Listen to the Podcast Episode

In this episode, you will hear from a guest who went to Morehouse and Duke's Fuqua School of Business and pivoted away from Financial Services after working in Equity Research and Asset Management.

Listen as he shares his motivation for getting his MBA, the key moments that altered his career, and what he has learned from re-telling his story..

Transcript

Victoria Hefty (00:00):

Hi, I'm Victoria Hefty and welcome to the Post-MBA Pivot podcast, where I share stories of professionals who took unexpected, interesting, or unique paths after graduating from business school. Today, you will hear from a guest who made a pivot from financial services. Listen as he shares his motivation for getting his MBA, the key moments that altered his career, and what he has learned from re-telling his story. So, we're going to just start. I like to dive right in. So, when you put yourself, you're thinking about business school, what was the motivation or the catalyst for even pursuing that avenue?

Guest (00:41):

That's a great question, and it's actually one of the better stories that I have. Out of undergrad, I was an electrical engineer, I worked at IBM in the networking and connectivity group. And so this is back in the early ons where you were really responsible for building out internet networks, LAN, WAN networks around the country. And I was working on a project where I was going to Virginia every Friday evening, and we were working over the weekend almost nonstop as the client turned the network down and I came back one weekend. It was a really interesting client, but challenging work, right? I mean, there's the technical part of the work and the people part of the work.

Guest (01:20):

And I remember driving back from Virginia Beach back to Durham, I was in Durham at the time. And I said, "I think I want to go to business school," and I had a very good friend of mine who actually went to Fuqua. He was a year ahead of me, but we also played football together at Morehouse. And I remember when he started Fuqua, he said, "You should think about business school." And so at this point in time, it seemed like the right time. I went to Barnes & Noble, imagine that a bookstore, going into an actual bookstore, and I remember getting one of the Barron's prep guides for taking the business school entrance exam. And I remember thinking I test pretty well, let me go through a couple of these, and the main thing I wanted to do was to continue learning. I was an engineer, but I didn't have a really strong business background, had never really taken an accounting or finance course in my life, and thought I needed opportunities to further my leadership capabilities.

Guest (02:12):

I needed to understand business aside from just the product that we were delivering, and that was what really motivated me to go to business school. I actually was an employee of IBM during my tenure in business school. I took a leave of absence, but really had an intention to go back to that organization, but wanted to go back armed with more skills around business. And once I started Fuqua, it was an amazing, amazing school. My life changed. I realized, "Oh, my God. How many other careers are there where you can flex your mental muscle, and meet people, and build networks and relationships?" And that was kind of it for me.

Victoria Hefty (02:49):

Pushing now, it feels like everyone has to be... You have to know before business school what you want to do. So, when you were there, were you one of those students who are like, "I'm just going to take it all in and then I'll figure out what I want to do," or were you one of those boots on ground, you knew exactly what you wanted to do and you already started preparing?

Guest (03:06):

Certainly not the latter. I lived in Durham and so my option in terms of going to Duke was... Instead of going to work every day, I'm going to school. And business school for me, I did not imagine it to be the life-changing experience, the step function that so many people generally make business school, but I went in and I will tell you a great story here. Goldman Sachs had a camp that was designed for people who are interested in banking that had no banking experience. And if I remember correctly, the numbers here may be off, but I think it was like... They gave you $500, right? They paid for you to come up there and they give you a $500 stipend if you were accepted into this program, and so I went, and it was phenomenal because I had never been inside of an investment bank before. I had a number of friends that were engineers that were going to tech functions at different investment banks, but I had never been in an investment bank. I'd heard of them at the Wall Street [crosstalk 00:04:07]

Guest (04:10):

I said, "These guys have great suits, and great watches, and they talk fast, and they know the markets, and they're so smart," and a lot of that turned out to be true. And so there was a woman there who worked in equity research, and my background obviously was in telecom equipment, data connectivity, and she covered telecom equipment. And she said, "Well, what do you want to do?" And I said, "I'm really just evaluating. I'm kind of interested in investing and finance." And she said, "Well, your background is good for what I do. I'm an equity research analyst. And for us, having really good knowledge of industries, and roles, and functions in specific industries helps us analyze fundamentals of companies and therefore their stocks." And I remember meeting her and I think I probably still have her card, and I went back to school, that was about a week before school started.

Guest (05:00):

And I went back to school in September and I joined the asset management club. And I said, "I want to start learning how to evaluate stocks and understand corporate motivations for things that impact the capital markets." And so for me, I did not walk in knowing what I wanted to do, but I did find out very early something that was of interest to me, and then moving through that process was incredible.

