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Lazard (LAZ): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Jenny Johnson, President and CEO, Franklin Templeton Peter Orszag, Chief Executive Officer Lazard In conversation with: Clay Chandler, FORTUNE

Fortune Global Forum 2023: Mastering Complex Financial Markets 

Conferences

<p>Well, hello and good afternoon. It's a pleasure as Alan said to be back here in the great city of Atlanta. And I have to warn you a little bit ahead of this uh session. I myself just came over from Europe. So it's quite late for me. Normally you'd run the risk as a moderator to bore your public and put them to sleep. But I might just do that to myself. So to make sure that we don't, let's get this conversation started and I'd like to suggest that we start with Roy and just one more thing, you know, you're going to hear a lot about ESG and ESG investing and about the backlash against it. We're gonna get, we're going to stay out of that trouble because we're going to be talking about impact investing, right? Do you remember impact investing? Well, these people are all experts in impact investing. And Roy, I think if we can go back a little bit in time, we work, of course, for the Ford Foundation, you know, I think if we go back perhaps a century in time, almost, you know, Ford, of course, the founder Henry Ford was maybe one of the people that did impact investing first. Now you as a foundation though, changed that model of combining for profits, uh investing with social impact, you change that model to corporate philanthropy. And I think if, if we know uh any organization that did corporate philanthropy or philanthropy over the last century, I think a lot of people would think of the Ford Foundation today though, it seems like you've embraced also this impact investing trends. Could you tell us a little bit more about the evolving approach of the Ford Foundation and what the role is of impact investing uh for your organization today? Uh Sure. First of all, thanks for having me here. Great to see everyone here this evening. So I, I tend to start with, I'm the luckiest guy in the world because I get to work at the Ford Foundation and I'm leading a really exciting initiative. Um When Henry and Ed made their last uh donation in 1947 a lot has happened since then. I was hired in 2018 to lead impact investing. And III, I do wanna say that um Alan Murray, he, he, he made the comment about um ESG becoming dirt impact investing can sometimes be seen as a dirty word. And I started referring to what we do as patriotic capitalism, which is a form of capitalism that puts the interests of country democracy, seeing the common good. First. It also has the benefit of being a little bit harder to weaponize. Uh as a term uh for those who are looking to divide us, uh There are opportunities out there. Uh We all know about but the, the Ford Foundation, um we believe that we are able to generate um attractive financial returns along with social impact. And we've, we've uh proven that um I still around after 80 years. Uh we are, we are, we're still around, We're doing well. And the key to this is truly thinking about what is good for the country. The world is changing, the world order is changing. The current driver of economic strength for any nation is its human capital. So almost everything we do has to do with human capital. We have a quality jobs name. Uh and we have a diverse fund manager's name. I can, I don't want to take up too much time. I'll stop there and we can come back. Let me just ask one follow up question. So my idea of the Ford Foundation was that it operated historically by taking its endowment investing that in markets or in, in companies and then using the proceeds to do philanthropy has that model fundamentally changed today. There's an old joke in the world of philanthropy that says, did you hear the one about the lung cancer prevention foundation? They made a killing in tobacco stock, right. So the important point about philanthropy is that the endowment investments usually do not align with the charitable mission of the foundation. That's the whole point to what the Ford Foundation has done. And what Ford did was it studied it very carefully and decided to carve out a billion dollar commitment and say, hey, let's give this a try. I think most people thought that we would lose money because when people here uh do well and do good, there's a sort of a cognitive bias that it says you got to lose. We generated in our first five years, a 28% compound annual rate of return and strong uh positive social impact. What does that mean? That means? Um in the diverse fund manager world, 1.4% of all assets under management, 80 trillion in assets under management in the US. 1.4% of that is managed by firms owned by women and people of color. Our portfolio is 68% 1.4 68. Uh Our fund managers have helped develop 23,000 affordable housing units. Um We have passed uh 76 million consumers in the global South low to moderate income. People who need fintech uh uh products to help with savings insurance, et cetera. That of course, you've been on the endowment side, you've done that as an investment, as opposed to philanthropy impact investing at the Ford Foundation is endowment capital. I run a separate endowment. Our mission was to was to display what an endowment can do. That's attempting to generate financial returns and social returns. The 28% is roughly 3.5 times what a foundation needs to achieve, which is spend rate, all foundations in the US are required to