Welcome everybody. Welcome to the 2026 reunion. I know many of you have come from far and near and old faces and new. It's so great to see you all. And I wanted to welcome you this morning with a story, a short story of business history that I really love. And it involves the great and mighty Walmart. In 1971, Walmart hosted its second ever shareholders meeting in a place called the Coachman's Inn in Little Rock, Arkansas. And the reason they picked that venue is Sam Walton had big dreams for that year. He thought a lot of people were going to come to the shareholders meeting. This was the second year. They had a great story to tell. They were creating value. He wanted people to show up. So, he said, 'We got to have it at the Coachman's Inn.' Can you guess how many people showed up?
Well, 50. Anybody else? Well, I'll use Sam Walton's words. The goose egg. Zero people showed up. So, let me just begin by thanking all of you for not letting that happen to the Markel Group. But back to Walmart. They went back to Bentonville. They got to the drawing board. I can picture them around his big desk as he scribbled on his iconic yellow legal pads. And they said, 'Where can we have the next one where people will actually show up?' I mean, they were mystified. They had this great story to tell. They thought they were creating a lot of value. Where could we have it? What did they come up with? We're having it in Bentonville. So that's what they did. But lo and behold, by 1977, people did start to show up because in that year, Sam Walton wrote in a company newsletter profusely about the good time that was had by all 85 people that showed up. And I'm convinced that one of those 85 is here today. So if you are, find me and tell me the stories because Sam Walton wrote about how they played golf together. They paddled on Beaver Lake. They even camped out in tents together in Elk Creek. And I know Cynthia Green is hearing this nervous right now. We have no plans to do that at the reunion. But I think that's amazing. From there, it only grew. It grew. And it grew so much so the company, the value, and the shareholders meeting that they had to move it to the University of Arkansas where they held it for decades.
Fast forward to today, however, if you go up and down the Fortune 500 company list of companies, all of them except for a small group, Markel Group among them, they don't hold in-person shareholder meetings, not even Walmart. Why? Why is that? Well, for one, they're hard to do. They're hard to execute. I've also heard the argument that how can you possibly measure the ROI in an Excel spreadsheet for an event like that? Or why go to such great pains to have a shareholders meeting for people that own one or two of your shares when you could just go to Midtown Manhattan a couple times a year and visit the big institutions. I think all of you know because you're here at Markel, we believe something different that to compound the value of some things to its fullest, you have to be in person. Things like relationships, friendships, trust, laughter, building something of lasting and enduring value together. So that's what we're here today to do. In the spirit of teamwork, we are here to continue our journey together, building something of lasting and enduring value. So, thank you for the role you play in that. Thank you for being part of the Markel Group, and we hope you have a wonderful reunion.
Good morning. I'm Mickey Kinyonus. I'm the dean of the Robins School here at the University of Richmond. It's great to welcome so many of my fellow shareholders to the reunion here at the university. If this is your first time, I hope you get a chance to walk around our beautiful campus. I'm here with Rich Steinmeier from LPL Financial and obviously Tom Gayner, CEO from Markel. We're just really thrilled that you've chosen to have your reunion again at our campus.
Thank you. It's become a wonderful tradition. Appreciate the hospitality.
And I know you're a neighbor so you come by our campus. This used to be a park and as you can see the campus assembles that. The spirit of teamwork is a theme for this reunion and I'm really excited to explore that topic with our guest today. And I think Markel and LPL provide just a great lens in which to explore that topic. As you know Markel has a core business and a series of autonomous portfolio companies and that creates an interesting dynamic in teamwork inside and teamwork with these autonomous groups. LPL has a similar structure with an internal structure with these advisers. Now Rich, many people probably don't know much about LPL. So I thought it would be a good place to start is to talk about LPL and the wealth management industry and the changes that it's undergone and LPL has really been at the forefront and right at the heart of that transition. Can you talk a little bit about that evolution? Help us understand what LPL actually is and how it has managed that transition in the wealth advisory business.
Yeah, sure. Thanks Mickey. Thanks Tom. Thanks for having me. It is great to be with you all. It's a real privilege to be at Reunion and to be with part of a community. So, I appreciate being somewhat allowed into this wonderful community. I saw that last night at the hotel as folks came back after the dinner.
