YouSaid · the spoken record

Sloane Payne

lines on the record
64
first
2026-05-04
most recent
2026-05-04
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

  1. “I said, it's not a straight line path that hasn't been for any of us. I've done virtually every job you could do at the firm. I waited tables until I was probably 30 years old and traveled. I definitely don't have the finance pedigree that a lot of people in a role like this would have. We're running $120 billion globally. It's definitely a complicated business. I'm not really a math guy. Somehow it works. It's fascinating. If you'd asked me when I was 20 years old, is this where I'd be? There's no way in the world I would have conceived it, but I love it. When Dave was talking, I was thinking about we didn't invent the culture from scratch. Paul Black, who's co-CEO right now with Mike Trigg, he was co-CEO with Kurt Winrich. Kurt's dad founded the firm. We joke sometimes that it's culture by inversion. I think about some of the stuff Dave was talking about, getting his arms around coming from a law firm and this idea that we do tend to trust them before they prove themselves.”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “You had to be vocal, you had to do it because there was no one else doing it for you. It wasn't that kind of environment that cultivated growth from the outside. It was you had to speak up and you had to prove yourself because everyone was just looking out for themselves. There was no service to others. There was only service to the entity and no one even really knew what the entity stood for. And here's the exact opposite. It's all about serving the people. We understand that the entity is just a figment of a lawyer's imagination. Unless you're a company that has the machines producing all the output, you're going to have the people producing the output. And if you don't care for the people, you don't maintain the people in the right way. And for us, it's maintaining it through trust. You're going to lose the game.”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “If either one of us had to say, why do you build trust with an operating mechanism? You want people to feel safe enough that they're going to be honest at work. But you also want them to feel trusted enough that they take ownership of stuff, that they take initiative. And you do that not through having systems and program. It's by modeling behaviors, by being intensional, but not rigid, by being organic, by being human. I think you experienced that out of the gate because I remember you did have some stuff early on about compensation. We have this whole idea that we want to generously compensate. We want to overtrust people before they're ready, put them in roles before they prove and they can do them. That's our whole mantra. And then we pay them really, really generously. Dave couldn't quite get his arms around that in the beginning. He was trying to figure out what is my bonus going to look like next year? What is my comp going to be? And is it commensurate with the risks of my position, particularly when you went into the compliance?”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “But if Sloan is being perfectly honest, he was probably very worried about me coming in and being the litigator that I was, I was worried too. I was still getting to know the place and how they operated. And I was coming from a very, very different company to start where they talked about culture, talked about values, had the poster on the wall in the break room, but didn't do anything to align themselves with those values. I think their worry was that I was going to bring that culture into WCM. And fortunately for them, I was ready to leap off the cliff and just do everything the opposite as I was doing before I started. So it was a perfect fit.”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Dave's actually interested in Jacqueline in the back and forth that then emerges after the like, how do you imagine yourself dying? But that's where the real terrain is. And it's not about whether you have the right resume or the right skill set. She does have a great skill set for the job, but that wasn't the point. So how did you know that Dave wasn't going to come in as a litigator and start tearing people up and make sure he's got the right mindset? Because he had Andrew Weichert, who had sponsored him coming in, absolutely loves the firm like most of the people here. I've been at the firm since 2004. The number of people that have left WCM voluntarily in that time span, it's less than three or four. We've had a couple of retirements, but people where it's not a good fit and they don't skip to work. I'm amazed by it. The flip side is nobody wants to bring anybody into the ecosystem that doesn't fit. So Andrew was just adamant about what a high quality person jerger was. And then we put him to the same interview process.”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “But in the last five minutes, I was looking at the list of questions that I was supposed to be asking and all these phenomenal targeted inquiries that Sloan has curated over the years. And I pick one out randomly. And it was, how do you imagine yourself dying? I look back. I probably could have picked a better one, but it revealed such an incredible Story that she got into about not just herself but her father and her family, and the interview got really real, really quick. And it picked up some traits and characteristics that you would never be able to reveal unless you made yourself vulnerable in that moment together. And once you start from a place of vulnerability, it automatically leads into the place of trust, which is what we're trying to chase. We're always trying to chase trust as quickly as we can.”