spend 5% plus inflation, purchasing power, um spending a lot these days. So uh we're spending more than 5%. We're spending 6% and we raised a billion dollar totally separate social impact bond to, to bond to give away. Uh But the point is we need to make at least eight or 9% to be sustainable and we've done well. Now, I don't say that we're not bragging. I don't think I'm a market wizard. We publish that data to provide a countervailing data point for people automatically assume that you're trying to do well and do good. You're going to lose, right? We say you don't have to lose that. That's an important point, I think. And it certainly adjusts my point of view or, or my understanding of how the Ford Foundation works. Now, let's take a more recent organization, Michael, you work for the Emerson Collective. It's been around for about 10 years. Is that right? Yeah, it depends on when you start the clock, 10 years is good. Um And so if you take that historical model of endowments and then uh philanthropy has that, was that different from the get go at the Emerson Collective? Were you all in on impact investing from the get go. Yeah. So from the very beginning, we were stood up as an LLC rather than as a traditional foundation. No, we preserved a lot of flexibility in the way we allocated capital and we're able to run some experiments and be creative. Is that for, for um ethical or moral considerations or, or for, for the flexibility for it was more for the flexibility, the observation and the reason for the collective was there's very difficult social issues out there that humanity's traditional tools haven't yet been able to address. And so Loraine looked at it and said, well, let's try a new model. Let's experiment. You know, we're at the uh the doorstep of Stanford, some of the greatest minds in organizational theory. Um Let's try some different ways that haven't been done before. So the idea of the collective is we've got a group of people focus on different issues using different tools and we're trying to be inspired by each other's work and um port some of those lessons over to other sectors where they can be more effective. Give us a few examples of places you've invested in and that has worked well for you to have returned uh good returns, both social impact and financial. Yeah. So our venture team that I'm on, I lead the energy and environment group more recently could be referred to as climate tech, but I've been doing it for a lot longer than that's been a term. Um And we look for consequential companies and the way we define consequential is generational scale impact and venture scale returns. So we don't see there's a trade off. There's really two ways we do that. One is how you filter and then how you help. Um So out of the gate, we look deliberately for opportunities where there's going to be profitability and impact that are well aligned. It's pretty easy to do in the climate space. It's more difficult in some of the other categories such as education, technology. Sometimes those can come into when you say it's more difficult. Have you cracked that code or, or not? And, and do you think it's possible if not? I think it's more being intellectually honest with what is the underlying um alignment between the profit motive and the impact motive, right? Or what the particular um technology is. So with climate, it's pretty obvious there's times where you really have great alignment. For instance, an investment in a company called Posen down in Louisiana that focuses on solar for low and moderate income households using a new underwriting approach. Um And then there's other opportunities where it maybe is not as obvious. And we have an opportunity to partner with really dynamic entrepreneurs who are gonna change the world and we have an opportunity to help them out of the gate, make sure that they're doing in a way that is planet positive and good for the environment. Right. I, I want to turn to Nikita. So you, of course, work for a, a firm that has traditionally been known, I suppose, since 100 and what, 70 years now. So 100 and 75 100 and 75. Congratulations in Switzerland. There's a, a club that you can only belong to if you exist for 100 and 75 years. Um, so, you know, but of course you're not a Swiss company. Um There's many, um so, uh you've done most of your existence, I suppose in traditional financing wealth management that we all know what is the size and growth of impact investing at Lazar. Um I think it's one of the most exciting areas uh within asset management and wealth management. Um Obviously, it comes down to definitions. Yeah, when you say exciting, could you, could you be more precise? I, I think the whole space including ESG is actually really, um we're in early stages, you know, first innings as much as we would, a lot of us here have been doing ESG for 15, 20 years, but that is still very young compared to the history of financial markets. I would kind of place us at where we were pre ec in financial markets when there were no definitions for, you know, what was and two investors couldn't necessarily speak and compare notes on the financial productivity or the health of the business that's still where we are in this space. So definitions are still very early. But if I would clarify on our end and the way I do think it is important to, to be clear about what your intentions are, I I define eg personally as an investor from an investor's perspective, discovering and pricing and g risks and opportunities. And it's really about financial materiality. Do you