Speaker 1:
From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week, we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICE's exchanges around the world.
Now, let's go Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Lance Glinn.
Lance Glinn:
Each month on the Inside the ICE House podcast, we engage in insightful conversations with business leaders, CEOs of NYSE-listed companies, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. We explore their journeys, the challenges they've overcome, and their aspirations to shape the future. You could tune in every Monday on all major podcast platforms to catch these discussions and watch full video episodes on tv.nyse.com and on the NYSE YouTube channel.
In October, we aired five new episodes covering a diverse range of industries from asset management and insurance to metal services, banking, and politics as the election draws closer. We kicked off with Episode 440 featuring Brian Doubles, President and CEO of Synchrony. That's NYSE ticker symbol SYF. Synchrony celebrated its 10th anniversary as a listed company on the New York Stock Exchange on July 31, 2024. Brian, who has been with the company since its inception, now leads it into the future.
In our discussion, he emphasizes the critical role of company culture and navigating challenges and highlights how Synchrony's commitment to listening to its employees has cultivated a workplace environment that others aspire to emulate.
Brian Doubles:
I was surprised, I was wrong. If you said in March of 2020 we could get 20,000 people home, fully operational, and the business would still be humming, I would've said, "You're crazy," but that's what we did. As we got into this rhythm and we built new processes and we moved to more agile, stand-up, operating rhythms, the business was performing really well. We started to listen to our employees and they said, "Wow, this really helps me balance the demands in my personal life with work," and employees were happier, they felt better supported, and I saw it myself.
I have two young girls, 12 and 13, so they were 9 and 10 at the time. For the first years of their life, I wasn't around to get them on the bus in the morning. It was a good result if I could get home in time before they went to bed, I wasn't getting home for family dinners, and all of a sudden, we're spending 24 hours together, which has its own set of challenges. That's not perfect either.
Lance Glinn:
Yeah. Trust me, I know that.
Brian Doubles:
So I got to feel it a little little bit myself. And as we started to listen to employees, and employees said they're taking care of elderly parents or sick loved ones and just how this helped them manage through that time period, we said, "We should make this permanent." And we did that in October of 2020, which was very early. We're still in the throes of the pandemic, but we knew we could operate the business successfully like that. And we haven't gone back on that, and I don't think we will because if the business is performing, if our customers are happy, our partners are happy, we're growing, we're meeting our deliverables, we're delivering projects and products on time and on budget, then I don't see a reason to change.
And so I think that was we took an already great culture and then by just really focusing on listening to our employees and making sure that they felt supported, I think we're able to take it to a whole new level.
Lance Glinn:
So Brian, on July 31st, again, the date of the 10-year anniversary since the IPO, you penned a letter titled, "A Decade of Partnership: Celebrating Synchrony's People, Growth, and Impact." And in it, and I'm going to quote you here, you wrote, "We know creating a world-class culture doesn't happen overnight. It takes patience, it takes intentionality, it takes investment, and it takes a commitment to partnering with people."
So while its clear Synchrony has achieved a culture that many others aspire for, do you believe that the words perfect culture exists? Or is it something that's constantly needing to be worked on, something that's constantly needing to be changed and evolving and asking those employees on a regular basis, "What can we do for you?"
Brian Doubles:
Yeah, it's definitely a living, breathing thing, and it is constantly evolving. You never get to perfection. We're not perfect. We're far from it. But I'll tell you what you need is the commitment of all the employees that it's a priority, that we value culture, that it's a differentiator, that it helps us better support our partners and our customers. And I think all 20,000 people truly believe that and so we're focused on it, but you have to be willing to change, too.
And that's always one of the challenging parts. When you think you have a great culture, it's easy to say, "Okay, let's just not break it," but if you just say that, you say, "let's just not break it," then you're not evolving, and the world around us is changing every day, and you have to respond and react to that. And that means you have to do that for the business and respond to those external dynamics, but it means you have to do it for the culture as well.
Lance Glinn:
Episode 441, features Mamadou-Abou Sarr, Co-Founder and President of V-Square Quantitative Management, a global asset management firm. Before V-Square even officially opened its doors in April of 2020, Mamadou and his team faced a major challenge launching the firm in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. They had to raise capital, engage clients, foster a team camaraderie, and shape the company's identity, all while navigating the unprecedented global crisis. Mamadou explains how V-Square successfully met these challenges by adhering to what he calls the PHD values, which became the foundation for the firm's success.
So what was that journey like of having to deal with this once-in-a-generation pandemic while also trying to now build this asset management firm?
Mamadou-Abou Sarr:
Well, thanks for asking, and never judge my market timing. I think if you judge by that, it's pretty poor market timing, but it's a gift and a curse, so I'll start with the gift in itself.