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And that's the point. Trying to get there as early as possible so we can reveal who those people are that we're bringing on to a very special place where if you don't have certain characteristics and traits, it's not going to work with how we form our culture around elevating your performance. We get pretty unorthodox in interviews. I remember an interview I had with a member on our finance team where we started talking about her love for making bagels. I'm a bagel fanatic. And so unfortunately the interviews are always a little bit short. They're around 30 minutes. Think we talked about bagels for probably 20 to 25 minutes.”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Genuinely believe self awareness is the whole ballgame. It's so fascinating because at the end of the day, interviewing is try to uncover who you are. So why don't we lay our cards on the table? Here's who we are as an organization. This is the type of person that would excel in this. Everyone's showing up and treating it like a first date. Everyone's amazing. Nobody has flaws. But eventually it gets unpacked. So why don't we just...”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Trust as the operating principle versus systems and processes. I think that's a little bit inverted from how a lot of operational teams think. For me, it starts with the hiring. You said something, David. You're brought in from an employee who knew you as a childhood friend. We often have done that. There's a layer of nepotism here that's worked incredibly well because people are pre-vetted. And if you're hiring not for credentials, but for self-awareness for the whole person, that's the whole ballgame for us. If you're an employee at WCM, you care deeply about your reputation, about the success of the firm and who you bring in. I mean, the bar is high. It's worked really well. We talked about some of the goofy questions we ask people. Like, would you be friends with yourself? Tell me about that. Or if your friends had to write a one-line roast of you, what would it say? Or what's something you used to believe about yourself that you no longer do? Those kinds of questions are interview questions. And we have hundreds of them. Not to be cute, but we just.”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “You should probably maybe blend you into a little bit of legal work just to make sure we're signing up what we think we're signing up for. That's right. Yeah, I had no experience in the investment advisor space. I was a commercial litigator for seven years going to trial, had some experience doing banking type litigation. But if you saw my resume, any other company and wanted to hire me for this role, I've even met the first layer review. But that's the special thing about this place is that we don't necessarily look for those orthodox competencies. It's character above everything. You have to be smart. You have to be super intelligent. But once you establish yourself in that way, everything else that you bring to the table matters so much more”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Two years of dating for him to convince me that that wasn't actually the case and started pretty much from the bottom of how we like to start everybody just doing basic portfolio management, trades, working with the trade desks, doing some ops tasks, a lot of admin work. Eventually when Sloan convincing our CEO that we needed someone to actually look at the contracts, they were like,”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I don't know how I'm still here because that was the first lawyer that WCM hired. You can imagine that. WCM was probably in operations for close to, gosh, I mean, it was started in 1976, way back in the day. When I came on board, they were running billions of dollars and hadn't had a single in-house council doing anything. Ironically, I wasn't even brought in to be the lawyer guy. I was a lawyer guy. I was working for a humongous law firm hating my life, billing my life in every six minute increments as all the lawyers know they have to do, but took a leap of faith when I decided.”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Sounds so cliche we start talking about these values together, but the company is still made up of people. It's just people that you're trying to get through the day and perform better inch by inch. And all you have to ask yourself is how can I make this person better? Forget the company, forget the entity, forget the structure, just focus on the person and what would make that person do something great. And that's all you have to focus on. all the other pieces for themselves when you focus all that purpose behind the people as opposed to the entity. It sounds cliche, but it works.”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I wish people understood how simple it is to run a good business. And by that I mean you got to measure things. You have to hold people accountable. But doing it systematically and systemically, I think is a fool's errand. And instead, this idea of treat people really well, be generous, overtrust them before they think they're ready. Show them that you trust them. Be honest. Be candid. Make work feel safe. Make mistakes feel safe. Celebrate errors. Encourage people to learn and get better. It's just not that hard. And be curious. You know what? And sometimes we fuck up. Sometimes I'm actually an asshole. And then when I do, I say sorry.”

    2026-05-04 · Capital Allocators · Sloane Payne and Dave Joerger – Why Culture Matters (EP.500) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source