Trust me, as a shareholder, you're earning your keep.
We'll work hard to keep doing that. So, Mickey, for those that don't know, LPL Financial is a full-service wealth management firm that serves 8 million American families through 32,000 financial advisers and over a thousand institutions. We support on balance independent financial advisers, meaning the advisers are small business owners across all parts of America and we only serve advisers in the US. And they are small business owners, meaning that they actually work in partnership with us. We've grown over our 37-year history, not quite the lineage that you have at Markel, but we've pioneered a part of the segment and the marketplace that is historically called the independent broker dealer. That is advisors who work on their own as 1099s. And they partner with us and choose us to do their middle, front and back office. In so doing we've kind of pioneered this idea of that they can own the business themselves and us instead of them being our employees, we serve them. The advisers are our clients. We have a client centricity meaning every single day they can choose to work with a different partner instead of some of the traditional way that wealth management had been done is that you're an employee of a firm and as such when you leave the firm makes claims on your clients. So we've innovated in that space over nearly four decades. Positioned ourselves now as the fourth largest broker dealer by assets in the country. And the largest in serving number of advisors. And it's been a fantastic journey. In many cases we get to pioneer that journey and sometimes we're following in that journey. But always the differentiation for this firm has been our client centricity of just serving advisers and putting them in a position to serve as many American families as possible.
Is there a trend towards independence from advisers and what are the pain points that these advisers are feeling that make them leave the wirehouses and moving into an independent model?
Yeah. At the genesis of the independent broker dealer movement, and we're now more of a full-service wealth management firm, but as we look at our founding, what had happened was that smaller advisers that work at a wirehouse or at a W2 firm, if they were too small, often they would be paid lower percentages or in many cases they kind of cull the herd and so those folks would be put out. And so the independent broker dealer structure came up to allow advisers to get a higher payout. And there they had to take down their own space and then they had to pay their staff and get benefits. But what happened was the benefit of this was that for especially in small towns this made the profession of being a financial adviser much more viable. And so when you think about that we are across every little community like I grew up Hershey, Pennsylvania, right? Like these are places where you don't necessarily see the large offices but there is the ability and the need for advice and especially as you look into mass affluent families they need more advice than maybe even wealthy families do because they don't have the ability to make mistakes and investments and so what you got was that was the genesis was that you on balance had smaller advisers but those benefits that accrue that make the business more viable for smaller advisers they actually accrue to larger advisers as well and so increasingly what you saw was there's differentiated economics, the ability to own your own business, the ability to be part of your community in a way that you choose. Somebody doesn't tell you how to run your business. And what that has led to is tremendous tailwinds of advisers moving out of firms that are very good firms, but firms who kind of define exactly how you do your business, put you into a box into this more enabled, independent construct. And so the tailwinds are both that more folks want advice from advisers in the US and in that advice delivery the tailwind is that more advisers actually would prefer to be independent. So yeah, we sit at this crossroads with two nice tailwinds of drive for more advice from humans as well as in spite of where we sit and I'm sure we may get to it. But the drive for more advice from humans and of that those advisers thinking I'd much prefer to define my own terms and run my own business.
I want to come back in a second to the great wealth transfer we've been hearing about and see how that drives your business. But Tom, I can't help as I'm listening to this to think about your portfolio companies and how they're partnering with Markel to provide value and to really partner rather than be acquired by Markel. Can you explore some of that parallel?
Well, I would love to. Now, first off, I want to thank Tyler again for his work here and I loved hearing and he did not tell me what he was going to say this morning. So when he talked about those Walmart annual meetings, I actually went to one of those probably 20 years ago and did the paddling on the lake and all that.
So you're the one that's supposed to tell him the story.
