away. We’d give you two phone calls. If you didn’t answer the first one, we’d call you again. I called this guy. He didn’t answer. I called him again. Still no answer. I didn’t think twice about it. I’m like, “It is what it is.”
Maybe I was eating my lunch. Twenty minutes later, the phone rings. We’re using a CRM call. I can’t see the numbers. I pick it up, assuming it’s a client calling me back. The dude is screaming in my ear and he’s like, “Do you know who I am? I’m the nephew of XYZ.” I’m like, “I don’t know who XYZ is.” Hang up. He calls me back again and he’s like, “I want to talk to your manager.” I’m, “Okay.”
It’s funny our CRM couldn’t internally transfer calls. I told this guy, “Listen, I physically cannot transfer you to my manager. I’ll write your number down. Please don’t think I’m ghosting you. I’ll have my manager call you.” I Slack my manager and I’m like, “This guy wants to speak with you. All I did was call him twice.”
You never even spoke.
He called me back and started screaming at me. He calls my manager. Long story short, from what I heard, I was never allowed to call him again. We had to get rid of the number. What do you want from my manager, to my manager’s manager to manager’s manager?
He puts the number in the form.
Sometimes people are crazy like that. Guys having a bad day.
You didn’t die. You are okay. You survived.
The lesson that taught me is sometimes you are going to be talking to people in relationship management that you can’t please and are just insufferable. You have to deal with that. It’s part of the job. He’s got to brush it off at the end of the day.
Sometimes, you will meet people you cannot please in relationship management. You just have to deal with that. Share on XDealing With Rejection
It’s interesting. We have a lot of proposals going out for the advisory business, and every time I go up that hill, they are going to sign 100%. Every deal bid we put in. It’s been 10 or 15 in the last several months. I think this one’s going to hit. What is having that optimism? I’m assuming you have an optimistic attitude with respect to that. How do you keep that going when you are getting rejection after rejection?
It’s tough. You can have bad days where you are doing everything you are supposed to, and no one wants to pick up, or no one wants to buy. I always looked at it as treating each day as its quarter. You just go in if Monday is not good, then you have Tuesday, and as long as you have 3 out of 5 days that are good in a week, there you go. If you are not having those majority of good days, then look at it every week that month. Did you have two good weeks in that month? Keep your head up and move on.
Is that the number you need as long as at least half the time you’ve had an effective day? Does that mean you win for the month on your metrics?
In my head, yes. Metrically maybe not. It’s always a good benchmark. You want to have more good days than bad. Shooting for 51 is not a great number to shoot, but if you are having more good days than bad, you are doing something. Speaking as far as KPIs, you want to be doing over 80% or 85% of good days.
I forget who said this, it was some Olympian’s coach. He said, “A third of the days that you are training for the Olympics, you should feel pretty good.” A third of the days, you should feel like you’re okay and a third should be terrible. If you are not having that split or something similar, like it’s too easy, you are not going to be an Olympian. You’re not going to get there and if it’s too hard, you are not going to get there either. It’d be a balance between wins and losses for you to make progress up the chain.
I’m going off. It’s a cliché people say you learn from your mistakes but you do. Every day, I would try to focus on the good calls and the bad calls and be like, “What did I say on this good call that sold the deal or closed it? Where did I go wrong on this bad call where the client wasn’t interested?”
Taking Art Classes
How much did you know about art before you got there?
In my junior year, I was fortunate to study abroad in Florence, Italy. I took two art classes, and only my teacher could see me now. I got the two lowest grades ever when I went to college, I got two C pluses. I was horrible at art. I remember specifically when our teacher was going through the class and naming what painting this was. She would skip over me because she knew I had no answer.
Being in Florence, Italy, one of the capitals of the world for art and architecture. I had no appreciation. I walked through Uffizi and seemed like I couldn’t care less. When I joined Masterworks, they would sponsor me for my Series 7. You can get your Series 63 without being sponsored. You can do it on your own, which I did but Series 7 was a big one. I was like, “I need to get this if I want to have a career in finance.” I wrote down a pros and cons list, and I was like, “Cons? You almost fell apart. You want to work in finance?” I was like, “Let’s do it.”
