Introducing Genius Loves Company

We recognize genius wherever it exists. And if you're known by the company you keep, we are proud to not only spotlight the women that are part of Rockefeller Capital Management's unique network, but also welcome our brilliant audience members.

Genius Loves Company is a new series showcasing inspiring insights and perspectives from the women of Rockefeller. Through these conversations, our guests demonstrate how different life experiences, priorities, and values can lead to new and innovative ideas that achieve personal success and growth while delivering value for clients.

Good morning.

Hello. Nice to be here.

Nice to be here.

I love it. It's not often I'm associated with genius. So I am happy to be in your company.

So, when I think about Genius Loves Company, you can't help but think about the fact that Rockefeller Capital Management, our firm's legacy, stems from one of the brightest, some would say genius business minds in American history. And of course, that's John D. Rockefeller. And if you fast forward to today, and Greg, this is something you often say, it really is the people of Rockefeller Capital Management that continue to differentiate us, that really truly set us apart. So as part of this podcast, the real objective is to give a glimpse into the terrific, brilliant, innovative minds of women advisers and women leaders who are trailblazers in our industry and in our organization. I do say constantly and it is 100% true that the success that we're having at Rockefeller Capital Management is tied to the quality of the people and women are an integral part of that group of people that drive Rockefeller Capital Management every day. So Kristen, what does it mean to you and what do you think it means to others? What are you hoping we're going to accomplish with this?

I couldn't agree more, Laura, with everything that you just said and you really touched on the genius side of the genius loves company. I really think about the company side and I think about when you listen to a podcast and when you're reaching out to a community and to other people, it is about connectivity. It's about drawing people in. It's about sharing experiences. And when you listen, you can draw your own experiences, maybe learn from others. So the genius side is incredible because we have so much to learn from each other. But I think the company standpoint is even more important because it's that community. It's that connectivity and it will continue to bring us all together at Rockefeller, women and men.

I'm going to take you all the way back. And I've got a lot of years now, so I promise it'll be tight. And I tell this story because it's so instructive on how I ended up where I am today. So I grew up the eldest of three children in Waterbury, Connecticut. I was the daughter of two elementary school, middle school teachers, born into a large Irish Catholic family of mostly attorneys, teachers, civil servants, and a very tragic but defining moment of my life. Unfortunately, when I was 6 years old and my siblings were four and two, my father at 39 died of a massive heart attack entirely undetected. And obviously that was a hideous event in a very formative time of a child's life. But as I look back on it today, it has guided the way I live my life. It has guided my career trajectory and truthfully, especially as the eldest child, it really instilled in me the strong desire to control my own financial destiny and to provide financial stability. And look, my mother, my extended family, we are all quite privileged in the way that we were able to live our lives. But it was not without financial challenges and hardship. So from a very young age, the ambition seed just blossomed. Now I didn't know that it would necessarily take me down a financial services career path. I was a business undergrad and I had no relationship to Wall Street and I had this mental barrier about stocks, bonds, that I just didn't know much about it. I had the great fortune of interviewing with a woman who would soon go on to become managing partner of today it's over a hundred billion dollar asset management firm and she was probably about 25 years my senior, probably about my age now, and when I interviewed with her it was a lot of gibberish that I was hearing but I knew I wanted to be her in 25 to 30 years and so as a woman in the industry it was so illustrative of I could go down a path in financial services, lean into my strengths and be successful. So that's a little bit of my background and getting here today. I spent my first 24 years in this business in asset management. So coming to Rockefeller Capital Management, a wealth management organization with an extraordinary asset management business and strategic advisory investment banking business but at its core a wealth business was a bit of a departure for me but I was compelled to pursue the opportunity for a number of different reasons. I thought the leadership was extraordinary. So, I've long admired Greg and many of the early members of Greg's leadership team. And I also saw the growth in high net worth and ultra high net worth. And I just saw this amazing entrepreneurial opportunity to just get in at the ground floor of an organization, oh by the way, that has a brand stemming back over 130 years. I spent my first four years here heading up sales for the asset management business and today I head up our enterprise client coverage group. Essentially, it's leveraging these firmwide relationships to really drive more growth in the organization. It's to knit together cohesively all of the phenomenal capabilities for our firm across the three businesses and all of the underlying capabilities in those three businesses to deliver that to clients in a neat cohesive package. So that's what I'm working on today and I am thrilled to be here.

I do know that.

A lot of trust went into the boat.

Yes.