When you build a firm in a time of crisis, it forces you to think about who you would like to become given a new set of obstacles. So I'll start by thinking that regardless of the environment, building a startup from scratch and building a firm from scratch is hard. And if you take that as a hard exercise with a high probability of failure, your goal as an entrepreneur is to de-risk a big part of it. And that's what I call "the controllables." Now, the curveball that comes in is the uncontrollable piece, and the pandemic was one that never forecasted in my business plan that I presented to my business partners.
Now, when it happened, I remember vividly sitting in my home and thinking, "Oh, boy. It will be a rough ride," but then the blessing is the following. It forces you to think more about your own identity as a firm, how you would like to spend your capital, internal resources and efforts, and ultimately what matters to you as a firm. And I must say that when we launched V-Square, before even building the full platform, we put a big emphasis on our values as a firm. And our values, we'll summarize in three words: passion, humility, and dedication.
Now, the funny part is, as you assemble, it does the term PHD, and I'll tell you the story behind it. My data has two PhDs, a professor of sciences and a professor of molecular genetics, and I have no PhD to claim. I'm an outcast in the family, a complete failure. So I use the acronym as a joke to tell him, "Hey, I didn't get my PhD"-
Lance Glinn:
There's your PhD.
Mamadou-Abou Sarr:
"... but here's my PHD." But then the passion for me is what drives and fuels us every day. To do what we do is hard enough, but if you don't bring the passion into it, it's impossible to thrive. That's the number one.
Now, the markets will keep you humble, performance will keep you humble, and then a once-in-a-generation crisis will also keep you humble. And so once you understand that humility is a cornerstone of a value system that I do adhere to, and all the partners at V-Square, every day we show up, ego is at the door, and we understand that for us to win, someone has to lose. For us to win, someone has to trust us. So never get it twisted. Sometimes people equate the success of their own merit. Of course, there is our own merit and hard work, but there is also a lot of factors, a lot of trust, a lot of goodwill that help you do what you do.
The last part is dedication. You need to be relentless. And the COVID tested us as far as how can we raise assets? No more face-to-face meetings, no more RFPs, no more new friends for consultants. How do you build trust virtually on a Zoom call? How can you raise assets when there is less opportunities where your asset class is out of favor? So all these factors forces us to adapt to a new norm.
Lance Glinn:
Inside the ICE House for episode 442, Pete Asch welcomed Karla Lewis, President and CEO of Reliance Inc. That's NYSE ticker symbol RS.
At the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate 30 years as a listed company, Karla has been with Reliance for all three decades, starting as its first controller in 1992. Now leading Reliance, building on its years of growth and success, Karla and Pete discussed the excitement of reaching 30 years as part of the NYSE family and how the company in the unique metals services industry has been able to thrive.
Pete Asch:
How does it feel to reflect on the journey that not only your career has taken, but the company's taken since its IPO in 1994 to where you are today?
Karla Lewis:
Well, I would say it's definitely been a lot more than I anticipated when I started working there 32 years ago, and certainly when we did the IPO 30 years ago. It's been great being on the NYSE. It's brought value to our company. We did our IPO back in 1994 because we wanted to grow a little more nationally. We were pretty much a West Coast company then, and that really gave us the funding to do that. And since then, it's created a lot of value for the company, but also a lot of our employees, our stockholders, and we've been just really excited to be listed on the NYSE for that long.
Pete Asch:
Yeah, I think in 1994, you had 18 locations. Today, you have about 300 locations, so definitely a bit of growth over that time. And the average company today lists after around 12 years of being in existence. Reliance took their time because this year is also the 85th anniversary of the company's founding. So February 3rd, 1939, the company is founded as Reliance Steel Products. Today, it's the largest metal service center company in North America.
Can you explain for our audience what a metal service center does and how much of the business is still tied to Mr. Neilan's plan from 1939 to distribute steel-reinforced beams?
Karla Lewis:
Yeah. I'm glad you asked the question because a lot of people don't know that our industry really exists. We're a bit of a wholesaler, distributor, and becoming more and more of a value-added processor to metal products. And yeah, Mr. Neilan, the story as I know it is he actually had opened a hardware store in Los Angeles, California in the late '30s, and he sold hardware products to a customer up in Fresno, California, and the customer wasn't able to pay him in cash. So he paid him with rebar instead, and Mr. Neilan made a good profit on that and decided maybe he should start buying and reselling metal. We sell very little rebar in the company today, but we sell many, many other metal products and have grown from that.
Lance Glinn:
Episode 443 shifted the focus to the insurance industry while highlighting the unique career journey of Juan Andrade, President and CEO of Everest Group. That's NYSE ticker symbol EG. Juan stepped into his role as president and CEO in January 2020 with a clear vision for the company's future. However, just three months into his tenure, that vision had to change dramatically. He joins me Inside the ICE House to discuss the challenges he faced, how his priorities shifted, and how he successfully navigated through tough times to implement his plans and ideas.