To answer your question, before I started at Masterworks, not only did I know nothing about art, I was at an even greater disadvantage because I hated art but after working at Masterworks, I got an appreciation for it. Masterworks sells contemporary art, which is post-World War II. Names like Picasso, Basquiat, and Warhol but I gained an appreciation for other art too.
I started going to the Met, exploring different wings not just art, but also architecture, which became a big interest of mine. I always point out to my roommate, “There are five types of columns in the world.” I was joking around with my friends about it like “What column is that?” I like art now. Another big thing is New York City is into art. There’s so much architectural history. A very unknown thing is Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions are open to the public. You can go on the website, look up when the next in-person auction is, and anyone off the street can show up. Not only can you show up, but you can also get a paddle.
You look a lot cooler than you are. I’ve done it a couple of times, and it’s always funny when you go to those. I was at an auction a few months ago. I went with a friend back in, I want to say, “March.” I was in a suit and she was in a dress. We were sitting mid-row, and it was like a Lichtenstein came up for auction for just a few hundred thousand.
The person who bought it was right in front of me and no, he wasn’t this old dude in a suit looking for attention. He must have been a younger guy in his 40s, wearing a snapback, a Mets hat, a t-shirt, and shorts. He dropped, like a cool million on it or whatever. I was like, “It’s crazy because, in the art world, you never know what a collector is going to look like.”
What you’re saying is, you went from getting mediocre grades in art. You went from not being interested in art, to “pinkies up” at the Met, knowing everything you need to know to have an awesome conversation.
It’s a lot about the culture of Masterworks. The people I worked with, many of them came from business backgrounds. Some came from art too, but everyone was engaged in what we were doing. Showing up to work didn’t feel like a job but I did enjoy doing it. That got me involved in that world, and I wanted to learn more because it was helpful for my job but also, being around it 24/7, I enjoyed it. When I joined Masterworks, like I said, I joined super early on. We were working on three stories in SoHo. I always found this transition cool. After working a little bit in SoHo, we moved to a WeWork in Tribeca.
The company doubled or tripled from 30 to 75 to 90 people. By the end of working in SoHo, we couldn’t go in every day because there weren’t enough seats for everyone. We expanded to this nice WeWork on Beach Street in Tribeca. Super cool. One of the best things about working at Masterworks is that both SoHo and I work in Tribeca. Both offices had a nice rooftop lounge. I’m talking about outside lounge chairs, eating lunch out there was nice, especially during the summer.
Seeing the company transition from working at a super small, four-story building in SoHo to having a giant floor in WeWork was cool. Right before I left, they moved to the American office in Brookfield in Battery Park. When I left, they had around 100 employees. Now, the last time I looked on the website, it was over 200. It’s scaling. It’s almost like 8X or 7X.
Allocation To Art
I’m not going to tell everybody’s portfolio theory. I’m not a portfolio theory guy, but you want some alternatives allocation, and somebody says, “The debt markets aren’t great and the deals are down. Maybe I don’t want to go into that semi-liquid private equity product.” What advice would you give to someone who says, “I want an allocation to art?”
We had a software that you would put in your portfolio and we gave a recommendation but I believe it was always we recommended around 10% to art.
It’s a big alternative to allocation. 10% of your portfolio or 10% of your alternatives?
Your portfolio is a little bit of a too big allocation, but it’s a great investment to get into for multiple reasons. On the actual investment side, it’s a long-term store of value, one of the oldest asset classes in the world. There’s always going to be as long as there’s humans and humanity there’s going to be some artistic aspect to our culture. It’s good to be in something that’s never going away.
As long as there are humans, there will be some artistic aspect to our culture. It will never go away. Share on XIf art goes away, we lose our humanity. On the behavioral side, investing in art it’s cool. It’s sexy. It is a dinner table conversation. You can be like, “Did you guys know I own 5% of a Basquiat?” That’s not something a lot of people can say. You don’t have a physical corner of the Basquiat hanging in your bedroom, but it gives you something to talk about that a lot of people don’t invest in.
