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Greg Fleming

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86
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2020-03-16
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2020-03-16
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  1. “Of the things I start with is independent, trusted advice, and lack of conflicts. We are a private firm. This is our whole strategy. High-end individuals and families on the private wealth and strategic advisory side, pension endowment foundation, ultra-high net worth individuals on the asset management side. We're not trying to be something else. So, for example, on the strategic advisory side, we just worked on behalf of the family, the chairman, and the board of Bombardier on the sale of their transportation business to Alstom and also the sale of their commercial aircraft to Airbus and the unwinding of that.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So within that breadth and story when you're going to a new client, what are those three things that you would have taken out as a consultant back in your Boozallen days and says, okay, here's what we're focused on for you.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Capabilities in 10, 15, 20 wealth centers in the country and the products and services that we've built to serve those clients and private wealth advisors will then be commensurate in terms of the investment and the scale that we're applying it against”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “easier to scale some of the things that need to be scaled if you're going to offer this set of services. The other thing, and this is part of our growth strategy, is you do need to put a reasonable footprint out there because we're delivering some really high quality services like our manager selection platform. We have a group of individuals who screen investment options for clients in all sorts of categories, and we're looking for the best. We do a tremendous amount of diligence, and then we bring the investment firm onto our platform. If you're going to invest in things like that to the degree that we have, you have to have a reasonable footprint to amortize that investment across. So we've been growing across the country since we bought rock and co in early 2018. We have a significant presence in Atlanta now. We have a presence in Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco. We've opened Boca Roton. And the four or five-year strategies to have a reasonable set of”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “It's a tricky balance. Now technology, I use the word digital now, is a key part of it in 2020. So there are things that digital and technology allow you to do that you couldn't have afford to do ten or twenty years ago. So we actually think that we'll be better than the competition on the way we interface with our clients, our advisors from a technology standpoint. So the client applications that we create for our private wealth clients that they have on their phone, the private wealth advisor platform that we create for them to interface with their clients. We have our own technology team, most of them in Hamilton, New Jersey, working to knit all this together for clients and for private wealth advisors, but we also partner with firms for some of the underlying functions that go into this, and those partnerships weren't capable of being in place 10 or 15 years ago. So technology makes it”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “From a high level, and we'll get into the asset management side, certainly the asset management business, there's always this tension between scale of a business and at least presumed quality of the product. When you're trying to do that much for these clients, how do you figure out that you can provide all that much service for a growing number of clients?”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Answer any question they have so they don't have to turn anywhere else. And we think if we continue to deliver on that, we can differentiate ourselves.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “hard for them to make it work together because there's such big firms. And most of the smaller firms are in one or the other, but not trying to bring it all together. So we think we have a unique offering for our ultra high net worth, high net worth individuals and families. And our notion is to provide counsel to them on everything. So they turn to us on everything. So even within Rockefeller Global Family Office, have something we call Rockefeller Lifestyle Advisory, which is a set of partnerships we have with third-party firms that we vet very carefully that we might introduce to our clients so they can help the clients with something that isn't a traditional need that you would think a firm like ours would provide. So if somebody needs advice from a security standpoint, they might have a child traveling in a part of the world where they're nervous. We have a partner that will bring in and talk to them about that. So we're trying to, for this set of clients,”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Was to create an independent advisory firm that could take care of everything for high net worth, ultra high net worth individuals and families. So we want to help them with their full set of needs extending across investments, family office services. We do bill pay. We help you with taxes if you want. We have two trust companies. We do a lot of generational work and have for the Rockefeller family for generation seven now. We also have a strategic advisory business because a lot of wealth in this country is created from businesses that families start. And we want to be in the position of being able to provide advice to those families. So we've got a strategic advisory business that's alongside Rockefeller Global Family Office. And we viewed those as strategically connected coming into this. That was a clear part of what we wanted to do. And Ted, very few people in the industry have both legs of that stool. The big firms have it, but it's very...”