YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Buckley

lines on the record: 55
first: 2023-02-17
most recent: 2023-02-17
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

“One I've learned through time, and it's always ask more questions. Fewer statements, more questions. And listen to the answers and encourage the debate. I catch myself still doing it today. I have to do it. And you're going to learn so much more if you let that team go. And one thing I've learned, you've always heard you can, you may not be the smartest in the room. I grew up with this. You may not be the smartest in the room, Tim, but you can be the hardest working. And that's how I grew up. I came to learn something else, which is even if you think you're the smartest in the room, you're never smarter than the whole room. So in time, I've learned, okay, we're not going to be smarter than the room. How do we bring out the best in that room? How do we get them to collaborate? How do we get them build knowledge on each other? And you'll produce great things as a team.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We looked at direct indexing years ago we started thinking about what's a way that you could disrupt the ETF or the mutual fund? You always should be looking, is there a better way to do it? And direct indexings existed for a while. It was reserved for the ultra ultra high net worth. And we could see that there's huge tax benefits for a lot of investors in using direct indexing. But we started to see customization as people care more about the values of how they invest and could you create portfolios where you're not going to undermine someone's retirement, but let them invest according to their values. And we got very interested in it and said, rather than hope that it goes away or doesn't undermine, why don't we embrace it and see if we can grow it and see if it is a better way to do something? And we'll find out over time. But we'll be investing heavily in.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not enough, but I also learned all those things that I had conviction about. There's another lesson there is over time you stay with it. Look, digital advice is accepted now. And those things. So you also, you have to just because it didn't work doesn't mean you leave it behind.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which one do we want to choose here? I would say they. I got a few of them. But let's go with conviction. A lesson here that I'll go back in time that I mentioned that hype, and I was the web guy, and I was convinced the world was going to change overnight, and online advice was going to take off and aggregation would be a key element of it. And I was selling hard. And we invested a lot of money in it. And nothing happened. I remember talking to my boss at the time. He said, Oh, I knew that wasn't going to work out. And I said, well, Jack, why did you say something or do something? And he said, Tim, you had to learn that just having conviction doesn't make it true.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I asked for feedback and I make sure my team. Even if Greg Davis, could you have a more accomplished CIO? Greg Davis is going to hear where he's great, but he's also going to say, Greg, your next level leadership, here's what you would work on. And so it's going to be that for him or for Karen Risi or whomever's on the team.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're on their side. And so, how do you put it in a way that they're going to say, okay, well, this is the help you get to the next level? One of my observations is, or how can we work on that? And that is a great way to get someone to receive feedback. And then my advice to other people, if you want to develop yourself something I've always done is I ask for feedback. And gosh, that makes it so much easier on a boss. And I used to poor Bill McNab would do a review and say, hey, great year. Tell me like, all right, tell me what I need to do better. Now tell me, like, what would the team say? And I would stay after him until he gave me something to grow on. And at any level, I don't care what level you're at, you should have two or three things you can grow on.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got to figure out how to be candid. And you've got people shy from giving people feedback. And everyone wants it. It never feels good, so you have to figure out how will someone receive that feedback. And you've got to make it about getting them to the next level. And if you can give feedback to anybody if they believe you're on.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one of those ones we've put first, you've got to have a big goal out there. So for us, we'll continue to grow the diversity of Vanguard, but by 2028, we'll put the goal out there that every level of leadership should look just like the rest of Vanguard. And so we looked at it and said, that is a goal that is attainable, but you need to have a distinct strategy around it. So we have a chief diversity officer that works with all of our division heads to make sure that we have the right strategy, the right practices around how we do attraction and retention, but critically development. You bring people in, you've worked hard with you, but you're making sure they're developing in the way that we talked about. Success for us in the past five years, we've seen both our diversity and our leadership go up 6%age points.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever one could expect from us is to continue what we find a straightforward but compelling strategy. And it's to make sure we're producing the top performing funds, that we have the top performing funds in ETFs out there. We'll wrap them with low cost, scalable advice, and deliver them on a world-class digitally enabled platform. Now it sounds simple to do, but you've got to bring those all together. And if you do that well and you can keep improving it, you'll create value into the future.