YouSaid · the spoken record

Brett Barth

lines on the record: 105
first: 2025-02-24
most recent: 2025-02-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Morgan Stanley, all rights reserved. And now back to the show. As you go and look at how you're going to fill out those strategy rows, the manager selection process. What have you found have been the most important factors to your team in your decision to work with a manager?”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the last few years, a market strategist to full time be focused not on predicting the equity market, but saying, listen, here's the risk reward and intermediate duration munis as an example today. What do we think of that and holding our feet to the fire on those relative values? Because since we can invest in anything, esoteric, traditional, what's showing up as attractive, and often it's coming from the managers. Here's what I love. Here's what's big in our portfolio. I wish I could be bigger. And then us saying, okay, let's talk about being bigger and creating a joint venture with that manager, getting bigger. And then it's up to each individual client and their advisors to say, this is how much risk or illiquidity we can handle.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really depends. Sizing is very client specific. And so I describe how we build portfolios for clients as a giant matrix. If you're a family here, you've got an advisory team that's thinking about your objectives, how you should be allocated, and all of the other wealth management services that go hand in hand with that asset location, portfolio construction, risk tolerance, how big things can be. So think of those as a column. And the rows are those strategies I just talked about. The investment research team's job is to define the rows and hire and monitor the managers that fill out those rows. There's lots of things that we're watching all the time we still get a dashboard that I get every Friday afternoon at the close on where are spreads and where are different markets and where our relative values. We've even hired”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we break everything into stable returning lower risk strategies and higher returning higher risk strategies. And if you think about it, that's the 60-40. Your 40% in bonds are stable returning lower risk strategy. Your 60% equities are higher returning higher risk strategies. That's not, again, revolutionary. It's sort of evolutionary, but those are the strategies. And by the way, bonds are one of the stable returning lower strategies and being long equities is another way to have a higher returning higher risk strategy. There's just so many other things we can do within both to build much more attractive portfolios.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we allocate to strategies, not asset classes. And we talked a little while ago about David Swenson and Stocks bonds and other. We never talk about stocks or bonds or others. We talk about active equity or public equity strategies. And those public equity strategies could be passive or active. Those active equity strategies could be long or long short. Equity strategies could be private as well as public. And just because it's a private equity strategy doesn't make it some magical, mystical alternative beast. And just because it's in a public active equity strategy that's long and short also doesn't make it some mystical hedge fund beast either. So understanding what are the drivers of those returns, what's the right price to pay to get those returns? And who are the best practitioners in the spaces we want to be in in each of those sub-strategies? I think that's different than certainly most other folks.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. And I would say these are not revolutionary. They're core tenants. And I would hope that other thoughtful investment firms would have some similar ones. But for us, it's long-term compounding. It's that diversification is the only free lunch in investing. I think we think about diversification a little bit differently. We talked about mean reversion and rebalancing, but for us, that's also being comfortable being contrarian. And people talk about it, but I think you have to be very thoughtful about it ex ante so that you can do it in the moment because it's really easy to talk about and really hard to do. And so you need to have the plan for it. And then a willingness to be, I call it tactical, but it's really opportunity.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'd love to turn from that over to the investment side once you have at least a sense of what you think, say, that asset allocation is going to be, why don't we start with the most important principles that you take in your investment approach?”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get home and their spouse is having a very difficult conversation with them, and they're not sleeping well at night. So it really is a family discussion that we try to have as if not in the beginning on an ongoing basis so that you're always fine-tuning the portfolio with what those goals are and what that tolerance is.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There isn't a scientific methodology to getting to the exact right asset allocation that a family will not only stay the course during difficult times, but buy their losers and sell their winners to make sure that we stay rebalanced. And the reason I'm not a family, it's not just limited to necessarily the principal who made the wealth. It's the spouse. Sometimes it's the kids if you've been working together. And we want them all in the room together. Sometimes we actually separate it and actually have individual conversations. And it's always eye-opening to see the difference intra-family with their risk tolerance. And so what you think you're doing is providing the perfect plan for the person that sits in across from you in terms of how much they can afford to lose and what their portfolio is. And then it's not because they come back to you during a market downturn and say we need to change it. And we ask, well, what's happened? What's changed from the beginning of the conversation? And the reason is, well, they.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there are some families that will say 20% big deal. That's not a big number. And then I'll say, well, you know, that's 500 million gets turned into 400 million. And their face turns white. And they're like, you mean I'd lose $100 million every generation before me in total added up compounded didn't have 100 million. How could you lose me 100 million? I'm like, well, then we're going to take less risk than that in the portfolio, right? Yeah. And so having those conversations, we now can do it with much better tools and much risk and we have much better data on what bad can look like and using our imagination and what bad could look like different than it's been so that people can stay those courses and we can be really long term.