not uh segment out impact investing at Lazar? So um not currently, but the way I would define impact investing and and hopefully this is helpful for specifically this audience here. And one of the main points I wanted to make at this panel is impact investing is not just for the realm of private investors. It's certainly not just about grant making as we just heard from, from Roy, but also not just limited to venture capital and private equity public, large public companies can have significant impact in the world if we define impact as the intention of having positive measurable, environmental and social impact in a way that that that lasts and where you can measure your contribution, that's how a majority of people in this field kind of define it. And I think corporations in the world are the units, the largest units of change. They are the drivers of change, positive and negative. They are by virtue of the size of the companies that you all work at and the complex stakeholder relationships you have, you are generating impact in society every day. It's a question of measuring it, articulating that story tying it to your investment and that then creating opportunities for us as investors to participate in. Does that also mean that ESG investing as you, as you define it? Um does not have a limit and upper limits could, could all investing be ESG investing since you know, we're all companies who are the greatest driver of change in the world. And so, you know, everyone can be an ESG investment for Lazar. I remember when I was interviewing at Lazard several years ago and, and my pitch to them was that you will know we are successful at what we're doing when I've lost my job because doing ESG and incorporating ESG into your work is about being a good fundamental investor. If you, how can you be a good fundamental investor today, an active investor doing deep research if you don't think about the consequences of the energy transition or healthier living habits and how consumers are shifting their preferences or worker rights and how that's shifting the operational margins of businesses, especially service oriented businesses. So it's part and parcel of being a good investor, right? But since we're in the early innings, I suppose you're still a while away from losing your job, which is a good thing I suppose in a way, at least for you. So uh I want to turn to the question for uh to, to the audience. There we go. This is my jet lacking and I want to turn to the audience for, for a question. Uh, but maybe just before, uh, we do, um, uh, Roy back to you. So, you know, we've heard a bit about the, the new models that are, that are being looked at ESG from the point of view of Lazar being an LLC, from the point of view of the Emerson Collective, is the Ford Foundation ever fundamentally going to change its model? Or is it just basically turning all of what you do in your endowments over to patriotic capitalism? Yeah. Well, um I assume that the board of trustees both at Ford and other um organizations are watching us very closely. There was great skepticism when impact investing was announced at the Ford Foundation. Um We've published our achievements thus far. And again, I want to stress even a broken clock is right, twice a day. I mean, we knock the cover off the ball but I mean, I live in Switzerland that that wouldn't die there. Um You don't like broken clocks. Um So, um I, I agree with the, that um um my theory is that as time goes on ESG disclosures, uh we will quantify them into dollar figures that can be baked into investment modeling and then you're taking risks and opportunities into evaluation and then investing in. There's no, it's investing because you have more investing has been about more information, creating better valuation alter, that's right and understanding the quantified cost of g helps um policy makers determine what needs to be internal, what externalities need to be internalized. Helps consumers decide. Do you want to make purchases from a company that's dumping costs on society or do you want to go elsewhere? Makes sense. I got time for one question. Um Let's maybe come over here and if you can state your name, perhaps also what you do or the company you work for any of your question and we're getting, we're getting the mic to you right now. Hi, I'm Raja and then one of the founders at Ulnas. Um we're a technology firm, we do data quality engineering. Uh We are an impact venture um and just as context. So our mission is to demonstrate neuro diversity as a competitive advantage. We have teammates in 30 states, three quarters are autistic, son of teammates are dyslexic, dyslexic, nonspeaking, etcetera. Um My question to you is um what are the trade offs you see as acceptable when you're trading off impact and profit? Because as an operator, I can tell you it's not a perfect world. We're making management decisions every day that you're trading off EBIT with, invest more in training and development in mental health support, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't buy it that there is no trade off that you can achieve the same market returns without sacrificing returns and have an impact. I would just like to hear your thoughts on, where are those tradeoffs happening and where is it acceptable, Michael? Can I turn it over to you in one minute or less? Yeah, I, I think it's like any other market where you're going to have diminishing returns. There's opportunities where there's great alignment and there's opportunities where there's no alignment or negative