YouSaid · the spoken record

Carol Geremia

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64
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2022-12-15
most recent
2022-12-15
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Yeah, I many times say that I got a lot of F's early on. As I described earlier, I really actually always love what I do. Every position that I was put in, I just cannot tell you how much I enjoyed what I was doing. It also allowed me to have a voice and grow an opinion. And I learned fortunately by some really good mentors about making sure that I check my motive and that motive is this about you. And like one of those real aha moments was understanding how I was interfacing and really close to the client and spent a lot of time, whether it was bringing in business, servicing. And when we had trouble, it was me coming back and translating like, how could this go wrong? We got to do it better, you know, standards up to here. And I really learned pretty quickly that I thought it was my client.”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So along the way, there's a lot of skill sets that there's the sort of direct sales, there's running a region, there's becoming a knowledgeable expert in an area, then running a bigger group, and then running kind of global groups. I'd love to hear what you think are the critical skills that you learned along the way that allowed you to continue to rise through the ranks”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Co leading distribution with a partner of mine that was on the retail side and I was institutional and then evolving that to president of the firm and head of global distribut”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Company. I ran that business for a while, and they asked me to come over to the institutional business, which was very similar in a way because I had been calling on companies and CIOs and head of HR, but the institutional business was away from the mutual fund and it was much more to large institutions and selling separately managed accounts, servicing products, marketing, all of it. And I stepped into the institutional business and had to learn a lot. We were growing our non-US presence at the time. So step into that whole world of global overnight institutional market and global and then took all that on for a long period of time, built the business throughout the whole world in every major developing market, built the teams around the world, and then moved into”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And that was just a whole nother level of complexity. And then soon enough, it became a big strategic decision at the firm of whether we were going to get into the 401k business in a more meaningful way and whether we would build a much bigger business around that. I was tapped to join this new team and to be one of the first pension wholesalers at MFS helping out the advisor community understand that here's a really important aspect in a segment of the market that's going to grow and why it's important to participate. So I joined that and just it was the greatest job I could have ever had. You know, I was out in the field. I was meeting with companies all throughout New England, talking to them about changing their plans, growing it, evolving it. And then as we built that business got bigger and bigger and I became head of the president of the retirement service.”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Where all the questions came to me in terms of figuring out that. And that just put me into the journey of my next stop, which was moving over to the retirement services part of the business, very focused on ERISA plans. It was the beginning of the 401k. And so I made this move from being on what was the early sales desk and supporting the field to a different business of the”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Part of that journey was covering the Midwest. There was a lot of retirement plan business done in that territory, specifically 403B plans. So it was universities, nonprofits, hospitals. And I loved that idea that it was starting to make bigger connections for me, that we weren't just selling mutual funds, that we were managing other people's money, and we were helping people retire. And we were helping teachers and nurses and doctors retire. Like there was early connection for me. We talk about purpose all the time these days, but it was very motivating to me because I had to become an expert in 403b plans. There were a lot of complications that nobody wanted to touch 43Bs on the desk. Nobody wanted to talk about them or do the exclusion allowance calculator. And I just thought, oh, I'll do it. So I became the 403B queen.”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Sure. So it was on the phones. It was learning a lot. I got to be honest. I really didn't know what a mutual fund was when I started. And at the time, we were a US mutual fund organization that was known to have invented the mutual fund in 1924. And so it was really working specifically through advisors throughout the country covering a territory. And interesting enough,”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And to me, that was the greatest thing we did. I knew it was going to shut off the spigot. I knew it was going to slow down growth overnight. But I was so proud about translating why we were doing that because there was no other reason we were doing that is just to protect the performance of the existing shareholders. And it's a simple one, but boy, to be behind tough decisions and then be able to explain that to clients, I think only reinforced your best example of how you're putting them first.”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, I think probably the biggest one was about almost 20 years ago. And I was taking over the institutional business. And so I had a lot to learn. And you're dealing with large institutions all over the world. But we made the decision to close a product that was receiving lots of flow. And I at the time was running the business and it was about building the business and growing the business and really getting presence and scale all over the world. And the portfolio management team and our management team says we're going to close the product”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Not black and white like you would think it really isn't. And so each of those decisions, whether they're small or they're big, sort of mount up to, again, whether you're doing the next right thing or you really focused on the end investor. Are you really making a decision that's more about your business success or, again, clients? And that just resonated with me tremendously from the very get-go.”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “But I do remember meeting, it was an orientation meeting with one of the senior heads of the firm at the time. He was very, very explicit and said, you are going to hear a lot about MFS and you're going to learn a lot in the next month, but there's one thing you can never, ever forget as long as you work here. And he said, we do write by the shareholder. And I don't know what it was, but that meant a lot to me. It was this idea that no matter what, this place was going to do the right thing in time through all the different positions I had at the firm, quite frankly through thick and thin, I really watched the consistency of the decision making and that being passed on to me about putting clients first, we all say that a lot today. But it's very, very gray in this business.”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Very distinctly coming back, and she said, So, what did you think? And I said, The people at Massachusetts financial services were so, so nice. They're incredibly friendly. I would love to work there. And that was it. And within a day, she said, you have the job. And that was November 13th of 1984. And I really started at an entry-level position more on the phones and more sort of doing whatever they needed me to do. I run to the mail room. And at the time, we had $5.8 billion under management with about 340 people. And a big part of the story, too, is that early entry was not just in the interview of meeting somebody that was so just kind was that I found that to be very consistent across the firm with how people interacted with each other, how I was treated as just sort of a kid coming in.”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, I started literally right out of school, and it was a job I had seen in the newspaper. But really, it actually wasn't specifically to go to Massachusetts financial services. It was through a recruiting firm. And so I had to respond to the ad through the recruiting firm. And the reason I even tell that piece of it is because the woman who I met with and who ran the firm herself was working with MFS and places like Bain and other financial organizations in Boston. And I came in with a resume that just had all fashion and retail experience in New York City. So she sort of said, okay, this screams retail. We're going to change this around a little bit and ask me basically if I could type some really basic entry-level things. And she sent me for an interview at MFS.”

    2022-12-15 · Capital Allocators · Carol Geremia - Creating Long-Term Value for (almost) 100 Years at MFS (Capital Allocators, EP. 287) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source