Victoria Hefty (05:25):

So, I do know that your first sort of role after, you feel like that was what you at least were interested or curious about at the time. So, I always like to ask, you're in this asset management role or you're in a sort of this world, what was the moment where something shifted or changed in you where you're like, "There's another world outside of banking? Maybe I should pursue something else."

Guest (05:49):

So, this is a multi-step question. One thing that my friends and my family know, that whenever I get into anything, I am full tilt, dedicated, obsessed about it. And so this world of stocks, and companies, and understanding how the capital structure of these companies correlates to what they actually do, understanding how, when your phone bill goes up, what that means for Verizon or AT&T, that was incredible to understand, the markets and how they moved. And I remember I had a colleague one time, and business school is always about reading the journal, and reading Barron's, and reading the economist. And I had a colleague and I said, "Do you read the journal?" And I remember he said, "Yeah, but only to see what I told them when they interviewed me yesterday." And I thought, "Wow, there are people... We're consuming this information, but there are also people who are making this information."

Guest (06:50):

And that information flow was something that was just phenomenal to me. I still think that no matter what you want to do in the world, and it could be marketing, it could be non-profit, it could be accounting, it could be technology. Spending some part of your time in financial services is just so eye-opening because you really understand how businesses work and how they're valued. And in this world, I think that's a good start for people understanding how things work. When I went to Wall Street and this is endemic, particularly I think of a lot of people that don't have backgrounds. I didn't know anybody working from Wall Street, right? For a lot of my friends, who are all very successful, but in things like medicine and law and things that a lot of people in our community have traditionally seen as like, "That's what success looks like."

Guest (07:39):

We've got relationships, we've got family, folks that we know that are doctors and lawyers and people that are in corporate, but we don't know a ton of people that are necessarily bankers or equity research. I was the only black person in equity research when I got there. Well, there was one other young woman who actually came from Duke as well, undergrad, but there weren't a ton of us there and so we didn't know what it looks like. And so often times in those environments, you want to be hyperrational, and hyper calculated, and very, very good at the work that you do, but you're not necessarily making a ton of relationships hanging out with people on the weekends, hanging out with clients, or non-business related things. And so you're not diving into people, you're diving into your work. And that was something that I realized, really towards the end of my career, the latter years of my career in finance.

Guest (08:30):

And certainly as I moved into other industries, where that all of these businesses are made up of people, like AI has not consumed the decision-making process. We're in the world, it is still people, and people will make good decisions and they will make bad decisions, but they will always make them based on what they feel and what they think they know. And if you truly build more genuine relationships with people, again, you'll be more successful, however you define it. I'm jarring my memory here, it's all kind of coming back. And I remember, there was a guy, actually during my time, in finance who was an IT guy. And so anytime there problems with switches, or routers, or PCs, he was the guy you call. And if you need new software updates, he comes in. And it was before the Cloud was really big, right?

Guest (09:16):

So, he comes in and he takes your to computer, gives you a loaner, he goes and upgrades it, then he brings it back. And I remember he said... And I'll skip some of the colorful language, but he says, "What the blinker are you doing, man?" He's like, "I'm seeing you're here two, three in the morning." He's like, "You guys got a really good team, but this company doesn't care about you." He's like, "You got to take a breather. They don't care about you. It's not a bad thing, but this company is going to go on whether you're here at 3:00 or not."

Victoria Hefty (09:45):

So, what were you thinking when he said that to you? Were you resisting it or were you like, "He's got a point."

Guest (09:51):

Oh, at the time I was fully resisting, I'm going to be completely honest. I was like...

Victoria Hefty (09:56):

Yes, bring it.

Guest (09:58):

I was like, "Well, you just fixed my computer. I don't need this testimony from you right now." We're both a little bit similar in a background, in a colorful language, and he was a buddy, but he was like... I'm like, "I just need my computer back, so I can get this report out. You're killing me right now. I don't need all this negative energy." So, let me see. I would say it probably took 10 years, honestly, for that to really sink in, right? At the time, I had a young daughter who was less than two. I laugh because when my daughter was born, she was born on Saturday morning, and I went back to work at noon on Tuesday.