alignment. And so I think it's being honest with where on that continuum you fall of what the alignment is between the fundamental profit motive and the impact motive. Um I think, you know, one of the things it sounds like you're doing is you're finding a way to tap into talent pools that traditionally have been ignored and that can be a way to uncover talent that otherwise wouldn't be noticed. And so you're gonna, you can have great alignment there. It's possible there's a lot of recruiting and training and things like that that go into it, but also you probably have a higher hit rate and you find the talent being able to get them on to your team. So I think that's a great example of a program that has huge impact. Um but also can have great probability. Excellent and you did that perfectly on time. Thank you so much, Mike. Well done. Uh My Swiss compatriots will be very proud of us and me. That's it for, for us. Thank you so much. We'll be talking much more about this in the next 24 hours. But for now, thank you to our panelists.</p>

Michael Bruce, Venture Investing, Emerson Collective, Nikita Singhal, Sustainable Investment and ESG, Lazard Asset Management, Roy Swan, Ford Foundation Peter Vanham, FORTUNE

Impact Initiative 2023: Aligning Profitability With Purpose

Well, hello and good afternoon. It's a pleasure as Alan said to be back here in the great city of Atlanta. And I have to warn you a little bit ahead of this uh session. I myself just came over from Europe. So it's quite late for me. Normally you'd run the risk as a moderator to bore your public and put them to sleep. But I might just do that to myself. So to make sure that we don't, let's get this conversation started and I'd like to suggest that we start with Roy and just one more thing, you know, you're going to hear a lot about ESG and ESG investing and about the backlash against it. We're gonna get, we're going to stay out of that trouble because we're going to be talking about impact investing, right? Do you remember impact investing? Well, these people are all experts in impact investing. And Roy, I think if we can go back a little bit in time, we work, of course, for the Ford Foundation, you know, I think if we go back perhaps a century in time, almost, you know, Ford, of course, the founder Henry Ford was maybe one of the people that did impact investing first. Now you as a foundation though, changed that model of combining for profits, uh investing with social impact, you change that model to corporate philanthropy. And I think if, if we know uh any organization that did corporate philanthropy or philanthropy over the last century, I think a lot of people would think of the Ford Foundation today though, it seems like you've embraced also this impact investing trends. Could you tell us a little bit more about the evolving approach of the Ford Foundation and what the role is of impact investing uh for your organization today? Uh Sure. First of all, thanks for having me here. Great to see everyone here this evening. So I, I tend to start with, I'm the luckiest guy in the world because I get to work at the Ford Foundation and I'm leading a really exciting initiative. Um When Henry and Ed made their last uh donation in 1947 a lot has happened since then. I was hired in 2018 to lead impact investing. And III, I do wanna say that um Alan Murray, he, he, he made the comment about um ESG becoming dirt impact investing can sometimes be seen as a dirty word. And I started referring to what we do as patriotic capitalism, which is a form of capitalism that puts the interests of country democracy, seeing the common good. First. It also has the benefit of being a little bit harder to weaponize. Uh as a term uh for those who are looking to divide us, uh There are opportunities out there. Uh We all know about but the, the Ford Foundation, um we believe that we are able to generate um attractive financial returns along with social impact. And we've, we've uh proven that um I still around after 80 years. Uh we are, we are, we're still around, We're doing well. And the key to this is truly thinking about what is good for the country. The world is changing, the world order is changing. The current driver of economic strength for any nation is its human capital. So almost everything we do has to do with human capital. We have a quality jobs name. Uh and we have a diverse fund manager's name. I can, I don't want to take up too much time. I'll stop there and we can come back. Let me just ask one follow up question. So my idea of the Ford Foundation was that it operated historically by taking its endowment investing that in markets or in, in companies and then using the proceeds to do philanthropy has that model fundamentally changed today. There's an old joke in the world of philanthropy that says, did you hear the one about the lung cancer prevention foundation? They made a killing in tobacco stock, right. So the important point about philanthropy is that the endowment investments usually do not align with the charitable mission of the foundation. That's the whole point to what the Ford Foundation has done. And what Ford did was it studied it very carefully and decided to carve out a billion dollar commitment and say, hey, let's give this a try. I think most people thought that we would lose money because when people here uh do well and do good, there's a sort of a cognitive bias that it says you got to lose. We generated in our first five years, a 28% compound annual rate of return and strong uh positive social impact. What does