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So, what we did with Rockefeller Capital Management, there's a family office that existed way back in 1882. It's the predecessor of Rock& Co, which is what we bought, which was the family office of the guy, John Rockefeller Sr., who made all the wealth and oil. He set it up in 1882. It became a multifamily office in the seventies, and that's the business that we bought and closed on in March of 2018. We immediately rebranded it Rockefeller Capital Management because we wanted to make it clear that we were in business taking care of lots of clients. The Rockefeller family certainly, and they're an important set of clients, but we're in the business of growing the Rockefeller Capital Management across the country and for many, many clients. The vision for what we wanted to do coming into this, and we had this great, brilliant, iconic”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That was a good lead up to it because at Morgan Sale on the Iran asset management and I took over wealth management a year later, a dialogue James and I had going in. So I ran both businesses for the last five years that I was there, asset management for six years. The wealth management business at Morgan Stanley was in transition. That was another reason why I went to Morgan Stanley. I thought the business model that James had started to put together was the right one. They had asset management, they had wealth management, they had the investment bank. But wealth management, to me, was a key part of what could differentiate them and no question it has. Look at what's happened since then. In running those businesses, I really got into the weeds of wealth management for the first time. At Merrill, it reported to me, I knew the business well, but I was president and I had everything. There was somebody running wealth management day to day. So I wasn't as into the granular as I was at Morgan Stanley. So I really got to know the business well. And when I left Morgan Stanley in 2016, I was very focused on creating something like what we're doing now at Rock.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Whether you respect them and whether you think in a similar fashion, that's a very important part of the way you should make decisions about what you do with your life. So James taking over and being in charge was a big part of that decision.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I had a lot of opportunities that were starting to come together at the time, and I was trying to sort through it, really, where do you want to spend your time now? I think I was 45. It was a good time to take stock and say, this is really what I like to do every day. Let's pursue it. But in the final analysis, Morgan Stanley was and is a high quality firm. And I knew James. I knew his values. I knew the way he thought about business. I knew what he wanted me to do. I knew I could do it. I knew he'd let me do it. And it was the comfort with that relationship that led me to take the job. And he was pretty focused on it. I mean, he had other deck chairs lined up. This is the one he wanted. But the personal relationship, and I say this often, this is another life lesson for my kids and when I talk to young people, the relationships with people are very, very important. It matters if you're working at Apple versus another company. But still, the day-to-day relationships with people.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So I did that over the course of the spring, and I really did kind of catch my breath. I mean, I drove the kids to school. I was on garden leave. I couldn't do anything anyway. And it was a time for me to kind of recharge. And then James Gorman actually came and spoke. He and I were friends from Merrill Lynch. He ran the private wealth side when I ran the investment banking side. So he came and spoke and he and his wife and my wife and I had dinner up there. And that really laid the seeds. We were still friends for when he was named CEO in the fall of 09. He called me the next day.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “of that time Merrill Lynch has went on to thrive the $65,000 people kept their jobs lots of positives I'm not picking on them but it was going to be a very different firm and I just decided this is going to be too difficult to transition for me I think it's a good time for me to go and this to go on I left right after the new year and I flew down to see Ken Lewis and I said I'm leaving and he nicely said we don't want you to leave and why are you going and I said it's a good time for me to go and after some back and forth I announced that I was leaving and I was going to go teach at Yale School. And I did. I ran a lecture series up there over the course of the next four or five months and we didn't tape it and I really regret that because we had Larry Fink, we had Rog Cohen, we had Alan Schwartz, we had Steve Galbraith, we had everybody that had been around the crisis. And they came and they talked to students at Yale Law School about what caused it, what's happening now, governmental responses. It was a spectacular group of people.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It's a fair observation because I definitely, to walk you through the sequence after we announce the sale to Bank of America, which I'll never forget on September 15th, 2008 And it actually leaked late the night before that Sunday night. So after we announced that, we started to move down the path of integration. And I went to my 20-year Yale Law School reunion. And the dean at the time was a man named Harold Coe. And I saw him, and he was very candid, like you just said, I slept through a year. He said, you look awful. You're drained. Why don't you take a break from that world and come up here and teach and write and clear your head? And I said, Harold, I appreciate that. And he said, it's a dean's appointment. It's just you and me. It's all yours. And I said, I can't do that. I just sold this firm and I was instrumental in doing it. I've got to see this forward. And then over the next month or two, I realized that it was going to be quite a difficult transition for Merrill and for me personally because it was a very different culture of Bank America. And look, they bought it. It was a $50 billion transaction in the middle.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, wow. I want to roll forward into sort of your move into private wealth, but I also noticed that after that period of time, after that BFA deal got done, you basically slept for a year. So, you did have that gap. What did you do in that period of time to kind of clear your head before you re-engaged in the business?”