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there are owners, and you never want to be complacent as a business, so as our owners, they should actually demand that we get better and better. And the other one is that if a company wants to lead, if you want to lead, you don't get to set the pace that you go at. Now, most people would think that, okay, if you're the lead, you're the one setting the pace of the race. But the truth of the matter, no, it's set by the performance of your competitors, you have to stay ahead of them and the expectations of your clients. If our clients have high expectations, we will keep our pace high. And we have to exceed both of those year after year. And so we always want to make sure we have the team, the plan, and the capabilities to do just that.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you do it directly advising clients? How do you help advisors become better at what they're doing so people can keep more of their return? They have a better chance of raising the investment success of their clients. So that's how we define what we do. Private equity is just one of those. In private equity, look, I said it's not an easy game. Typically a little bit below the S&P. And there's a wide dispersion of returns. So if we're going into that, how do we make sure that our clients are on the right side of that distribution? And relative fees matter in there. Access matters. And we had to vet all of those. That's very consistent with the original vision of Vanguard.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hey, he pushed back on me on the web and would have good debates on that. I think his vision, though, that's what was so powerful. And that's what remains. This idea of putting the client first and giving them a fair shake. That's what defines us. People want to define us as a low-cost index fund, which Jack Bulw should be and was incredibly proud of. I mean, he brought this idea that existed out there and brought it mainstream. So many people have done something so much to extend that. But he was the visionary behind indexing for the Main Street investor. And so we want to remember that, but that's not all he was. He was that vision of how do you put the client first? How do you let him keep more of their return? So we look, what are other ways to do it? Because it started with low cost active, but how do you do it through advice?”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And no, it's great. I mentioned that a tough decision whether the retirement business, both of them said, hey, we should have done that earlier. And so it's reinforcing to have that. And we're looking, and they're proud that we just became in that business number one in competitive NPS. So that business is totally shifted and turned around. But they were 100% behind it.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is one way. If I reach out to them, they get back to me, but they don't reach out and go, hey, what are you thinking about? Where did you do that for?”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how cool it is. I mean, two very different leaders and two fabulous mentors and great friends, both of them. And they have a different way to see the world and see leadership. And I would encourage everyone out there that often people come into a role and, oh, I got to put my imprimatur on there. And I can't talk to the past leaders. Look, whenever I make a big decision at Vanguard, And I talked about some of them. I would actually talk to Bill and talk to Jack first. I would understand why didn't we make this decision before? How did we get to this point? They would give me the historical context and often give you information that, oh, I didn't think about that, you might adjust, you might not. And they are accessible. They made us leave our phones backstage, but I could text right now. You got yours? I could text Bill right now and he'd get back to me in five minutes.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around their competencies. As we rotate them, there's a give up. Someone loses their expertise in a role. So what they're gaining is context. They're gaining context and becoming a better leader, better decision maker. You just have to, it's a system you have to balance because you can't have everyone rotate to a new area. You have to keep institutional knowledge and really sandwich people like experience on the top, experience on the bottom, and have someone fresh in the middle.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rotates. Well, look, I mean, the same way that I was rotated between what would be a corporate area to a service area to an IT to investments. And you give up your best talent. And it's odd. Most companies don't do it. You want to hold on to your best talent, but at Vanguard, you're rewarded for give up your best talent and make sure they develop. And how do you develop them? And we do it. We rotate people based off of their competencies. We know, think of them as buckets that you need to fill. And it may be, okay, well, what someone's vision and strategic thinking? And it might be, how well do they know operations management? How good are they developing crew? And these are buckets that you're trying to fill along the way. You can't fill them all in one job or with one boss. Some bosses will be better than others. So what we do is if we understand those about our people, then we rotate and we know what the next one or two or three rotations will be.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At every leadership level, we do talent oversight where we'll go through and you should know your teams. And you'll know everyone will know their leadership team, people in their group, where they're strong, their competencies, where they need to develop. And we will talk about, we constantly rotate talent to develop them.