that mean? That means? Um in the diverse fund manager world, 1.4% of all assets under management, 80 trillion in assets under management in the US. 1.4% of that is managed by firms owned by women and people of color. Our portfolio is 68% 1.4 68. Uh Our fund managers have helped develop 23,000 affordable housing units. Um We have passed uh 76 million consumers in the global South low to moderate income. People who need fintech uh uh products to help with savings insurance, et cetera. That of course, you've been on the endowment side, you've done that as an investment, as opposed to philanthropy impact investing at the Ford Foundation is endowment capital. I run a separate endowment. Our mission was to was to display what an endowment can do. That's attempting to generate financial returns and social returns. The 28% is roughly 3.5 times what a foundation needs to achieve, which is spend rate, all foundations in the US are required to spend 5% plus inflation, purchasing power, um spending a lot these days. So uh we're spending more than 5%. We're spending 6% and we raised a billion dollar totally separate social impact bond to, to bond to give away. Uh But the point is we need to make at least eight or 9% to be sustainable and we've done well. Now, I don't say that we're not bragging. I don't think I'm a market wizard. We publish that data to provide a countervailing data point for people automatically assume that you're trying to do well and do good. You're going to lose, right? We say you don't have to lose that. That's an important point, I think. And it certainly adjusts my point of view or, or my understanding of how the Ford Foundation works. Now, let's take a more recent organization, Michael, you work for the Emerson Collective. It's been around for about 10 years. Is that right? Yeah, it depends on when you start the clock, 10 years is good. Um And so if you take that historical model of endowments and then uh philanthropy has that, was that different from the get go at the Emerson Collective? Were you all in on impact investing from the get go. Yeah. So from the very beginning, we were stood up as an LLC rather than as a traditional foundation. No, we preserved a lot of flexibility in the way we allocated capital and we're able to run some experiments and be creative. Is that for, for um ethical or moral considerations or, or for, for the flexibility for it was more for the flexibility, the observation and the reason for the collective was there's very difficult social issues out there that humanity's traditional tools haven't yet been able to address. And so Loraine looked at it and said, well, let's try a new model. Let's experiment. You know, we're at the uh the doorstep of Stanford, some of the greatest minds in organizational theory. Um Let's try some different ways that haven't been done before. So the idea of the collective is we've got a group of people focus on different issues using different tools and we're trying to be inspired by each other's work and um port some of those lessons over to other sectors where they can be more effective. Give us a few examples of places you've invested in and that has worked well for you to have returned uh good returns, both social impact and financial. Yeah. So our venture team that I'm on, I lead the energy and environment group more recently could be referred to as climate tech, but I've been doing it for a lot longer than that's been a term. Um And we look for consequential companies and the way we define consequential is generational scale impact and venture scale returns. So we don't see there's a trade off. There's really two ways we do that. One is how you filter and then how you help. Um So out of the gate, we look deliberately for opportunities where there's going to be profitability and impact that are well aligned. It's pretty easy to do in the climate space. It's more difficult in some of the other categories such as education, technology. Sometimes those can come into when you say it's more difficult. Have you cracked that code or, or not? And, and do you think it's possible if not? I think it's more being intellectually honest with what is the underlying um alignment between the profit motive and the impact motive, right? Or what the particular um technology is. So with climate, it's pretty obvious there's times where you really have great alignment. For instance, an investment in a company called Posen down in Louisiana that focuses on solar for low and moderate income households using a new underwriting approach. Um And then there's other opportunities where it maybe is not as obvious. And we have an opportunity to partner with really dynamic entrepreneurs who are gonna change the world and we have an opportunity to help them out of the gate, make sure that they're doing in a way that is planet positive and good for the environment. Right. I, I want to turn to Nikita. So you, of course, work for a, a firm that has traditionally been known, I suppose, since 100 and what, 70 years now. So 100 and 75 100 and 75. Congratulations in Switzerland. There's a, a club that you can only belong to if you exist for 100 and 75 years. Um, so, you know, but of course you're not a Swiss company. Um There's many, um so, uh you've done most of your existence, I suppose in traditional financing wealth management that we all know what is the size and growth of impact investing at Lazar. Um I think it's one of the most exciting areas uh within asset management and wealth management. Um Obviously, it comes down to definitions. Yeah, when