Tyler, we found him. It's Tom. So I was remembering that time and he appropriately qualified to Cynthia Green who you know runs events and does so much for us that the camping idea was planted. I can assure everyone including Cynthia, camping is not going to be an option. And part of the inspiration for that is one of my favorite people in life who I've learned so much from has been a great mentor is Don Graham, the retired chairman and CEO of Graham Holdings prior to that, the Washington Post. Well, Don very admirably served his country on the ground in infantry in Vietnam and he was a foot soldier and did that work. And we were chatting about something at one point in time and I was talking about a particular trip I was taking that involved a little camping and Don looked at me very very wisely and says, 'You know, when I got back from Vietnam, I promised myself I would never sleep on the ground again.' He earned the right to say he was never going to sleep on the ground again. I've not paid that particular set of dues is what he did, but I'm following that same motto of not...
Well you know there's glamping now, there's a different way of doing it.
Even so, not for me. So again, welcome and the spirit of partnership and again, it's why I invited Rich. They're a company that we have a meaningful shareholding in and have for a number of years and because of the tailwinds of which you speak and the way in which the business is being run, we think that idea of partnership and attracting people to your team because your team has such valuable skills to bring and you're so much better together as a team than you can individually that is just a core belief and a core value and the core way we do things. So within our insurance business which is the core business and how Markel got started and the 20-some businesses that we've bought along the way whether it's the house plants, the bakery equipment, the concur, medical, we have attracted people who we can help take care of the balance sheet, we can take care of the capital and they get to run their business and they get to run their business with a long-term mentality, a long-term mindset. As one example, because the real world you can say these things but until the moment of truth comes people don't know whether you really mean what you're saying or not and almost inevitably at some point a year or two into a company joining the Markel family the CEO will come to me and say you know we've hit a little bit of a bump and here's what's going on. They'll explain the situation and they'll sort of say you know we probably can still make the budget if I do this and that oftentimes involves a tradeoff between something that you can do in the short run but probably would have some longer term consequences that we're not in love with. So that situation comes up, what I do is I look at the CEO and I say, 'Let me ask you this. If this was your company and it was the only asset you and your family were ever going to own, what would you do?' And then I shut up and I wait. And 99 times out of a hundred, they make the long-term choice. They know it. It's not technically hard. It's culturally hard. So, we just want to set that environment and be consistent in the behavior because you must be consistent. You can't wobble on somebody or go back and forth about what matters long-term and short-term because the instant you say, 'Make that short-term trade. We need to hit that number now.' You've lost your credibility. It's done forever. So that's the spirit and the culture in the way we do things and we think the system and the architecture that we've built has demonstrably produced some pretty wonderful results and that's the magic formula.
Yeah. So Rich, I'm reminded of a conversation we had in preparation for this and a moment that revealed itself as to what LPL was about and its relationship with its advisers. Can you discuss that or what kind of advisor is attracted to LPL and the value that you provide to them that they wanted?
Yeah, I mean I think we think a lot about our goal is to make our clients successful, right? And so what happens is that we spend our days trying to listen a lot more than we talk. We try not to be as directive to our clients to tell them this is the best way. We may give them examples of ways that they can be successful. But for us, the way the firm has been led is by listening, ingesting their feedback and then operationalizing it. And I think in points in time throughout the history of the firm, there are times when firms lose their way and times when they come back. And this firm for a long while had been a really high growth firm because of its orientation to serve clients. And then there was a decade or maybe seven years where we got misdirected from that. And I think coming back and understanding that the most important thing is to deeply satisfy your clients to understand those clients to see what is their definition of success because it isn't always the same as ours. And so we actually have to let go our agenda and realize look the definition of success at this firm is making our clients wildly successful which in the end means that American families are going to actually achieve more goals. And if we can orient to that that is something that we had to reorient our goals to. And on that journey though and I think very similar Tom to the way you know you think about your different communities that come together is that means that employees need to be aligned as well and they need to understand where we're collectively headed together and they need to be on that journey committed but we also need to make sure we're taking care of them.
So let's talk about that. One of the things that came to mind as I'm an industrial psychologist by training I teach all the management stuff and we talk about teamwork. One of the things that I always say to students is just because you put a group of people together doesn't mean they're a team. There are certain things that differentiate a group from a team and one of them is that concept of alignment. So I'm curious for both of you. How do you achieve alignment without and I want to explore a little bit later about this idea of commanding and controlling versus not? But let's talk about alignment in general. What are the best leadership moves for achieving alignment?