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're comfortable that you'll buy more? And one of the things that's been really interesting to me working with families is you'll have a $500 million family and you'll tell them, listen, in one of these really terrible markets, you'll probably lose 20%.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or how to pay for their kids' college. It's all multi generational. But if you tell me I'm so long term that I don't have to care about mark-to-market volatility, I would tell you, no, you're wrong because Evan highlighted it in 08. One of our core philosophies, and I think one of the biggest value adds that any investment advisor can provide is to rebalance and stay the course, i.e. we're losing money, let's buy. We've made more money than we should let's sell and let's rebalance back to those targets that are set based on what your objectives are and what you want to achieve. And if an 08 or 18 or 2020 with COVID or 0102, our 25 years, we've got to live through some pretty ugly markets we now sophisticatedly call them turbulent regimes. But we can say, here's how bad your portfolio will perform when things are bad.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has always been the same philosophy, but how we've articulated it has gotten more and more sophisticated over time. And actually the 08 experience was important for us. We always highlighted that you had to think long term. We've always highlighted that as a family, your wealth has broken free of gravity. None of our clients need to figure out when.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After doing that one hundred and ninety times, so much of money is tied to psychology, as you said, people's experience growing up, maybe they have some sense of what they want to accomplish. How do you figure that out with them?”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We get feedback from people who've gone through your process and then end up hiring us. And we ask why. And they said, you're the only ones who just listened in that first meeting. You asked a lot of questions. Look, we're analytic people. We're investment people. It's not going to come without follow-up discussions where you can actually lay out some financial rationale. But if you don't know all the inputs like Brett just described them, the rationale is just a cookie cutter. It's a template. You could have any financial planning software come up with it. You got to be able to figure out how to customize it. And every client is different. 190 families, we have 190 different portfolios, 190 different set of needs.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether it be how you build a portfolio, how you structure your estate plan, how you think about taxes, how you think about philanthropy. So all those wealth management services, as well as even the administrative stuff about the complexity that comes with that level of wealth, but we don't start with, here's all the stuff we can do for you. It's what do you want? And here's how we can deliver that for you. And I think that really differentiates us. And I think that's, again, back to the culture of we want to provide value to these families and we want to do it in a very high quality and high service way.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if you were to line up and do a beauty contest and we lead with congratulations, it's big exit, way to go podcasts are really hitting it. And instead of like, okay, well, tell us everything you're invested in. It's back up. What's your wealth for? And that leads to a discussion. There are so many times in those first meetings where we're not opening books. We're not going through portfolios eventually you have to get there. But the first discussion is really orienting around what is your mindset now that you've had this big exit around is it enough? Are you going to work again? Is it too much? How much are you going to leave to your kids? How you're thinking about charity? Are you philanthropic? How did you grow up with money? Does this feel like you were due and it was meant to be or do you feel like you just hit the lottery? There are so many ways to figure out.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The very first question I'd ask you is what do you think some money's for? And our goal is to help you achieve those objectives and for every individual family, those objectives are different or articulated differently.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look around and there's not a lot of firms like us anymore who are independent, 100% focused on wealthy families. And yet we think it's the right strategy. We think that works for us, to all the points that we've talked about today in terms of early decisions we made to create longevity. But now there are a lot of firms who used to look like us, who are now part of a much bigger suite of offerings. And they might be affirmed that in the past like us didn't manage any internal money. We weren't private equity investors, weren't hedge fund managers. They themselves were allocators. Well, now they're not. Now they're at a product shop. They've got good products in-house. And that's who we're going to be seeing in RFP situations. And I think the same thing's on the service side. Firms that have sold to bigger shops that have internal accounting firms that have internal insurance agents.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can have a boutique mindset as we get bigger. And so I think, again, part of the culture of the service and the customization just needs to not ever change. And that's part of our job to make sure that's the case.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't believe I'm actually saying this 25 years later. I think we're probably one of the largest, if not largest, independent boutique firms in the space. For us, going forward, I'd like to be able to say that for decades to come.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We always wanted to be that way, but it's pretty hard in the beginning to say no to revenue. We made some mistakes along the way there, but once we were comfortable, once we knew we were a company built to last, we could then say even for clients that wanted to hire us and that would have moved the bottom line, but there might have been a mismatch and fit and needs or whatever. I think we got better at being able to say no. So the quality of the clients, I think, improved because it was more of who we wanted to service and who wanted to hire us.