you say exciting, could you, could you be more precise? I, I think the whole space including ESG is actually really, um we're in early stages, you know, first innings as much as we would, a lot of us here have been doing ESG for 15, 20 years, but that is still very young compared to the history of financial markets. I would kind of place us at where we were pre ec in financial markets when there were no definitions for, you know, what was and two investors couldn't necessarily speak and compare notes on the financial productivity or the health of the business that's still where we are in this space. So definitions are still very early. But if I would clarify on our end and the way I do think it is important to, to be clear about what your intentions are, I I define eg personally as an investor from an investor's perspective, discovering and pricing and g risks and opportunities. And it's really about financial materiality. Do you not uh segment out impact investing at Lazar? So um not currently, but the way I would define impact investing and and hopefully this is helpful for specifically this audience here. And one of the main points I wanted to make at this panel is impact investing is not just for the realm of private investors. It's certainly not just about grant making as we just heard from, from Roy, but also not just limited to venture capital and private equity public, large public companies can have significant impact in the world if we define impact as the intention of having positive measurable, environmental and social impact in a way that that that lasts and where you can measure your contribution, that's how a majority of people in this field kind of define it. And I think corporations in the world are the units, the largest units of change. They are the drivers of change, positive and negative. They are by virtue of the size of the companies that you all work at and the complex stakeholder relationships you have, you are generating impact in society every day. It's a question of measuring it, articulating that story tying it to your investment and that then creating opportunities for us as investors to participate in. Does that also mean that ESG investing as you, as you define it? Um does not have a limit and upper limits could, could all investing be ESG investing since you know, we're all companies who are the greatest driver of change in the world. And so, you know, everyone can be an ESG investment for Lazar. I remember when I was interviewing at Lazard several years ago and, and my pitch to them was that you will know we are successful at what we're doing when I've lost my job because doing ESG and incorporating ESG into your work is about being a good fundamental investor. If you, how can you be a good fundamental investor today, an active investor doing deep research if you don't think about the consequences of the energy transition or healthier living habits and how consumers are shifting their preferences or worker rights and how that's shifting the operational margins of businesses, especially service oriented businesses. So it's part and parcel of being a good investor, right? But since we're in the early innings, I suppose you're still a while away from losing your job, which is a good thing I suppose in a way, at least for you. So uh I want to turn to the question for uh to, to the audience. There we go. This is my jet lacking and I want to turn to the audience for, for a question. Uh, but maybe just before, uh, we do, um, uh, Roy back to you. So, you know, we've heard a bit about the, the new models that are, that are being looked at ESG from the point of view of Lazar being an LLC, from the point of view of the Emerson Collective, is the Ford Foundation ever fundamentally going to change its model? Or is it just basically turning all of what you do in your endowments over to patriotic capitalism? Yeah. Well, um I assume that the board of trustees both at Ford and other um organizations are watching us very closely. There was great skepticism when impact investing was announced at the Ford Foundation. Um We've published our achievements thus far. And again, I want to stress even a broken clock is right, twice a day. I mean, we knock the cover off the ball but I mean, I live in Switzerland that that wouldn't die there. Um You don't like broken clocks. Um So, um I, I agree with the, that um um my theory is that as time goes on ESG disclosures, uh we will quantify them into dollar figures that can be baked into investment modeling and then you're taking risks and opportunities into evaluation and then investing in. There's no, it's investing because you have more investing has been about more information, creating better valuation alter, that's right and understanding the quantified cost of g helps um policy makers determine what needs to be internal, what externalities need to be internalized. Helps consumers decide. Do you want to make purchases from a company that's dumping costs on society or do you want to go elsewhere? Makes sense. I got time for one question. Um Let's maybe come over here and if you can state your name, perhaps also what you do or the company you work for any of your question and we're getting, we're getting the mic to you right now. Hi, I'm Raja and then one of the founders at Ulnas. Um we're a technology firm, we do data quality engineering. Uh We are an impact venture um and just as context. So our mission is to demonstrate neuro diversity as a competitive advantage. We have teammates in 30 states, three quarters are autistic, son