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can pass on your lessons and someone else builds on them, they teach them to somebody else, that's where a leader can have true impact.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You had been mentored by Jack Brennan, right? Good, by Jack Brennan and Bill McNab and Mike Miller and all these people through time who had taken an interest in my career. And they took an interest in my career. And when people asked about me, I hadn't done as much. Now there may have been one or two people that said I was the best thing to happen in their career, but by and large I hadn't done enough. And so I've spent the next 22 years saying, okay, well, how do I develop talent? And I would tell you that for me, my proudest moments at Vanguard are when someone that I've mentored ends up on our senior leadership team. And fully half of that team, I can say I had a hand in mentoring them along. So it takes concerted effort. And for a leader, there's nothing more rewarding because that's the way you have exponential impact.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, I know. And still a weakness. But second from the bottom was developing talent. Man, that one stung. Because I realized I had been a taker all this time, not a giver.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That stuck with me. A couple things stuck with me. It was the importance of competencies in developing those competencies in people and the importance of taking risk in the development of people. Another thing occurred to me probably a year later, and that was that, and we're big believers in doing 360s on people. So getting feedback, every leader should go out and get feedback, not just from their boss, but from their peers and those people on their teams. So I did a 360. And, you know, it always starts off with your strengths and where you're doing well and say like, oh, gosh, you know, Tim's strategic and he's got drive and he gets results and collaborative and loving everything. Then I get down to the, okay, here's what his weakness is when he needs to work. And, you know, the bottom was patience, and we can come back to that some other time.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unfortunately back then our CIO suddenly passed away Jack Brennan asked me to Step in and lead our technology group. It was a surprise choice for everyone. It was a surprise for me. And I remember talking to him about it, going, pushing back a little bit like, you know, I don't have the IT background that other people would have. And he said to me, Tim, I'm not asking you to code. I'm asking you to lead. And then he went through the competencies that you would expect me to bring to the table and how I could bring our IT division to the next level.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we have a team who are constantly out there looking for who could be great outside managers. And they will look for that Active Edge, they'll look for that differentiation, and they're constantly out there so that if there's an opportunity that pops up in a fund or there's an idea for a fund, that we actually have a list that we can go to right off of people that we respect and that we could work with. And working with Vanguard, one of the differentiators is that we're so long term. They have such a long-term focus that they truly can have a low turnover and stick with an idea, not worry, hey, they're underperforming for two years that we're going to move on from them. So we're probably a lot more patient. But at the same time, highly educated in the questions we ask.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because look, you have a low expense ratio, it can be higher quality, and you'll equal or maybe you fall behind just a little bit, and you'll keep a lot of dry powder. And so then when you have spreads widen out, you have dislocations in the marketplace, you have plenty of dry powder and you deploy it. And with that strategy, you will outperform over the long run. And I mentioned that 10-year performance. If you look at our active fixed income, I believe 98% of the funds have outperformed their competition over the long run. So their competitive group averages. So it's, and straight up the number's huge. So it's a differentiated way, but we measure it. Do they truly deploy that black powder, that dry powder? Do they take advantage of it?”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They truly keep that edge of differentiated thinking. We do it to ourselves. Our active fixed income group, against super smart people supported by great technology, but what's there? What's that edge that no one else could duplicate in there? It comes from our structure. If you think about the fact that we have client-owned, so we're delivering as close to at cost as possible, we're going to be a lower fee than almost everybody out there. That means a low hurdle rate. So what do you do with that? Well, for us, that means that when you're not getting paid to take risk, when spreads are tight like right now, then don't take a lot. You don't have to. You don't have to make that extra spread or go out and credit quality and take extra risks there.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People talk about, well, yeah, it's people, it's philosophy and process. You'll go through all of those. But we found the best way to evaluate one is make sure that they can tell you what their edge is. What is their active edge? And it has to be one that can't be easily duplicated in the market. Because in a zero-sum game, right, where you're competing with other managers, you want one an edge that nobody else has. So you can't just say we have smart people and they collaborate well with technology, right? Everybody's got smart people and everyone's got great technology. You can't just say, you know what, we think differently. We want you to prove it. So how do you think differently? So you've talked with the leaders of Bailey Gifford. Where do they hire from? Well, they don't hire from business schools. They'll hire military intelligence officers and have them work actually serious with a poet and with someone else and they keep them in pods of teens that they work together but they don't collaborate. They don't want groupthinks. They don't let them work with other groups. And then you measure.