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think there probably were ways in which we acted subconsciously that we didn't realize. Because what also happened with Lincoln Peak is that they also provided Brett and I with some liquidity. So it'd been 10 years. We've been running the business, working a lot. But when Lincoln Peak came in, they were just the perfect provider for us for what we needed at that time. Once there's some liquidity off the table, and I think this is probably true for a lot of first-time founders, you relax. I think that our anxiety and stress, while we would say we were fun-loving guys and we didn't bring anybody down in the office, my guess is that that's not how everybody else would have described it. And once you just had a little bit more money in the bank and you knew you were going to be able to pay for your kids going to college, there was something about your mindset that shifted. And as part of that too, I think we became more disciplined about saying no to prospective clients that weren't a good fit.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it changed anything about how we ran the business or did our line jobs. I think it changed a lot about how we thought about people and how we thought about timeframe. That we weren't thinking about quarterly numbers or annual numbers. It was where are we going to be in five or seven years? Who works here that we want to be a partner at 357 years from now? Who do we want to be working with over the next 20 years? That change, I think was an incredible cultural positive for everyone here. The culture was already set in terms of how we thought about investing and how we thought about service and clients.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the business, you got to make them stand by that partners of BBR partners. And that was the first time we started to make actual other partners of the business. And to this day, every year we're making one, some years none, but usually it's one, two, or three partners a year, several years now we've actually had multiple partners retire getting ready to retire, but there's real partners of the firm to the point where back to it's not about me and Evan anymore, you got to stand behind being a partnership. That transition was a big deal. And I think that was really what got us thinking. Not only is it not just about us and it's about everyone here at the firm, particularly the other senior people and the senior people to be as part of that development. But how do we think about the firm lasting generations from this and making the decision that the company would never be for sale? And that how do we think about super long term for how the firm be structured?”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That point, and it's something Ted, you and I have talked about in the past, right? I came from a background in derivatives and trading at the end when I was at Goldman. Listen, if you have a view, take the view versus let's have a trade that has four legs to it and over hedge it. Listen, it's cheap. Buy it. I think we overcomplicated things for a little while. And that made it clear that being overcomplicated wasn't good. The next big milestone, 2010, our third founding partner, Art Black, decided he wanted to leave. And to facilitate that, he wanted to be bought out. And so we brought in a third-party passive partner, these folks at Lincoln Peak, who are amazing and have been amazing partners for 15 years. They are passive, but they are incredibly value added. And one of the ways they were incredibly value added in addition to facilitating the transition that needed to happen to the business at that time was to say, you need to not just formulaically pay people, give them the transparency.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking to our clients before they called us, telling them that we don't know. It's okay. This is new. We don't have a playbook. And then the other is, okay, this is going to create some tremendous opportunities. Do we have the guts to be able to invest in strategies that are down 80 or 90 percent because we know their true value is much higher than that? And we did. We didn't get it 100% right at all, but we made some at the time big bets for our clients that said we think this is overdone and here's how we're going to take advantage of a total dislocation in the market.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was like, okay, we really need to focus on talent, focus on hiring, focus on people, focus on career management. So that has been a long time coming, but that was a demarcation, a point that we made. That was one of our early call centers that we made it. 08 and 09, that was new. Anybody who lived through that, I can still feel it. I remember the conversations you and I had around what does this mean for the banking system? Questions that you don't ask yourself in business school or certainly not anywhere from the 90s and the early 2000s that we had come from.com was totally different. This was a real fundamental stress that the banking system, the financial system isn't going to work the way that it did. And it was a point where our clients were in freefall. They were in panic mode, no matter how much we diversified their portfolio and had lots of strategies that were uncorrelated. It didn't matter. And so learning to get ahead of that is actually.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll do this in chronological order, not necessarily in terms of order importance. Brett made this point before. In 2003 or 04, we hired our first HR director. We were 15 or 20 people at the time. It came from a discussion we had with another friend of ours who looked at our firm and said, you're bound to.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From KKR. We got two bits of conflicting advice. One was whatever you do, put your name on the door so that people know they're talking to a founder. And then the other bit of advice is whatever you do, don't put your name on the door so the firm's not about you. And whether I talked about holding on to things too much, Evan just talking about things being the bottleneck, trying to have that mix of we've got great people here. What do we have them do or bring it outside expertise versus us doing? It went both ways for a long time. And I think it took us a while to get there where I think it really just shouldn't be initials. The firm's not about Brett and Evan at all anymore. People ask me, what happens if I get hit by a bus? I'm like, well, I hope people are sad that's really bad for me. It's probably bad for the bus. But it doesn't mean anything to BBR anymore.