of teammates are dyslexic, dyslexic, nonspeaking, etcetera. Um My question to you is um what are the trade offs you see as acceptable when you're trading off impact and profit? Because as an operator, I can tell you it's not a perfect world. We're making management decisions every day that you're trading off EBIT with, invest more in training and development in mental health support, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't buy it that there is no trade off that you can achieve the same market returns without sacrificing returns and have an impact. I would just like to hear your thoughts on, where are those tradeoffs happening and where is it acceptable, Michael? Can I turn it over to you in one minute or less? Yeah, I, I think it's like any other market where you're going to have diminishing returns. There's opportunities where there's great alignment and there's opportunities where there's no alignment or negative alignment. And so I think it's being honest with where on that continuum you fall of what the alignment is between the fundamental profit motive and the impact motive. Um I think, you know, one of the things it sounds like you're doing is you're finding a way to tap into talent pools that traditionally have been ignored and that can be a way to uncover talent that otherwise wouldn't be noticed. And so you're gonna, you can have great alignment there. It's possible there's a lot of recruiting and training and things like that that go into it, but also you probably have a higher hit rate and you find the talent being able to get them on to your team. So I think that's a great example of a program that has huge impact. Um but also can have great probability. Excellent and you did that perfectly on time. Thank you so much, Mike. Well done. Uh My Swiss compatriots will be very proud of us and me. That's it for, for us. Thank you so much. We'll be talking much more about this in the next 24 hours. But for now, thank you to our panelists.

Robert Reffkin talks about how he can turn losses to profits at the real estate brokerage firm he founded and how civil rights leader Vernon Jordan inspired his career.

Compass CEO: “2023 will be the last year of the housing correction”

Leadership

Robert Reffkin talks about how he can turn losses to profits at the real estate brokerage firm he founded & how civil rights leader Vernon Jordan inspired him.

Compass CEO: 2023 will be last year of housing correction

so great to meet you robert to talk about compass. You know, you've gotten a lot of attention for starting a real estate brokerage company from scratch and making it the go to brokerage for buyers and sellers from new york city to Los Angeles. You made news a year ago when you took compass public on the new york stock exchange and You earned evaluation of $7 billion 12 months have been tough the next 18 months. I fear that they can be tougher. What changed what happened? The real estate market in 2021 was a record year for agents in the overall industry. But policymakers started raising rates to bring down inflation. And what that did to mortgage rates is it brought us from an all time historical low in January to 20 year high in less than nine months, which really put the brakes on the real estate market. Alright, so on on that point, what's your turnaround plan? The turnaround plan is very clear. Uh it is bringing down our expenses along with the market, but our strategy is the same. We're still focused on hiring the best agents, 18% of the top 1000 agents of country or a compass. The company sells or leases the home on average, once a minute, we sell twice the, the average per agent and we have 30,000 agents in the country. And we, we as a company are building the best platform of tools, services and programs to help them grow their business and best serve their clients? The big question is, when are you an eternal profits? Yeah. So we made a commitment to our investors where we said on the last call that we're committed to being free casual positive next year, 2023, we feel very good about the progress in the path. And we're actually assuming the market is going to be worse than the average Of the analysts out there because we want to have a buffer just in case it's worse than people expect. It's clear that there were things that you had no control over policy makers, you know, raising interest rates, the inflation issues. But compass has just celebrated its ten-year anniversary and through that whole 10 years, you never turned a profit. Why is that? And so as a private company raised $1.5 billion dollars and all of those investors, they invested in the company with a mandate to focus on growth, in expanding the company over profit. That was the time of that period over the last year, the market really shifted to focus on profit overgrowth. And we're shifting with that market. Uh, and we're bringing down our expenses accordingly with the real estate market and we're pausing expansion so that we can create profit without having to expand and invest again and again again in new markets. One of the things that differentiated companies from a lot of other real estate firms is that you created this tech software platform, Do you think you got your money's worth? You spent almost a billion dollars to develop that. Would you have done that differently at Compass? We created the first con to close platform where a real estate agent can go from first contact, putting their client into a crm all the way through the buy and sell side process to their transaction