Guest (10:37):

I'll be honest, my wife, depending on the day of the week, she still might not forgive me for that, but that was what I interpreted as the culture. This is again, 2005. I was thinking, "If I'm not there, if I'm not making the call, if I'm not writing the note, if I'm not on top of the news, they're just going to call the next guy and that's money and opportunity to go on for me." And that was some of that just very rigid thinking around, "I've got to be the best. I've got to be as good as I can be. I got to prove myself every day." And in reality, I think that helped harden and galvanize some other type of work ethic, but it's always at a cost. I got beautiful kids, a beautiful and intelligent wife, and they have certainly made allowances for my shortcomings in terms of work-life balance early on.

Guest (11:27):

When I left finance, the thing that hit me was that everybody didn't live in this world, that everybody didn't wake up at 4:30, everybody didn't have CNBC or Bloomberg on in the background all day long, people talked about things other than the markets. I'll tell you, the first couple of months was uncomfortable for me. I felt like, you're in this world and you're talking to people every day that are generally focused on the same sphere of things. And even with my wife and my kids, they saw the difference. And they're like, "You're not just consumed with the market stand, you enjoy the markets and you're interested, but you'll watch Grey's Anatomy at night now."

Victoria Hefty (12:12):

She's like, "I have him back."

Guest (12:15):

Yeah. Yeah. She's like, "Oh, man. That's a tough 10 years."

Victoria Hefty (12:18):

Well, so one of the things I want to probe on a little is, was it a certain day or week or memory that you have talking to someone, obviously we won't share their name, where you just realized, "I'm dealing with people who are different than what I am used to."

Guest (12:31):

So, I will tell you, there was an organization that I was doing some work with, and I'd worn a suit and kind of business casual attire almost every day for a number of years. And I started consulting and working with this company and it was a very casual, and I remember somebody who actually became a very, very good friend of mine, a dear friend. She said, "You know what, we got a bet, we didn't know how long you were going to last with that." She said, "You wore slacks and a shirt for two weeks." She was like, "Does this man own any normal pants, or jeans, or a shirt without a collar on it?" And that one kind of hit me because I realized that the culture of work is no different than the culture of people. We wear our hair differently, we worship differently, we eat differently. Business while we're all trying to generally improve lives in shareholder value, we do that in so many different ways and that was something that I didn't really appreciate.

Guest (13:33):

I mean, I still wear a lot of collared shirts and a lot of slacks, but I did understand how it makes people feel when you can accept their culture, and they accept your culture, and you meet people where they are, that was something that jumped out at me. And certainly, the thing that was biggest, people don't think about the world always, in terms of ROI, that's denominated by money. That was almost earth-shattering to me when I first saw this in the workplace. You hear about it, you hear about it from your friends that do different things, but then when you're at an organization and you see an opportunity maybe to do things differently and increase revenue or increase profits, and the company says, "Well, you know what, strategically, that does not align with necessarily what we want to do right now." Yeah, you're like, "Come again. Who broke the record player?" But that's the reality of the world.

Guest (14:28):

And that actually helped me a lot later in my career, as I started working with entrepreneurs and started thinking about the motivations of people that are starting companies, and starting companies up with small teams, and building that culture. That was something that really stuck with me.

Victoria Hefty (14:43):

When's the next, if you're looking back in your career, the next moment that you shifted in some way?

Guest (14:49):

Yeah. So, I'll say, my general kind of theory on life is we get one and you can either do one thing incredibly, incredibly well for most of your life. My mother was a teacher, her entire life. My father worked two jobs in his life and he was picking cotton when he was eight in Mississippi, and he went into the Navy when he was 15. We didn't even know until he had passed, that I guess he had maybe lied about his age to get out of Mississippi, but he was in the Navy for 27 years, and he worked for the Library of Congress until the day he died. One thing that I took from them was taste as many different fruits in this tree of life as you can, because if that's where your joy comes from... I talk about this a lot is this culture of curiosity.

Guest (15:34):

And I think for people that are motivated by learning that having a number of different experiences can be helpful to your life. And some folks will say, "Well, your career won't get the type of traction that you need." I would argue that your career is made up of multiple phases, and I think you kind of have the early career where you want to prove some level of technical proficiency, because we equate technical proficiency to intelligence. I think the second stage in your life is largely around management. I had a very good friend, Mann, who was a big time trader at a bank in New York. And I remember the day he came in, he said, "Look, man, I got tapped. I'm a managing director now." And he said that the partner that came to him said, "You're no longer compensated for how much you produce, those other seven guys that are on your desk," or however many it was. He's like, "Your bonus is largely driven by how much they produce."