There are lots of discussions around language models and supposed artificial general intelligence and I saw somebody say, “The art” created by AI has made me believe in a soul because I have looked at things that are now officially soulless. It’s uninspired. I can never picture a computer making The Scream. I can never picture it making Starry Night.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There’s some art we were talking about earlier about Pollock, and how you look at Pollock. Some people don’t get it. Also, that puts the soul into it in a way. There are some artists out there, and the way they create their art it’s crazy. There’s this Japanese or Chinese artist in Chicago, and they paint by sitting on a swing. They put paint on the floor and use their feet. That counts as a soul. An AI can’t do that but it’s the story behind why the artist did it, which makes it all so interesting.
Who’s your favorite artist?
My favorite artist, it’s not contemporary. Probably William Turner. The backstory of this is, that I was sitting in Professor Kennedy’s military history class sophomore year, and there’s this painting called The Fighting Temeraire. It’s hanging in the National Gallery in London. It symbolizes the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the end of everything before. The painting is of a wooden ship that defeated Horatio Nelson in battle at Trafalgar. The Fighting Temeraire is being pulled away to a scrapyard by an ironclad ship, and the sun is setting in the background. I find it inspiring how fast technology changes, and how you have to stay, and almost like, in front of the wheel and just being able to pivot.
Taking A Career Pivot
That’s an interesting point because I could argue Masterworks is a tech company. I can argue it because you’ve taken something and split it up. It’s a fintech platform. It’s super interesting. You pivoted your career. You have another opportunity, you want to cross the street. Where did you go across the street? Why did you go across the street? Instinctively you are doing well, why did you want to go across the street?
I loved Masterworks. I wanted us to move towards more of a blue-chip institution, so I decided to move over to private wealth at AllianceBernstein. I thought that was a good career path for a renowned bank and I thought being a financial advisor, creating your book of business, and making your hours eventually, would be an interesting way to live in a way I could see myself living my life.
I moved over to AB years ago. Finally, I moved to the city then around the same time, I started at AB around September or October. I signed my first lease in Manhattan around October, right around Halloween. I loved it there. I started. They have a pretty robust I changed it after a year, but a pretty robust training plan. It was crazy like two months in training, doing only training.
You’d be assigned to a team of advisors, alongside a few other associates. It’d be around 1 senior associate, 2 associates, and a coordinator, which is similar to an analyst. You would help 3 to 4, 3 to 5 advisors manage a book of business. It was interesting because working at Masterworks, I got experience in art as one alternative asset class, but at AllianceBernstein, I was exposed to private credit, hedge funds, private equity, BDCs, and a lot more financial products, which was helpful with my vernacular and learning about different types of financial literature.
You were thinking about building a book of business, and the way it’s explained to me is, that private wealth management takes 5, 10, 15 years. I have a friend who went over to run his father’s book, and he says he’s focusing on HENRYs High Earners, Not Rich Yet. Wants to marry them, help them do planning to set it up so that they will become clients 5, 10 years down the road. It’s like you’ve got to dig your well a bit in advance. What do you think about that? What got you interested in private wealth management?
It takes a while to build the book. I was forcing it. The advisors I started on the team were wildly successful. They have large books of business but the way Bernstein did it was great. You would start as an associate, then you would become a CSA. You would share a book with an advisor, and if the advisor wanted to have a CSA, you would almost split the clients, split the management fees.
Then you are gaining the experience of someone mentoring you on how to build that book, and you were also managing that relationship but if you needed help. You were essentially a 50/50 partner with someone else who, double, sometimes even triple your age, and they would help you there. It was a struggle to talk to other advisors and hear their stories.
Advisors, you have to focus on what book you want to build. I worked for this great advisor, Rudy, and she had a bunch of cool clients. I remember when I was finishing training, she invited us to go to a recording studio for Shakira’s producer. I’m blanking on the name, but we were in this recording studio Tribeca. I had been at AB for two months. I was about to finish the training program, and I hadn’t networked with anyone there, besides from my cohort. She took us to her recording studio where we recorded Hips Don’t Lie by Shakira. She focused on cool clients.
I imagine every day for her going to work was super interesting. Why? Other individuals at the firm had your boring old Joe’s and Jane’s working out there rich people who had money, which made it mundane after a while. A lot of it is focusing on what target market you want, and then also enjoying that. If I had to go back and do it again, I’d try to break into art collectors, because it’s something I’m passionate about, and I could talk to them about their business and then help them out there and build that connection.