You step into the role, as I said, January 1st, 2020. You then say March 12th, 2020 is when you had to shut the company down. Now, every CEO goes into a new role, or every executive, you could really say, goes into a new role with their 30-60-90 plan. "Here's what I want to do next month, two months, three months." Now, I'm sure you had one in place. I'm sure you had in your mind what the next, frankly, whole year was going to look like, but then obviously this unexpected pandemic comes around, and I'm sure that really changes everything.
How much did you have to shift those goals, shift those ambitions, shift those priorities when it came mid-March 2020?
Juan Andrade:
Yeah, it for sure definitely threw a curveball at you because all of a sudden you're going from, "Okay, I've been in the job now five months," from that perspective since I started, and I did have a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do, strategy with people, et cetera, et cetera, but all of a sudden, you have something much more important, which is the health and safety of your employees around the world in a very uncertain environment.
And then the other thing that happened, and I think to some extent's still happening, is the fact that there was a large loss of faith in institutions, meaning the government, et cetera, during that period of time. So your employees really turned to you as the CEO to help pave the way for reassurances, for et cetera, et cetera. So all of a sudden, I'm assuming a role that I never expected that I would have to assume.
In addition to that, you have all the social justice issues that took place in the United States in that period of time. So the focus changed for safeguarding people's lives, trying not to make decisions for the long-term when you really didn't know what the long-term was going to look like. I still remember in those early days thinking, "Okay, this will be done by June or July of the same year," and here we are a few years later and we all know what happened. So that certainly probably slowed down some of my plans.
Now, at the same time, we still moved forward on changing some of the leadership and really setting the time to develop the strategy, et cetera, et cetera. But in some ways, the priorities did change in that point in time because when you're thinking about life-and-death issues, particularly when it was very unclear what the future was going to look like, it really became a different story.
The other part of it's you didn't know what was going to happen with the economy in the US, world economy. Are you going to have another credit crisis? Was this going to be similar to the GFC, the Global Financial Crisis back in '08, '09? And so all of those things are running through your mind, and particularly as a brand-new CEO, that was a challenging period of time because there was no blueprint. We, all of us, developed our own blueprint and based on our style or experiences, et cetera.
But this, I go back to not a linear career path because I lean back on what I had dealt with in the government, what I had learned, what I had learned in my prior life also as a journalist, et cetera, et cetera, and I'm a calm person to begin with. And for me, it really became an issue of my priority is my employees and their safety, the company, absolutely, but at the end of the day, don't make final decisions at a time where you have no information on what to do. So you manage it one day at a time until things become clear, and then that roadmap begins to develop on its own.
Lance Glinn:
As the month comes to a close, CNBC anchor Carl Quintanilla joined Kristen Scholer on Episode 444. With stark policy contrast between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Kristen and Carl delve into how the economic policies of both candidates, along with various national issues, could influence the electorate and ultimately determine the outcome of the presidential election.
Kristen Scholer:
In the context of the perplexity that is out there today, how are you finding that investors are interpreting everything that we've seen, and how do you think that might impact investing ahead?
Carl Quintanilla:
I think we've been asking investors all year long, and even back in when the primaries were in full swing, "How are you pricing in the election?" And inevitably the answer was, "Well, we're really not thinking of it right now. It's going to be more of an issue for second half '24," and even the last few months, a lot of advisors and strategists will come on and say, "Yeah, we expect some chop." That's the phrase, "We expect some election chop. And then once we move past that, we can get back to CapEx and earnings and cash flow analysis." So I think there's been this attempt to delay it as long as you possibly can because, as you say, it's been so unique and so uncertain.
Right now, you're starting to see some trades develop. You can argue it a couple of different ways. Stanley Druckenmiller just this week argued that the market's pricing in a Trump victory. If you look at things like small caps and cyclicals and Bitcoin, areas that might get deregulated more, might force more M&A, that's very much a Trumpian trade. And Druckenmiller's point was that if you look inside the market of the internals, you're seeing that.
Others would argue, "Well, if you're counting on a Trump presidency to withdraw from, say, Ukraine, then why is Raytheon at all-time highs? Why is Lockheed at all-time highs? Why aren't a lot of exporters pulling back in their stock price if, in fact, we're going to be putting universal tariffs with the risk of retaliatory tariffs from other countries?"
So you can slice and dice it any way you want, but you look at betting markets, you look at certain polls, people want to blow off a little bit of political steam by making trades because so much of the actual polling data is within the margin of error. We really don't know what's going to happen.
Lance Glinn:
You can listen to these episodes, along with all past and future Inside the ICE House episodes, wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes are now available on tv.nyse.com and on the NYSE YouTube channel. Be sure to join us every Monday for inspiring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries.
For Ken Abel, Pete Asch, and Kristen Scholer, I'm Lance Glinn. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you again next week.
Speaker 1:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X @ICEHousePodcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week Inside the ICE House.
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.