I was extraordinarily lucky in joining Markel and that the fundamental groundwork had been laid before I got there. So we have a statement called the Markel Style and it really is a creed and Alan Kirshner a former chairman along with Tony Markel and Steve Markel at the time of the IPO in 1986 prior to the IPO they knew a day would come when it wasn't the three of them running the business and they essentially wanted to leave a set of written instructions not detailed this is what we do on Tuesday this is what we do on Wednesday but what are the values, what are the core beliefs of this company. So we have the Markel Style and as my partner Simon Wilson appropriately describes it that is a style that is lived not laminated. So you go in a lot of places and companies you'll see mission statements and whatnot and you touch it you'll see some dust on it. And Markel, no that's not the case. It is in loose sites that are on people's desks. It is in the annual report. It's referred to all the time. But the way you can really tell it's real is that if you ever hear someone use the phrase about a fellow colleague that wow that wasn't really the Markel Style but warning bells go off that really is a sensation that I think all of us pay attention to and we have that creedal statement as a way of defining the core values of the company. And you can't tell somebody to have those values. All you can do is ask and say, 'Do these values seem like values that make sense to you and let them tell you?' And they tell you through their words and they tell you more importantly through their actions and their consistent commitment to that over time. And they also tell you when it's not the case. So, as Maya Angelou used to say, when somebody tells you who they are, believe them. And people will tell you who they are in the fullness of time. Not instantaneously but there will come a moment there will come a time there will become patterns that emerge that give you an indication and people who want the sort of values that we have they love it because it's not common it's rare and they recognize that there's commitment and cost and countercultural ways of being committed to that team sensation. But first have it, secondly communicate it, thirdly live it, and be consistent.
Yeah so Rich I'm curious to follow up on that. People watch what you do, not what you say necessarily. And I think when we first spoke, you talked about really reliving or going back to your values and your mission of LPL. Can you talk a little bit about how you drive that, how you make sure people live it rather than speak it?
Yeah. So, one of the things and I'm a relatively new CEO in the role, so less than two years. And one of the things that was incredibly important for me was to distribute decision-making as close to the client as possible. But if you don't actually have a shared vision, a shared goal, a shared mission, and a shared objective, it is really hard because what you will have is a rudderless firm that folks are making independent decisions. So for me, the first decision that I made as I came into the role was to build towards a long-term vision for where the firm aspired to be over a five-year arc. And I can tell you that while the value system was pretty consistent in the firm, our purview for how we thought about horizons that we shared and cascaded to all of our employees and to our clients lived in one-year arcs. And we've worked really hard to move that to a five-year arc with a view as to what we want to accomplish in time. And that for us is to be the best firm in wealth management. But there are ways that we then define what that is, cascade that back. And the point being there, I'm hopeful that I can demonstrate in time that I make very few decisions. I work really hard to get to a shared vision that then can be pulled backwards into achievable kind of outcomes and milestones that we have objectives against. But in the end, the goal here is to have an incredibly empowered organization. And so more often I'm trying to shape and direct than I am to decide. Now, there are times when you need to have tiebreakers or there are incredibly important decisions that need to be made decisively. And hopefully they're made in alignment with our long-term vision. But so for me so much of this is around distributing decision-making inside of a shared vision that then I can have folks who are way more they have better information they have better insights they are closer to the client they know the context of the decision better and then we can work together and then look at after we make decisions what was the outcome of those decisions and did we make them with the right set of data did we make them with the right decision makers and collective. We've even introduced a new decision-making framework at the firm and so for me how to live that is one we actually had to refresh our values. Some of our values as I came into the seat were dated and aged in ways that looked like how you operate in a meeting versus what you exhibit in terms of your value systems to know whether you can live those values at the firm. And I think we refreshed our values so that we could all understand collectively this is what the behaviors expected and how we think you should act when you work at this firm. And I think that's created a lot more alignment of a shared set of individuals who select to be in an environment that have these values. And so those are a couple of decisions we made very early on as I moved into the role that I think have brought our firm together more as a community. Maybe not dissimilar to this community though, maybe earlier in our journey as a community across now our employees who really I think are beginning to feel part of that journey and then expanding that into our clients as well.