I love books on people’s interpersonal relations. It’s like if you can have one link in a connection, the person that you are talking to like you know art. They know art. The acceleration to build that relationship is like 50% more. It’s better to talk about the weather. That’s interesting. You spend time at Masterworks. You can build a book off of art collectors or artists. There’s a gentleman named Mark Wilkins, and you know I’m passionate about military service, and he was an Army officer. He’s a private wealth manager. He’s at UBS. He has an interesting connection to military members. It’s almost like building a bridge across.
Like I said, that’s a huge one. I know people who would be dentists, and cardiac surgeons, you have to pick your niche and focus on it, because also that one person you do right by will refer you to their colleagues. You will know what to say when talking to those people.
Plans For The Future
How are you thinking about your career now and what’s the big goal you have 5 to 10 years out?
I have had the privilege of now working at a fintech company and also working at a blue-chip publicly traded bank. There are pros and cons to both. I love working at AllianceBernstein, but there’s a lot of bureaucracy, and nothing gets done quickly. When you are working at a fintech company, everything can be at the CEO’s door. Ten minutes it depends on how fast you walk. I prefer the fintech space. It’s dynamic. I like wearing a lot of hats and solving problems, and having your input count toward solving those problems makes work a lot more interesting. Several years from now, I would like to be at another startup, almost like where those people were at Masterworks several years ago, where you joined something super early on. You grow it into some mature company, and you get to see the fruits of your labor blossom.
In the Harvard Business Review, they have a thing called the Dinosaur Diagnostic, which says, “Would you want to work at a seed company or work in a Fortune 50? I don’t think I’m certainly wired to work at a Fortune 100 company, even though I have done it before. I’m hearing you, like, you feel the most comfortable when the company is scaling but you may want to go back earlier at the beginning.
For me, it would be a good choice, and I will see someone coming right out of college. You don’t have that much to lose. I hope that people are not signing an apartment lease before having a job. Realistically, you are most likely still living at home, or you are living in your college situation, which you could probably afford. You didn’t have a job then.
Take that risk. Join that startup right at college. It might but you also might have a great time and might teach you a lot of great stuff, and I might succeed. Out of most of my friends or friends I have talked to have joined startups I don’t think a single one of them is red at it. They have all had to create experiences. I might be in New York City, people only talk about it like when you gamble. You talk about when you win. You don’t talk about when you lose. I have heard a lot more positive things about working in a startup, and I had negative.
Building And Nurturing A Network
The one thing about New York is everybody goes to New York to hustle. Nobody goes to New York to slack, in theory, and you can always find an interesting person. That’s got an interesting story, pretty much any day of the week. You are pretty well-networked. You introduced me to a couple of interesting people. What do you think about building and nurturing your network in the city? We all get busy, and it’s hard to do. What advice would you give to people to make the network bigger, but make their network grow, preserve their network, and then help people in your network?
Part of my ability to build my network was working in an SDR role at Masterworks. I learned to talk to anyone. The best way to build a network is by going out and honestly talking to people at social events. Various social clubs in New York City can join. There’sthe the New York Athletic Club, which is a big one. I like to go to meet a lot of great people there and then there are other places that you wouldn’t think you’d meet. Equinox is one. That’s a crazy business conversation in the sound of the equinox.
The best way to build a network is to go out and talking to people at social events. Share on XThere are common ones where people might meet someone out like the bar. You are not talking shop. You don’t know what they do, but you become friends with them. Go out for drinks another time, and you hit it off, and you are like, “What do you do? Super interesting.” I will give you an example. It was Tech Week in the city, maybe around two months ago, and I signed up because it was a CEO dinner. I saw the location. It was this nice restaurant housing yards called Queen’s Yard.
I’m not a CEO. I was like, “Does it hurt if I put my name in?” I was like, “Threw my name in.” It’s no due diligence. I got accepted into this. Before I’m like, ” What was my name tag?” We showed up to this dinner. No one was a CEO. Everyone was like VPs. Everyone also worked in tech, which I don’t have experience with.