management. Getting paid. There's no other place other than Compass where that can be done. We're very proud of that investment and you can see that the agents that use the platform the most grow their business and stay. Encompass the most. But do you think you got your money's worth for that $1 billion development. My mom has been an agent the majority of my life, she's an agent today at compass and I saw her move from firm to firm to firm, always hoping she would get the support and tools that she could realize her dreams as an entrepreneur build her business and best serve her clients. And so I created compass with the sole desire of how can we be best in the world and making agents better and agents are using over 700 tools in this country every single day. But no industry should have to use all these different tools, average 11 tools. We built it all in one place to make it easier for them to do their job. I understand that you gave an upbeat speech recently to thousands of your real estate agents in Atlanta and your message was personal emotional and you encourage them to embrace one of your entrepreneurial principles bounced back with passion and you guys standing ovation. Well, how do you bounce back? Well, I think there's mindset and actions on mindset, you have to know that there's opportunity everywhere around you and so regardless of the challenge, what's the good news and so, okay, it's a really difficult real estate market. Well, the good news is 18% of the top 1000 agents of country or a compass and historically the best agents always getting market share in a downturn. That's great. That's the good news. I give plenty of examples like that. Um, and as it comes to the actual company and our actions, like I said before, we're going to bring down our expense base, The real estate market will bounce back and is we keep our expense base at a moderate level. That will create a lot of opportunity for profit in the years to come. Well, let's talk a little bit about the housing market and pivot away from just compass. How long do you expect this housing correction to last? I think Next year, 20, will be the last year of the housing correction and I think we'll even see a rebound towards the end of next year. There's still buyers that are out there. They've just been sitting on the sidelines a little bit because there's just record volatility and mortgage rates and a lot of volatility in the stock market Robert. Let's talk a little bit about you. Some of the words you use to describe yourself, hardworking, perseverance, optimistic. Those characteristics have not only propelled compass, but also you in amazing ways compass broke into the Fortune 500 this year you're the first black founder on the list ever to make the list. And there are only six black Ceo on the Fortune 500 you're one of them. What did it take for you to achieve so much? And at such a young age we have eight compass on first principles. The first one is dream big. And so I think I've always been a big dreamer. I'm from Berkeley California. I moved to new york because it's the city of dreams where anything can happen. Uh and I remember when I was an intern during my first summer, I went to Columbia University and I saw who was the Ceo of American Express and he was one of the first black Ceos that was in the Fortune 500. And just seeing him in that role made me think I could accomplish more. Uh, it made me feel like more was possible. And so I think I've tried to do my best to dream big and stay positive uh and have a lot of role models like him who helped pave the way for me. Well growing up, you were raised by your mother and you say that she inspired and encouraged you. What was the most important lesson that you learned from her and how has that guided you? My mom is an entrepreneur, she's a real estate agent today, she's been an agent my entire life. The first half is a life insurance agent, the second half is a real estate agent. And so I think the best lesson I got from her is that no matter how many times you fail, you just got to get back up and I just saw through her that failure isn't a hard thing, it just makes you better and you just, and if you can keep trying and trying again, you'll eventually succeed. You worked in many places before you started your own business, Mckinsey Goldman Sachs Lazard and even when I worked at the White House and you say that you had many mentors along the way, you were always asking for their advice. One of those mentors was vernon Jordan who's famous for advising so many american presidents and he also was an investment banker at Lazard, which is one of the firms that you were working at, I'm sure you learned a lot from him, but what would you say is the best leadership advice that he ever gave you, it wasn't just the advice, it was the confidence. I think at that age when I was in my early twenties, I had this thing in my mind of, you know, I can't do this, I can't do that. And for one reason or another. And then I saw this six ft six powerful black leader who was on more fortune 500 boards than anyone in the history of the United States. And it became clear to me I can do whatever I want. Yeah. He walked in Martha King and came from the segregated south to advising Bill Clinton and working in the White House. Uh, and if he can do that, I can realize my dreams and he interests me to the White House fellows program. He told me to apply like his good friend Colin Powell. And that really changed the trajectory of my life.

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