So exploring the topic of teamwork a little bit deeper, what in your mind makes a good team? What does good teamwork look like? Because I think one of the issues is oftentimes we confuse effective teamwork for example with quick decision-making or some of these things. So I'm curious.
I think a sense of otherness. So as our kids were coming up and raising the kids and obviously that's a process multi-year. It's a lot of fun. I can remember a phrase that was banded about our dinner table a long time many many times that we called the concept of other people. So every once in a while that seemed to be a brand new discovery that there were other people involved. So we would explicitly talk about other people and I think to hone that skill of empathy and seeing things from somebody else's point of view. Morgan Housel who's on our board wrote the book The Psychology of Money which is just a spectacular book and I think in relatively early chapters and Morgan can correct me if I'm wrong but he talks about nobody is irrational from their point of view. Everybody's processing they're saying things that they believe to be rational so as opposed to having an initial reaction where you would say to use some of your industrial psychology terms that's nuts maybe you use that professionally or not I don't know but it's not nuts from what they see.
And from what they believe and how they're processing. So have some curiosity about you as to why do they think that? Why might their view of this be different than mine? And might they be right? Might that be applicable in that sense? And I think what a good team is, and again, I'm reminded to, so after UVA won the national championship in basketball in 2019, let's be reminded about that a little bit. You know, in 2020, they had a basketball team and the circumstances came up and practices. It was the early jagged experience of not knowing. And my son Jack made an interesting observation about that 2020 team compared to the 2019 team is on paper they had more talent, but he says they look like they don't know one another when they're playing. They hadn't had the practices. They hadn't had the reps. They hadn't had the time together to really have that X-factor sensation develop of what it means to be a team where you could be looking one way but you know your teammate is over there and you can throw those no-look passes. That can't happen without reps and practices and caring about where your teammate is as opposed to looking to make the shot yourself. So all of those sorts of things are things that cumulatively happen through daily behaviors that build team. You can't write a memo about we're going to have a team. You live the memo about how a team works and you do it every day. And people begin to trust that process and eventually they begin to embrace and love that process because they know that they're better off by virtue of being on a team rather than as a solo act.
Yeah. Can I add one thing there because I know Mickey, you're flying at the speed of light, man. So I'm trying to just keep up. The, there are two things, Tom, that you said in there that I think a lot of times aren't often spoken about in teams. You started with the word care and then you ascended to the word love. I think in business we often shy away from this concept that there are intangibles that in the end if you build a team longitudinally that trusts each other, that is vulnerable with each other, that actually has this shared mission and begin to care for each other, but the best performing teams that I've been a part of actually love each other and care for each other's success. And there is this care, it isn't just in the good times, right, there in the bad times when things don't go well that you lift each other up and you put each other on each other's shoulders. And I think, you know, we often times, and I don't live in academia, but so often when you look at the alchemy of what a team should be, that's a collection of individuals with a different set of capabilities that are, you know, and there's all these analytical measures. And one of the things I was mentioning that we changed our value system, one of the values we put in was create and share joy. So we have five values at the firm and one of them is create and share joy. And people are like, you can't do that at work. And I would challenge that. Like, work doesn't, like, work's called work because it is work, but in the end, work doesn't have to be miserable. Work can be fun. Work can be uplifting, enlivening. I don't know, there's a lot of words in there that came together. I'm not sure, but choose your own adventure. Yeah. That is the difference for me to try to create a place where you don't shy away from love, where you don't shy away from, I want the people that work together in our community to care for each other. And I think when you can get to that level, not just a transactional interaction that says I do this, you do that, we're part of a process, but I care for you. I think those are elements that often sometimes are underappreciated in the dynamics of an incredibly well-performing team.
And you talk about the word joy. So in that Markel style, we talk about maintaining a sense of humor.
Yeah. So we're using different words, but we're trying to convey the same thing.
Absolutely. And when you have that love and care, what do you then get that's not present in teams that don't have it that allows them to be a better team?