I have met a lot of great people there. Met this guy, Matt. He’s building out some AI software to identify cancer. Super smart guy. It was a Harvard undergrad, MIT grad. A great guy to have in your pocket. Putting yourself out there and going to be like one-off events that you might be nervous to go to. You might think nothing’s going on but as long as you can talk to people, it doesn’t matter if you know anything about that. I went in there super nervous but very open-minded that I didn’t know anything about tech or AI or half the stuff they were doing but because of that, when we were there, I made an effort to talk to everyone in the room. I asked them, “What are you doing?” and had them speak to me and on LinkedIn, probably won’t talk to them ever again, but just stay interested. I see on LinkedIn, what they are doing and I read those articles, and it’s just broadening my perspective.
As we are training new people, I’m always like, “Be interested, don’t be interested.”
People love to talk about themselves, so ask those questions. “What do you do? Why do you do it?” like, “What does it look like day-to-day?” “What are you doing?”
That’s where we say Dilo day in the life of, but like, if I can get somebody to map out their week in the life of and figure out what they do day-to-day. They are going to be reflective and go, “I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing,” or they are going to talk about it passionately. Then you are trying to get away from the conversation. Anybody that can rattle theirs this is what happened last week. That’s what I did this week. Here’s one more. Next week, I will meet some clients over here.
To add to that, too, networking with alumni. In college, I was always scared to reach out to alumni, but now, not so much and it doesn’t even have to be that formal. A LinkedIn message was, “We have never met, but I also went to Fairfield. I see you working in private equity down in Tampa. I am looking to learn more about the space. Do you mind hopping on a five-minute call?” I will get LinkedIn messages like that, and then I’m fine talking to someone. It is a little funny sometimes when I get the emails, and you can tell it’s copy-pasted. You are doing that. Putting your due diligence in proofreading, and attention to detail.
I admire the urge to automate something, but a copy-paste is probably better. I’ve got a couple of those that say, “Hi, first name, here’s my Calendy link,” and I hate Calendy. I do feel you are pretty social, and networking probably came very naturally. What advice would you give to somebody that might be a little more hesitant to do it? Why would you encourage them to do that, and do you have any tricks to make it easier?
Preface this with the worst thing someone says is “No.” They are not going to be gelling their friends, their industry, or their family, that, “This kid reached out to me. Let’s not talk to him because he did something wrong.” That’s never going to happen. At the end of the day, like you said, they’re not going to think about it after saying “No.”
Like I said, the worst thing to say is “no.” I think some tips are opening it up with like you said, a common link. If it’s alumni, that’s easy, saying, “I went to Fairfield, interested in working in this field. Could we talk quickly?” If you don’t have a common link, just be forward and honest. “I see you work in investment banking. I am interested in breaking in. Would you have five minutes to talk to me?”
I have sent hundreds of those LinkedIn messages and emails over the last several years, and I’ve probably gotten a quarter of responses. Sometimes people guess they’re spam or people don’t look at their LinkedIn messages, but every one of those conversations I’ve had has always been productive but it’s also up to the person showing up, who’s asking to have that person’s time, to make it productive. You can’t show up and be like, “What do you do?” You have to have questions like, “What do you think about this? Do you have any advice if I do XYZ?” Don’t waste their time, also.
You see yourself always in investor relations. Does it feel like a natural fit to you, or do you see yourself branching out? What are you thinking about that?
I like the front office and investor relationship management. You know, talking to people is one of my skills, so it’s a perfect suit for me. Getting out there and speaking and I also like relationship management. There’s a lot of perks to that job. Meeting a lot of interesting people is the first thing. The second thing is, there is a good amount of wining and dining also involved in it and because you are making someone at the end of the day, you’re trying to sell them something, and to sell them something, you have to make them feel appreciated.
You know, there’s that awesome number four perk. I was talking to the people I’m staying with here, the guy that works, and I said, “As a company.” He works on the fun side of the business and all his clients right now are sports teams. He was like, “I got free tickets to all these games.” He was like, “They will send me tickets, like games. I don’t even live in that state.” I was like, “That’s awesome.” He’s like, “What are you doing?” He’s like, “Nothing.” I was like, “You should sell out. That’s a good side hustle.” Being able to talk with people and relationship management is a great skill to have and also, and there are a lot of perks besides, getting a paycheck out of it.