Guest (16:28):

And that means, now you're a manager, that people is about leverage, right? Your experiences, your leadership capabilities, your empathy, your trustworthiness, people give their lives and their futures to you to help you manage, and groom, and guide them towards whatever outcome they want to get to. And so I think that management's the second stage of folks' careers. And then the third I think, and this is where a lot of the political relationships come in, I think is about leadership because as you start to look as an executive, whether it's on board roles or on public service, how do you create a multiplier effect for whatever skills, talents, and relationships that you have? And the best way to do that is by operating at the points of maximum impact, we've got, what? 535, 538 people that ultimately make the decisions for all 350 million people in this country.

Guest (17:25):

And they make a binary decision, a yay or nay. You look at boards, your companies. You'll have anywhere between five and 13 people maybe, that decide ultimately what a hundred billion dollar company is going to do strategically. And the CEO, obviously is going to be part of that, but there are also board members there that are deciding how folks react. I had a really interesting conversation with a board member from a company that was very much involved in some of the recent Black Lives Matter stuff. And what he shared with me was, when they came time to make a decision on where this company was going to stand, there were seven people in the room and they had to figure out on behalf of 50 or 60,000 people that worked for the organization, and the hundreds of millions of dollars of shareholder value that was out there, what position the company was going to take.

Guest (18:17):

And I thought that was one of the most fascinating points. It's unreal, but that's what leadership ultimately looks like. There's a book called The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, which I think has also been kind of transformational in my career, and it's something I just picked up a couple of years ago. And basically, I was doing a program and there was a excerpt that we have to read, that was basically saying adaptive leadership is dangerous, right? And what it hit me was, was that when you're really doing leadership that is making you a change agent, right? So, you're taking something that's headed in one direction and you're rerouting it in a direction that you believe is best for the people that you serve and the people that you care about. That is not a populist kind of conversation, people are not going to like you.

Guest (19:09):

And so I think when I look at my own career and I don't know if I'm there yet, but I think we all aspire to be change agent leaders. You've got to build up a certain level of rigor that makes you feel comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Victoria Hefty (19:23):

For me, when I think about that changing pivoting careers, it is uncomfortable. And embracing it instead of resisting is important. So for you, how have you built up your change or pivot sort of muscle, so that when it is time to change, sure, it can be daunting, but perhaps it isn't debilitating. What does that balance for you?

Guest (19:45):

That is honestly the trillion dollar question for all people. I really was resistant to change as a young person. Even now, my wife laughs at me, I've had the same car for 21 years, right? I won't get rid of it. There's some aspects of this that are just hard to break, but I would say, the most critical thing for people that are high performing, I think all the people that are listening, the folks that you're targeting, these are high performing people. You will have anxiety and it's okay, right? There will be points where you're like, "What am I doing?" And if we're really honest with ourselves, a lot of our concern is, "What do our friends think? What do our families think? God, I've been the smartest kid in the class and in the family, and everybody expects this out of me." And taking the moment to understand that you've got to have some window to breathe in order to change direction. You've got to have some room in order to create that opportunity for you to change and be as impactful as you want to be, and it's never comfortable.

Guest (20:50):

It's never as comfortable as doing the same thing you were doing yesterday, and that's by design. One of the analogies I use all the time is friction, right? Again, this is going back a little bit to being a little too tactical sometimes, but when you look at a drag racing car and you see those wheels, they've got these big, huge wheels on the back and they're spinning, spinning, spinning, and you're seeing all the smoke come out. The reason for that, all that friction and that heat burning off, and that heat is our anxiety and that friction is all of that discomfort that we have, but ultimately that's what pushes the vehicle for. If that vehicle were on ice and it were working with tires that created no friction coefficient, it wouldn't go anywhere. For me, understanding that whatever decision you make is going to be a good decision.

Guest (21:41):

People used to say this to me and I used to say, "Oh, you're full of it," right? I hate it when people say, "Perfect is the enemy of good," and they used to drive me insane because I was a perfectionist, but I do understand that when you're trying to chase after different opportunities to evaluate any of that curiosity, wasting time is probably your biggest enemy.

Victoria Hefty (22:04):

So, maybe this is a candid question. I think a lot of times I hear, "I don't want to start from scratch." So for you, what allows you to know that you'll be fine? Is it something that comes from within, that you know you're going to be fine? Or do you just trust that your work ethic got you to a certain point, it can get you there again, which is very much my philosophy?