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The discussion about what our name should be came down to we can't come up with anything clever because we're not clever people, we're not creative. We didn't have any marketing people around. Let's use our names. Last letter of our. And it's like, okay. KKR kind of sounds like BBR. Maybe we'll get the halo effect from KKR by copying there. So that was as much thinking as we got.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things we grappled with is an interesting question to be reflective on. We've developed a real brand in this industry in a lot of ways, but it has nothing to do with our name, which is one of the worst names in the industry. That's not true.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other light bulb moment was when the coax said to each of us differently, which is you can't solve every problem. That is also a point that is, if you want your firm to grow and last in addition to you, to pass it on and have a real legacy. If you are in the end the bottleneck, every problem has to come through you because you've got this inflated vision of your capabilities of being able to untie every knot, your business is going to get stuck. And once you start thinking other people are as good as you are and are actually capable at figuring out a problem in a different way than you are and you see that all the way through, you start to let go and trust other people at the firm.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were really good at learning from our mistakes. We made every mistake, but we never made them twice. And the coach looked at me and said, why make them the first time? And, you know, we hired a COO. We hired technology folks. We hired a head of HR really early. It's like, you guys don't know that stuff. And yes, you make mistakes and then you don't make them a second time. Why don't you go get the expertise you need you're a real firm to not make those mistakes the first time?”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that had ripple effects across the board, not just in terms of some of our HR approach. Once you're more transparent with your staff when you're working through what they're goals are, you're more transparent than the next step with the firm. And so we started doing town halls as a result of the feedback that we got from the coach. Our town halls are quarterly. It's everybody at the firm. We talk about what's gone right. We talk about what's gone wrong. We solicit anonymous questions. We answer every anonymous question that gets asked in those town halls. And I think that just opened us up in a way that wasn't, I think, comfortable for us to begin with. And it wasn't these private discussions that was the only way in which we would have healthy interactions with people. We could do it at a broader scale as well.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scorecards You need to do at the beginning of every year is agree with the people who work for you what their objectives are. Now they don't need to be meaningfully different than the year before, but you and your direct reports need to agree on what they need to accomplish. Those things don't necessarily need to be ex-clients or Y investment performance, but they do need to be measurable. At the end of the year, you need to hold them accountable for those results. You can't give people a pass if they get a C on their report card. And at the same time, as entrepreneurs, we help things really close, you had to not hold it as close that if you're going to hold them accountable, you had to trust them, and you also had to give them the responsibility to make the decisions to drive those outcomes. Yeah.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At this point, we use coaches for almost every single senior person around the firm. And it's not coaching to be remedial. It's coaching of saying, I want to invest in you to be better at what you do, to be here long term.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, outside expertise was really helpful for us. The other thing we did in 07 was hire a management coach for us as founders. We all had mentors at Goldman and at GAM that we could look up to. But as Evan said, we were pretty young when we started this business. We hadn't managed very many people. And all of a sudden, we were managing a reasonable number of people. I don't think we were doing that well. We were gang tackling. We didn't understand the difference between accountability and responsibility. And so having someone come in and say, here's how you actually run a firm. Here's how I can be your coach to help you be a better executive and a better manager. In 2007 was still pretty early in our journey, but that was an incredibly nice thing to have.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things we did right to determine what we were doing wrong is we brought in a consultant pretty early. It happened to be a friend of a client. This is several years into the business and says, you probably could use some external help. Because to Brett's point, we really had never done this before. And consultant came in, took a look at our business, and came back and he's like, you're running this like a schmada business. It's like Lower East Side, textile business. He's like, you get a client and then you go hire somebody. And he's like, you're not going anywhere. Believe in yourself, basically, and hire for growth. Automate for growth. But to Brett's point, it came very slowly and we needed an outside perspective to basically hold a mirror up to us.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're a little slow to realizing we were in an industry versus just different than everyone else in the broader sense. And I think it's because we were so focused on customization and so focused on service. And that's a good thing. It meant we didn't automate much. It meant that if a client needed something we said yes, if that took more time, we ultimately spent more time and ultimately hired more people. It took a long time to realize that we could still do what we needed to do for our clients, but do it for them better and more efficiently if we automated processes, if we invested more in technology. Now, we ultimately got there, but I'm not sure I'd call that a stumbling block, but if one of the things I could do differently was realize no matter how complex or customized our clients are, there's still things we could have done better, more automated because none of us had run a business before.