Why Trust You
Why would a client want to trust you with their money? What’s your pitch?
It’s also not just me. It’s usually a team effort. I might be talking, but there are so many other people who put work into this deal to go through. There is the research team, who identified the fit. There’s going to be an analyst or someone in operations who’s putting together all the numbers, and you are all going to have most of the commenters on the deal. Plenty of times, I have had questions and concerns. That I have, what I think is the answer to? A second opinion never hurts. Going to someone who has twenty years of experience over you, it’s super helpful. My pitch is to be an honest, likable person. Body language. You tell when you meet someone first impressions are the most important. When you meet someone, you can tell if they are a very likable, trustworthy person.
Even if you think you know the answer, it never hurts to get a second opinion. Share on XIn my former life, I got asked a lot to go see the LPs. From the moderately likable guy and I remember some people didn’t want to go see the LPs because they had their day jobs. TTakethat time as part of the team because you are only going to be able to explain so much of what I tell you, the telephone game about what’s going on in the factory, that is $5 million behind in its revenue target LP. It’s the whole process, it’s a team sport. A friend of mine who works at Goldman in private wealth management, he’s like, “I have an army of people behind me. I would never start my shop up.” I need any client questions, any adverse events or trends. I have an army of people supporting me to get it done.” That’s why the guy I know, Mark, went to UBS.
The resources you have, like a farm, like AB are huge. You have people who specialize in all of these funds, and the back office was phenomenal. If you didn’t know the answer to a question, you could have an answer within an hour. Not even like an email, like not even, “Look it up in the help manual.” An email that you still don’t know what’s going on, and you are too scared to ask twice. You could be like, “Do you mind? I’ll give you a call. Two minutes, I know the answer to how to explain it to someone.”
You get the rise of betterment and Robinhood and stuff like that in the industry trend, and you tell me if I’m wrong. It’s going to be a lower fee, less high-touch service.
Most of your readers the time when to execute a trade on Robinhood one trade was $9.99 to do 1 trade. I remember that could have been too long. I still had my account, so I’m like, years ago but now that’s for preposterous. You cannot compete where Robinhood has zero commission trading. Could you imagine if, like Schwab, was still charging almost $10 or $20 to buy and about ten dollars to sell? It’s all going to lower management fees and lower commissions in general. I have noticed it’s started a price war. You can’t have your fees being 200 bets when your competitor’s is 1.5. When there’s so little bit of difference between your two firms it might be your products, but at the end of the day, the products are pretty much the same. They are named something different.
High-Touch Money Management In The Futures
What does the niche look like for high-touch money management? What does that look like in 5, 10, or 15 years? Is it going away?
It’s always there. We had this conversation a little bit earlier. You know, when you are an ultra-high-net-worth individual, you want that personalized touch. A good comparison is, when you have that much money, you always want to be a step above everyone else. Do you think a first class on a plane is ever going to go away?
You have that much money, you want to be sitting in the front, the first one to board the plane, the first one to get off the plane, and you want to be sitting in the front so you are not waiting for everyone to get their luggage in the comfy seat. That’s a good comparison to a finance person. Whereas if you have the money, you’re going to end up spending it on something that makes your life easier.
If you’re a hedge fund manager, you probably know how to operate Schwab or use your portfolio, but if you’re a cardiac surgeon making $500,000 a year, you probably don’t know much about a stock bond, and you probably don’t know what the acronym for “what REIT” stands for. You’ll be paying that extra money for that, and also, it does add up to 100, 150, and 200 bps but when you’re making that much money, it’s a necessary expense. I also feel like a lot of those people don’t blink an eye, especially when you’re getting those returns.
There’s always going to be a desire for a premium product. Things are changing, but that’s my example. Everybody thought that the internet was going to kill real estate agents with Zillow like, why do you need one? Nobody’s clicking “buy it now” on the most important purchase of their life it’s a house.
Funny, on the way here, my Uber driver said he moved here several years ago and he sold his house on fax. I was laughing about that. Maybe he’s in a one-off situation.