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Bank of America. I didn't want to see the firm sold for $2 or $5. It was a great firm. 94 years of history, most of the businesses were performing great. And actually with hindsight, it's been a spectacular deal for Bank of America, despite some of the challenges up front. But it was hard to stay steady, to your point when it was constantly no sleep, stress that you carried that others couldn't see. It was quite a challenging time. I used exercise. I'm close to my family. The kids were young then. They would distract you. Dogs. There were all sorts of outlets, but it was a relentless sense of being hunted.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “On the leadership team. And it was hard to stand back and make sure you were balanced in what you were reacting to and what you shouldn't react to and help lead the firm and exhibit confidence to all the people, 65,000 people. And the thing about Merrill that was particularly with hindsight even sad is that much of the company was well positioned for the crisis. The wealth management business was best in class. We owned 49% of BlackRock, one of the outstanding asset managers in history. We had a great investment bank competitive with anybody. And then we had fixed income exposure in a relatively small set of products, but it was big exposure enough to risk the whole firm. So you had 60-something thousand people were walking around saying, well, my business and my life seems pretty good. So you had to keep motivating them and keep it going. That actually was something that motivated me in the negotiation with.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Literally worked around the clock and didn't sleep for virtually eighteen months. I mean, there were obviously times you slept, but the stress never left you. It was almost like being hunted at those firms at that time. Remember, there was a famous piece written by, it might have been Howard Marks called Where's Waldo, and they were talking about where the fixed income balance sheet exposure was and trying to find it. You know, at first it was Bear Stearns that was in trouble and then Lehman and all the dialogue around Will Merrill's the next firm and how much exposure do they have. So the relentless stress that created”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “If you get into the granular part of those key decisions, Sort of an off the cuff question, but you're working around the clock too. How do you keep a sort of clear mental state Knowing that, like, so much is at stake, and you might not be at your best in that moment.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Capital with companies that you respect and you don't want that capital to be at risk. As we raised a lot of capital at Merrill in the 0708 time frame. And I was on the phone with friends that were the CEOs of mutual fund companies and asset management companies saying we're coming to market. We'd love to have you participate in the offering. You want to do well by those people. And the pressure of making the right decisions against that backdrop and not being able to turn somewhere and say, okay, who's going to come in and tell me am I right or wrong? It's you. You just have to, in life, get ready for the fact that that's going to occur and you better step up to the table and do your best and make sure you keep in mind what's important and what matters here and what's not.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “One of the things that I learned during that time, this is clearly a life lesson, and I talked to my children who are 23, 21, and 19 about this, there were times during that period where you're wondering where did everybody go and how do we end up in this position? Because when I was made co-president in 2007, I was the youngest president, I think, in the history of Merrill Lynch. And by the time we were in the middle of this crisis, a lot of leadership change that occurred around us, things were happening that virtually nobody in the industry had predicted, and the decisions were now in and around my hands. And what I say as a life lesson is things haven't been actually around that long. And if you're waiting to look around the room and say, well, who's got the answer here? Oftentimes there isn't going to be somebody saying this is the answer. You're the president of a 94-year-old company with a spectacular brand name. There are 65,000 employees. You've been raising cash.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “BlackRock's a good example of great leadership. Larry Fink, he's a really good leader, both strategically in terms of where they should go and putting people in the right seats and motivating them. And that's one reason why that firm has done as well as it has. It's not just investment performance or buying eye shares at the right time. A lot of it is in the management and leadership of that firm. And that's a positive example. There are many on the other side that might have been bigger or better positioned over the years fell by the wayside.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “People intensive businesses often make the mistake of taking the producers, the people that are generating the revenues in one sense or another, whether in asset management, it's portfolio managers and investment people, in wealth management, it's private wealth advisors and investment banking, it's investment bankers, and then assuming they can be great leaders because they've done their craft very well. And the skill set is often so different. Investment banking is the starkest example because some of the greatest bankers are really good at covering a set of clients and doing a lot of business with those clients and obsessively working with those clients. But that skill set doesn't translate to motivating large groups of people all the time. And because of that, you end up with companies that promote people who really should have stayed on the business side into leadership, and then they struggle. And then there are companies that make good decisions about who the leadership should be.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “If you took that thread from your Booz Allen experience and the sort of getting the right focus, a lot of you think of asset managers in particular are not known for managing people well. Where did you see that succeed and then fall short, that idea of sort of having the right focus from a business lens?”