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Answer this question. So as it relates to that, it's interesting there are a few firms that looked like us when we actually launched. I know we thought we had a very creative idea to provide this highly customized, high touch, very full service approach to families and to be their profit center. But over those first few years, I mean, this is a great example of the half full, half empty, lots of firms started up. We were very early in this trend, and every time I heard about a new firm or someone leaving a bank or private equity firm backing a firm in this, I would walk over to Evan's desk and I'd be like, we're toast. There are so many more competitors in this business. And every time Evan looked at me, he's like, no, that means we're on to something and people are doing what we're doing. And so the space went from something we had to describe to one where ultimately we describe why we were different than others in that space. So I wouldn't say it's a stumbling block, but I think we.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of, oh, I matter. I care. I impact the relationship with the client. I think it brings out the best in them. That is a big secret sauce of how I wish we could replicate it, put it in paper. I think a lot of it's leadership by example. But in the end, that is what I think differentiates us.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starts with everybody needs to row in the same direction. The idea of assembling a boat of rowers where the hole is more than the sum of its parts. And that's because you've just got to put that together where you've got complementary skills together. This is not to pick on Goleman. They are a great firm. We would not be here if it weren't for them. But that firm is where there's tension between the goals of the individual rep and the firm's goals. And we say, that's just not for us. Look, we had a huge advantage. We started in 2000, not in 1862. We could start from scratch and say nobody at BBR gets paid on commission. Everything's oriented towards team. Put the team together. The person who's involved in a client relationship who's handling moving money is just as vital as the person who's actually making decisions around investment strategies. And when everybody feels a sense internally,”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he's like, I told her. Carried in your wallet. If anything happens to me, that's the number you call. And it's like, okay, everything else has been placed. We've gotten the client in a place that he just feels like. Everything's going to be okay.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the principles really were to create peace of mind for wealthy families. Once that's your North Star, you build the whole firm around that. And that's still who we are today. Our services are oriented towards serving wealthy families. Our partners wake up thinking about how to serve wealthy families. Our employees come to the office every day thinking about wealthy families. Our investment strategies are always thought of from an aftertax family dynamics. We have family education practice groups internally that all are oriented towards supporting what a family needs to feel like everything's going to be okay. And I think one of those early aha moments for us was a few years into the business and we were meeting with a client who was financial professional, successful on Wall Street. He said, I want you guys to know something. He's like, I've given my wife your business card. This was the day when they actually, there were business cards.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was interesting is our profile. We were young guys in our 20s. And so I think we were seen as dot-com believers. We had that profile. It was our generation at the time that was leaving the big firms to go do startups. But we never believed in it. We always felt like it was a bubble. We always felt like we're too academic, we're too institutional in the way in which we think about investing. So our first few clients hired us knowing we weren't going to participate in any of the potential upside that was going to come through IPO allocations. It wasn't going to come through us betting on networking stocks at the time. And so we earned a decent amount of unexpected goodwill from our clients when to Brett's point the market cracked so early after we got started and they were protected.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investing in building portfolios purely philosophically has not changed at all. I think we nailed that from the beginning. It worked well from a timing perspective because if you think about the dot-com boom being in full swing, the market hit its all-time high within weeks of us starting. We actually started managing money technically April 1st, I believe. 2000, 2001, 2002 didn't do well for those 60, 40 portfolios or those, I hate to say, traditional alternatives. We did really well. And so I think that philosophy served us really well out of the box just by making money, not losing money for those families those first few years.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the investment philosophy we got right. In early 2000, most independent advisors were sixty forty and they picked stocks and bonds in the big innovation. And you'll know as a Yale guy, Ted, it was David Swenson's pioneering investment management. I think it came out in early 2000. Literally right as we started. And so then it became stocks bonds and other. We had a philosophy that it wasn't about stocks bonds and other. It was about building sophisticated portfolios that wealthy clients were not taking advantage of in the different ways, whether it was RIAs or banks or trust companies, thinking about long-term wealth and what they wanted to achieve with their wealth using sophisticated strategies. That was probably part of our very first deck. And it's still part of how I describe how we think about it. So I definitely think how we invest has changed, but the philosophy behind how we think about and”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you the big idea, which is what it is today, and that is to deliver for wealthy families, is to provide a singular pursuit to give them peace of mind that their financial needs were going to be met. How we were going to do that is very wrong. But what we wanted to do wasn't. And it is exactly what our mission is today. It's part of our culture. It's who we are. What we wanted to do is take the lessons that we had. Brett and I both came from Goldman and our other founding partners also came from big banks and say there are some flaws in that model. What can we do differently as a boutique without legacy issues, without being a bank to be able to do it better?”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People at the firm in three offices, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. We manage money exclusively for wealthy families. There are about 180 families where we're overseeing their wealth, and that's $32 billion.”
2025-02-24 · Capital Allocators · Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source