In general, some people want someone to hold their hand through that process. It gives them comfort.
Especially with money too. Money is very personal. This is not like buying a car at CarMax. My parents sold their car online, but the money is very personal. You want to know the person who’s managing your millions of dollars is trustworthy and not an AI bot.
“AII is going to make some disruptions. It’s not going to be in high-touch businesses. If a robo-caller calls me from Masterworks, I’m not going to call them back.”
I can’t blame you either.
It’s not going to happen.
Even for my new amounts like that, like a $10,000 investment, most people still want to talk to someone. Especially for products that they don’t know a lot about, it’s one thing. Logging on to your portfolio and dumping a few grand into the S&P. It’s a whole ball game. When you are talking about investing a few grand into art or even a private equity fund you don’t know anything about, you want someone to hold your hand and walk you.
Money is locked up for years. How long would it take to sell those pieces of art, or like, how long will you be locked up for? If a typical holding period, when I was there, was 3 to 5 years. That was one of the big reasons that, to invest on the platform, you had to have a conversation with someone on the sales team because we wanted to make sure it was crystal clear that once you invested, your money was locked up. There was a secondary trading platform, but it wasn’t that liquid. You couldn’t, you couldn’t invest whatsoever without talking to someone first. We wanted to make it explicitly clear that once you give us this money, you cannot get it out.
You could get up to the point where you hit “buy it now” or “invest now,” but you still weren’t transacting, correct, until you got it.
When you hit “buy it now” and say the next screen, it would be to schedule a call with an advisor. I got on your favorite app Calendly.
Biggest Mistake And Favorite Book
I have strong feelings about Calendly. When somebody’s asking me for a favor and then making me feel on a web form. I’m not excited about that. Some people are. It tends to be more of a problem on the West Coast. I got my last three questions. Number one, what’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in your career? What did you learn from it?
My biggest mistake in my career when I made it was one, I started online spurning. I didn’t realize how time-sensitive different procedures should be, especially when you have to wait on other people. I was always used to the sales on Masterworks, only relying on myself, but when you are working these big bureaucracies when you are dealing with compliance, I say getting forms and sales and trading to execute the trade and transfer to a bank account is not like you hit press the green button and it’s good to be monitoring it along with no steps.
I didn’t realize that when I began, and you know, after a few weeks on the job, I realized how important not only time management was but also staying on top of your to-do list. A big thing that helped me was writing stuff down. There’s this quote by JP Morgan. I’m going to butcher it but someone asked him and said, “Give me like a million dollars and I will give you the key to success.” He gave Morgan an envelope, and all that said in the envelope was “Write everything down.” I have abided by that since I heard that quote writing stuff down, your to-do list every day checking it off.
Few people do that in Corporate America. In finance specifically. I would say you have a higher uptick rate of doing that, and I can tell I have sketched my to-do list the same way for the last several years, Monday block on Tuesday, black Wednesday block on Thursday, block Friday, and then, I got follow up with the bottom six blocks. It’s now remarkable and set up on a mole scan, but it’s checked off. Go check off, go check off, go, and it does two things. It keeps you organized. It’s like that act of your manager watching you write something down and put a checkbox next to it. Let them know you are in control of the process.
Make sure you are doing it on paper too.
It lets them know you’ve got the process and are in control. What I heard you say, is to turn into a baby project manager at a bigger organization.
I always compare it to, in high school, doing things like practice math problems. I sucked at math. Doing those problems, writing it down rather than using the calculator. Just, remember stuff more when you use paper and pen.
What’s your favorite book?
My favorite book would be All the Beauty in the World. It’s an art book about chaperones and he talks about working there for like 30 years, and I think it’s insightful. As far as my favorite finance book, Liar’s Poker even though I have never played that before.
Episode Wrap-up
Super good having you outside, Michael. We are going to go get a beer and have some dinner. I’m looking forward to continuing to watch your career grow. This is the first of our continuing series we are going to do on young to mid-career finance professionals. A lot of you guys have wanted to learn case studies of how to get my career. What does this look like? We wanted to bring the people in, we have done that versus you clicking on a link or a website and reading a comment. All super nice to see you out here.
Thanks so much for having me. Great time.