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Making big decisions about Merrill, we ended up at that time owning 49% of BlackRock, and I went on the board. So I had intimate insight into BlackRock going into the crisis, which was big asset for Merrill Lynch. I knew the wealth management business because I'd been dealing with the people there for years, financial advisors, and who were selling a lot of the asset management companies' products, who I was covering on the banking side. So being front and center in terms of what was going to happen to the company was partly that I was president and partly that I knew these businesses.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “You know, Ted, one of the sound bites was that I joined the financial institutions group pretty quickly after being at Merrill. It was a couple years, but that's really the path that I ended up on. And I got significant exposure to asset management. I started covering them from an investment banking standpoint and also wealth management because the asset management companies were generating a lot of their assets through retail system. And Merrill had the biggest and one of the best. So those two businesses became a cornerstone businesses for me in terms of understanding and having clients and operating them. Very important to Maryland as a principle. So the knowledge about financial institutions and the career path I took through financial institutions, eventually I moved over to the management side and I ran US financial institutions, global. Then I became head of investment banking and then co-head of the institutional business. But that path was partly set by my insight into financial services companies. And that's one reason why I was at the table in 2008.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I thoroughly enjoyed the work and the exposure and the coming up with solutions to problems and presenting it to the clients, but then they went to do it or not. And I started wanting to do it. And I wanted to be closer to being in control of it. So I got a call from Merrill Lynch, which at the time was really starting to expand its wings beyond just retail into being a broad-based financial services company and a big name in 1992. And I went and I joined in late 1992. And I thought this would be an opportunity for me to get closer to doing it myself and being one step closer to being the decision maker.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And one of the things I saw early on was all of these plans that would get put in place by the executive or the leadership team. And it was too much. And you're part of helping them craft it and you're thinking they're not going to go get a lot of this done. And in fact, they don't. So one of the things I had started to learn early on was be very focused on what you're going to try to accomplish within a company. The strategy has to be tight and clear and communicated constantly and you have to keep going back at it. Because I saw a lot of situations where that wasn't the case. I'm not saying that I had that clearly in my head at the time, but the seeds of that came together over the course of my career where later on you see this is why some companies are very successful and this is why many aren't.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “That I had only had minimal insight into coming into it. What were the biggest lessons you took away from that initial experience? Well, it was a couple things. And I don't know that I Lesson at the time, but Course of my”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Spoke Portuguese and they decided they were going to do the meeting in Portuguese, and we just kind of watched Learned on so many levels.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And I spent four and a half years at And Ham Companies from many different industries Fascinating Was an incredible education. Businesses Them successful Cons Very interesting business to be part of because you get”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Just at the beginning Curve that's taken into this massive multibillion dollar I interviewed with a couple of firms and I got an offer from Booze. Which was a private, it's been broken up since then, but it's a private firm. That had a commercial practice and a government practice, and I was hired into the commercial practice in New York That really took me in a completely different direction in life than if I had started at a law firm. Which I was considering doing, or gone and done a clerkship for a judge. And it really That I found out about management consulting. I thought it sounded like problem solving for companies and I liked problem solving. So I took the offer and I jumped in.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Back to law school because I made the first of a few unusual pivots at that time that's kind of led me through the career path and I often talk about that. So I'm at law school in the mid to late 80s. I graduated from Yale Law School in 1988. I spent a couple of summers working at law firms in New York. And I was still trying to figure out. With my career. And I found out about management consulting, which was a big business.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “My guest on today's show is Greg Fleming, the founding CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management, where he took the helm of a storied family office in two thousand eighteen to build and serve other families and institutions as well. Prior to taking on this challenge, Greg was the president of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and Morgan Stanley Investment Management, and before that spent 17 years at Merrill Lynch, culminating in serving as president and chief operating officer from 2007 to 2009. Our conversation walks through some of Greg's career paths, including some highlights from the financial crisis and the Rockefeller Capital Management Business and Strategy. And I couldn't help asking Greg about his relationship. With a Yankee great, Derek Jeter. Please enjoy my conversation with Greg Flemish.”

    2020-03-16 · Capital Allocators · Greg Fleming – Building and Running Rockefeller Capital Management (Capital Allocators, EP.125) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source