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“90% active, so we were active firm when I joined Vanguard. And it's just evolved over time to be 80% indexed. We firmly believe in active, we firmly believe in low-cost active, but its place in the portfolio has changed. If you think about a port for most clients, it's an index at the core. And if you have the risk appetite for active, it's going to play much more of a satellite. And so as we look at it, we look towards strategies, it might have, well, maybe it's the same a little bit higher. You'd hope for information ratio, but you have a bigger risk budget or standard deviation. So you look for more excess return. So that plays for a better complement to the index portfolio. Now, how do we think about active managers?”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then other companies will retain earnings. They'll pay a dividend, go to a family. What we do is we say, okay, with that capital, we'll give it back to our clients in the form of lower expenses. And it's been a pretty powerful cycle, and that's why year after year, we're able to kind of lower expense ratios. So I mentioned Jack Brennan. I bumped into him in the hall the other day. He stepped down as CEO in 2008. And he said, Tim, when I joined Vanguard, our expense ratio was 88 basis points. And it's less than a tenth of that now.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the dividend that we pay out to lower that expense ratio. And it's how we're built, and it comes with those are economies of scale. Every year, just like any other company, we have our expenses that includes kind of the big investments we're making in the business, and we have our revenue line. And we end up, you know, we've been lucky be very profitable year after year. Well, what do you do with that? You can, number one, you put it back into the business. There's plenty of capital put back into the business. With projects, it will meet your cost of capital. So you do that. You have to make sure you have enough liquidity reserves to, so if there's a big bear market, you want to protect your investments, et cetera, risk event.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being cloud native can give you incredible speed. Resiliency last year, our availability, and you never get a good article written when you have high availability. You just want to avoid the bad ones. We were at 99.97% available for our client application. So that's a number I hadn't seen before”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've rebuilt we're about 74% of the way through of rebuilding all of our applications to be cloud native. Now that sounds cool. Like what does it give you? It builds up your resiliency but your speed. And I'll give you an example. Maybe the team won't love that I'll use this one. But we launched a mobile app last year. It fell flat on its face, the mobile app. It was panned. Our clients hated the mobile app. And in the past, when you did that, well, you had to live with it. You'd have to wait nine months to fix the problem. But because it was built cloud native, that meant you could make changes to it. You could make changes every two, three days. And so we did 200 releases to it in nine months. And that app has gone way past the satisfaction ratings, client satisfaction ratings of the past one continues to grow. And so...”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for us, technology is the embodiment of our service. We've always been a virtual company, just used to be through the mail and 19 hunter number when I joined. So it's always been that way for us. So it needs to be a necessary area of investment. And I mention this when you lead with technology, what can happen to you is you can, if you don't continually make the investment, you fall behind because it gets so costly to address your legacy. It becomes an albatross. You're kind of your legacy applications. They become a burden and they slow you down and they slow down what you can do for your clients. We made the choice of eliminate that legacy. And a few years ago, we said on whether you're investing directly with your investing through an advisor, whether you're investing through a retirement plan, the platforms that we deal with are service infrastructure, our investment infrastructure, cloud native.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How people code, where you host something, all of those things, those have, you know, how applications talk to each other, those have totally changed since I was CIO. But if you think in investments, certain things like there are more rules in there, like that proven investment philosophy of diversification, that's not going to change overnight. So you have to be more careful in the investment world. And both of those can be a balance of CEO.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On private equity are often below the SP 500 on average. So you've got to do your work. You've got to see through it and say, okay, well, that means that I need to keep fees low and I have to get with the right GPs, et cetera. And so you can drive, you can figure out where's that long-term change going. So those two jobs give you a perspective for, okay, avoid that hype and how do you see through the long-term change that you want that you think you should drive home? They're probably different in how you embrace change. In IT, the world's always changing. So that's a dangerous thing.