Guest (22:26):

In terms of that starting over, I'll invoke another kind of physics principle, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, right? Basically, you can't tell the momentum and the location of an electron at any beginning point in time. By observing one, you're changing the other. I think this also applies to where we're going in our careers. If you're too myopically focused on the money, then you'll miss the opportunity. If you're too myopically focused on the opportunity, then you may miss some money, but you got to be okay with it. It's like somebody says, "Well, I took this opportunity," and there are couple of people that... I won't say who they are, but there a couple people who are folks that I've known for a number of years and it's like, you look on somebody on LinkedIn, right? LinkedIn is the curse of the overachiever. Oh, my God. We're always marketing ourselves to the market on LinkedIn, but you never know the struggle because I've seen people on LinkedIn.

Guest (23:20):

I was like, "Man, they took that?" And then I look up and five years later, they're the CEO of their own company or they've grown that company by 10,000%, and they're on the cover of a magazine. And you're like, "But I know they they cut their salary by 80% five years ago." So, here's another piece of advice I often give people, I do this, grab a spreadsheet and really look at what your assets are. Don't look at all your costs and your expenses and all of that stuff, just look at what you got, and sometimes you can restructure your own life. Sometimes, you say, "All right, this is what I got. If everything went away today, this is what I have, and this is kind of my own shareholder equity." And often times, that position is a lot better than people think it is. That allows you some more freedom.

Guest (24:09):

You got a few dollars because you went to good business school and you took a job that you did well at, but maybe you didn't love, and now you want to step away and do something else. Well, the whole point of you taking that job that you didn't love was so that you could position yourself to do something that you do love. So, the longer you wait on doing that, the more you're devaluing the experience that you really didn't enjoy that much.

Victoria Hefty (24:32):

I love the spreadsheet, because I think as all good business school students, it takes some of the emotion out of it. And you're like, "I can work with that. It's actually not that bad."

Guest (24:41):

Yeah. Listen, I'm not going broke tomorrow.

Victoria Hefty (24:43):

I got a couple of months. I'll figure it out.

Guest (24:47):

Yeah.

Victoria Hefty (24:48):

Okay. So, I don't want to be disrespectful of your time, so a couple more questions. When you look at the people in your life that you know of, that have been able to make a change, a pivot, hopefully career-related, that has just been like, "Wow." What is it about that person for the external point of view, right? You never know what's going inside, but from an external point of view that you're like, "Yeah, I could see why that person did that," or "I could see why they were successful," either one.

Guest (25:16):

Yeah. So, I want to make one note on one point that you made. It is always about what's inside of that person. The only thing that really matters is what's happening internally and the reality is... And this is for you and I, I'm sure, and for all the folks and the audience this is kind of aimed at. I know, and you know, and they know, we all are battling all types of stuff. I mean, this COVID 2020 has been unreal, how it's just ravaged our homes, our inside, and the way we relate to people. But externally, I think what I've seen, I see this a lot with entrepreneurs. Folks seem to be unfazed externally and I would bet my life, and I've seen this with my friends and a point certainly with me, that to the outside world, they look on face.

Guest (26:06):

They look like this was supposed to happen. Even when I took that pay cut, or I missed that promotion, and I thought I was going to leave, and I was interviewing, I didn't get the gigs, I had to stay. And now all of a sudden, something good has happened. Externally, the people that don't know them, it looks like that was their plan, she was destined for that. Internally, and this is what I would share with people, is that resilience to just get through to the next day. Listen, and I'll be real because I love this form that you've created, we are dealing with stuff that folks never think about.

Guest (26:42):

I mean, women and men that are high performing and high achieving, they are trying to figure out, "Well, we're having fertility issues, or we're having aging parent issues, or we're having substance abuse issues, or we're having financial issues with people that we love, but we're not necessarily responsible for." 2020, right? We've just seen incredible things that people have had to go through and they still show up. Your ability to continue to be resilient and persevere through obstacles, that's something that makes the people to wake up and take notice of.

Victoria Hefty (27:16):

I love that. So, when you're looking back, right? Now, you're looking back at your career, how did even re-telling this, just saying the words out loud, what overall feeling do you have as you think about your past and sort of where you've gotten?

Guest (27:31):

Victoria, I'll tell you, I feel empowered. This platform you have is probably as much for the guests as it is for your audience. Just being able to put it all in perspective and really take an empowered, optimistic view on change. I think the MBA is the most dynamic degree that somebody can get, I think it is designed to be that. And I think certainly, for people that we know and people that we care about, that dynamism again, sometimes can create false expectations and anxiety. And so a platform like this that allows people to understand what other people have gone through, I think helps mitigate a lot of that anxiety and allows them to perform at their highest level. And so I thank you for providing this platform and your voice to this because you're going to create opportunities for people to fulfill their potential.