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That Gartner hype cycle was something where whenever there's a disruptive technology and it comes in, there's a lot of hype and high expectations. So unrealistic expectations, followed by something doesn't happen, you have disillusionment. You have the troth of disillusionment. And people give up on it. But the true change comes when, hey, you know what? Those loyal to that technological change figure out over not one, two, but three, five years, how to drive change and how to leverage it. And that's been true through time. It was true whether it's with the internet, you can plow it with mapping the genome with EVs. And it's true in investments. You have to look at a change. And people will talk today about, okay, a private equity, some magic elixir. If I can just get private equity into my client's portfolios, it's not true. I mean, private equity is greater return dispersion, but the return...”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for every CEO, you need perspective, and I think both the CIO jobs gave me incredible perspective. The first one would have been back in, you think about I became CIO right at the tail end of the internet craze. I was on the web and then took over as chief information officer, and that was a time of incredible hype. The internet's going to change the world. Oh my gosh, it'll change how we actually consume video, how we game, how we do business. And everyone was talking about that in 99, 2000. You remember that well, and then it didn't happen right away, and everyone ended up disappointed. We know what happened over the long run. It, you know, back then we used to talk about something that I've tried to bring back for people, which is that Gartner hype cycle, if you remember it.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She said, why is that? Well, it was because not everyone was coming in. And you still had some people at home and some people, or you didn't want to travel from building to building, we have a nice campus, and not everyone wanted to travel. And we just said, no, actually, when you're here? Like, first, everyone's got to be here. And then secondly, when you're here, we expect you to actually interact with each other, not on teams. And you want to see that team's usage drop in the middle of the week and go up on the tail ends because Monday and Friday are the virtual days. So we actually had to establish that norm that people had gotten so used to using Teams all the time in the middle of the week. We had to move people away from it.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sure a lot of people have been through this where they come into the office and we had it at first where people came into the office and they were on teams when they were in the office. So what we're finding Zoom for, okay, they come into the office, they say hello to each other, and they sit down on their desk and they go on video all day long. Well, that defeats the purpose of actually those serendipitous moments who bumping into each other, trading ideas, you're sitting in a conference room, you're talking to each other, building on everyone's points if you're on teams.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're able to do it in a virtual world, but now that people are basically back for three days a week, it's a lot easier to reinforce it and people to see it when they're actually face-to-face.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Client, crew, self, always in that order. And a lot of companies will say that, like, they will put the client first, but we don't have another choice. Our clients own us. We don't have anyone else to serve. And then during the pandemic, it became clear to us, like, yeah, but the only way we can mess that up is if people start putting themselves in front of the client. And so the leaders there would have to say, okay, we have to enforce it. It's always the client first. And as a leader then, that means that you have to take care of the crew before yourself. So we emphasize that wholly, that leaders are going to actually make sure that crew know that they care more about their success than their own. So for me, it's more important to see my team's success than Tim Buckley's success. And it's amazing how that helps build a team if you're true behind it and it builds the collaboration on that team. And then down the road is somewhere where you put yourself. But that is a corridor of culture.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's tough for every company out there. When you've hired thousands of people who've never set foot on a campus and you often model the behavior in a culture. And so the first thing for us is it's in the leaders that you actually select. And that's so crucial for us. So in our screening, you get odd interview questions. We're trying to figure out are you purpose-driven? Are you actually someone who's going to be purpose driven? But then we have something I learned from one of my mentors. You've talked with Jack Brennan before. Former chairman and CEO. And he always established this early on in the culture that it would be.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“7.2 trillion, but it's growing at 15 to 20 percent a year. And there are 650,000 clients that at the bottom of the market last year, 80% of them were still right on target with their goals. And for advice for us too is also a matter of you think about advisors. How are we using model portfolios to make their results better? Are we making sure that they have the right products from Vanguard to actually complement what they do, the right practices? Being in the advice business ourselves, we can help improve their practices, justify the advice that they give, justify the fee, and just simple things like, hey, the value of tax loss harvesting. How do you make that apparent to people? Something that for us saved our clients $300 million in four months. In doing that. And so great change.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk about just getting started. But, you know, it's one of those things that as a leader, you don't think about like, well, here's the finish line and then I'm done. It's how far can you push it and get the next team ready to take over and continue that journey? But for us, we measure our success in different ways. We measure our success by how are our funds doing. And we look back long-term performance. And right now you look back over 10 years and are active funds, 94% of them are outperforming their competitive group averages, 68% are outperforming their benchmarks. If you look at that ETF low-cost leadership space, I believe it's 86% of our assets would now be considered lowest cost. So we can actually have that low cost title back, if you will. If you kind of continue on to that advice journey that we had.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We looked in our personal investor, our direct business, and said, we have to organize it differently and we have to modernize that digital experience. Tough decision overseas are basically pulled back from Asia. It was all institutional clients and we gave back 125 billion in assets, which most people think is crazy. $125 billion. Wow. They were all institutional separate accounts. That's not what we do here and gave it back to them. And that's not where we'll excel. It's just not what makes us tick. We were managing money for people for basis point and a half, and then they were going ahead and charging 70 basis points. That's not why we get out of bed. We want to see that an investor have a better return as a result. So made those tough choices and five years later, we're sitting a lot better off.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a choice to make at that point. And the choice was do we just delay everything and play defense or do we just add a pandemic to our list of brutal facts? We chose the latter and said, we have no idea how long this is going to go on, but we owe it to our clients to emerge from it stronger and better than when we went in. And we prioritized all our strategic plans. We had to figure out how to get them done while people were remote, forced us to make some tough choices in that time and some big investments. Whether we were building out our advice capabilities and building virtual teams to do it or tough choices in our retirement business, we had to rebuild its soup to nuts. And we partnered with Emphasis, but that meant 1,300 crew went and worked for emphasis. But it meant we could triple the resources that we had focused on our retirement business.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looked at the foundation of our position, and it wasn't as good as we thought it was. In fact, we're low-cost leader, but at that time we weren't. If you looked at our ETF assets, at that time less than half of them actually would have been considered lowest cost in the industry. Our NPS scores were high, but they were declining because of an antiquated digital experience. We were losing market share in the critical retirement, the 401k business. Internationally, we were spread too thin. We are serving clients, institutional clients, and that weren't core to who we are. We're all about the individual investor. So we looked at those and said, well, we've got to address those, and we want to build this new engine of value with advice. Great, awesome. That seemed like enough, and then COVID hit”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for 40 years, we have been hammering away at the fun side of that. We had lowered the cost of investing. And we had improved the quality of those funds. And, you know, Dare I say we made a change in the industry. We started to think that maybe we could actually do that on the advice side. Maybe we could be the vanguard of advice because we had this PIS group, personal advisor services that had some early success. So we sat out and said, okay, could he build another engine of value? Engine one being funds and engine two being advice. And if we could do that, that would be wonderful. So right before doing that, right after we talked, we looked at, we like looking at our competitive position. Do it constantly and we call it, hey, let's embrace the brutal facts.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Optimist or a pessimist, you just have to embrace the facts in front of you. Brutal as they may be. And that's what we learn throughout this. And you have to plot the best path forward. And maybe if you humor, maybe we'll go back to kind of the first time we talked and you go back to that time because Vanguard had been gone through a decade of incredible success, great growth and look our fun performance had been top notch if you went back to that time and our net promoter scores were really high. Cash flow outpacing the industry. So all signs were great. We had a wonderful opportunity in front of us. We looked at We looked at a client's success and we saw it as hey, it was defined by the funds they hold, but also by the advice they got on those funds.”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both challenges and opportunities for Vanguard. CEO during the pandemic COVID lockdown What sort of challenges? A couple of bear markets, inflation at a 40-year high. Titus labored labor market of our lifetimes. But yeah, other than that, it's been easy times. So what sort of challenges and opportunities have the past five years presented? There's one of a huge lesson for us, and it's brought out in our leadership team. Great leaders, you've got to embrace your reality. You can't be”
2023-02-17 · Masters in Business · Tim Buckley on Finding His Purpose With Vanguard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source