I always take it back to my roots and hearing your roots, it makes me think even more deeply about family and where I may have drawn from some of those. My parents were not teachers, but one side of my family, all farmers in the Midwest. So, I am a Midwesterner, if you will. And so I grew up with one side of my family being up at 4 in the morning with my great-grandfather in his overalls going out on the tractor, the green tractors, not the red tractors. And we would go out and I really think that that sense of hard work came from seeing what that was like. And some of my best memories are wearing his John Deere hat and being out in the corn fields playing with my sister and being on the tractor bright and early. And there's nothing I wanted to do more than get up at 4:00 a.m. and be out there alongside him seeing what he did every day. And not every day, but all day. Every day. There was no 9 to 5 in his world. The other side of my family, so more corporate America, if you will, business individuals, but I think of my grandfather on my dad's side of the family, and he started at a company in the mail room, and he worked his way to being president of the company. And what I remember most about those stories and those people, unfortunately, what really resonated with me the most was I read in the local newspaper after my grandfather had passed. I read what a lot of the people that worked for him said about him in his obituary and the comments after that and it said things like he always knew our names and he knew our family members and everybody was as important as the next. And so I think that connectivity to people and wanting to know people and really relate to people comes from that side of my family. And watching him start in a mail room sorting mail to helping to make strategic decisions for the company is impactful to me. And so I think about those two sides of my family and how much they relate to who I am today. My career. So I also to your point don't know exactly how or why I landed in wealth management but it came by way of a lot of great people introducing it to me. So I went to undergraduate school for physiology and kinesiology. I was going to build health and wellness programs for Fortune 500 companies. Then I was working with a woman who was a manager in wealth management at a local firm where I was living and she said, 'You know, you really have what it takes. You have a sales acumen and service and you like people. You could really be in this business.' And at the time I didn't really know a lot about it. But speaking about role models, she was a great role model and I saw her doing it. She took time. I went into her office. She told me about what she does. And lo and behold, when I graduated college, I interviewed at multiple wealth management firms thinking I could do it simply because that one woman planted the seed in my head and changed my life forever. From there, I did a lot of different things in wealth management. I had the opportunity to work directly with clients as a wealth adviser. I worked in sales leadership. I ran a branch and then I worked for seven or eight years as a complex manager leading a big business at my prior firm. About 15 months ago, I had the opportunity to come to Rockefeller and Greg, you said, you know, what brought you to Rockefeller? And I can say without question, people brought me to Rockefeller. It was the great talent here. It was the ability to come to a firm that's growing and to be able to have impact and influence on not only our firm but on and with our clients with the teams that we work with every day. And the more I got to know the people here, not only did I want to be a part of it, but there was a level of fear. And the fear came in thinking, gosh, can I work alongside all of these incredible individuals? And I knew right away that to get to the next level and to really be excellent, I needed to surround myself with excellence and I felt that at Rockefeller. So lo and behold, I am here leading the Southeast Division for Rockefeller Global Family Office. Very happy to be here.

There are so many examples and for that I'm grateful. But the first one that comes to mind, I was a swimmer since before I can remember. But my swim coach in high school, Ray Wilpey, she was really invested in making sure each and every one of us as athletes, as academics, really were a whole person. And she did a great job of making sure we really understood that we were more than just what we were doing in that moment. And I've taken that throughout my entire life and my entire career, making sure that I'm well-rounded in a lot of areas. And so she not only inspired me to do more and be more and set higher limits and try harder and, you know, she built this incredible competitive fire in me, but she also was able to ground me and make sure that you kind of take a step back every once in a while and just look at the bigger picture. Another person is actually someone that's here at Rockefeller and that's Michael Outlaw. So long before coming to Rockefeller, I worked with Michael Outlaw, who is our national field leader. And he really helped me to see early in my career, my leadership career specifically, that the people we hire and the people we surround ourselves with is almost more important sometimes than what we do day in and day out. And I'll never forget, we were sitting in a meeting at my prior firm and he said, 'It's my goal to hire the best and the brightest people who are not only better and smarter than me, but,' he said, 'people that I can see myself working for someday.' He said, 'It's my goal to hire people that I will work for.' And I remember thinking, gosh, don't be threatened by hiring people that are better than you and smarter than you and have, you know, broader experiences than you because all it does is lift everyone else around you. And that was a game-changing day in my career because my outlook on who and how I surround myself with, what people and what team, I think really has set my trajectory in a different direction.

you know, that could have been, you know, a long time ago. I'm going to go back to a quick quip about the woman I referenced who entirely changed the trajectory of my life once I got into a professional setting. So who, just by the way, an organization that had been around since 1929, she was the first woman partner named to that organization. And so, so this is just to kind of plant the vision of this extraordinary,

Exactly. Exactly. But this is just kind of a funny one, but I alluded to this earlier. I had a little bit of a mental hurdle about, well, I'm not super at math and can I really go into finance? I don't know much about Wall Street. The woman who I ultimately ended up working for, she had been an English major at a liberal arts college. So, she kind of quickly, it was like, get over yourself, Laura. You have certain strengths and namely around communication and connectivity and EQ that will take you so far in this business. But it's not as if this information, this finance on Wall Street is difficult for you to master. And so that was a mental hurdle I just needed to get over. But the funny thing she said to us, and she would probably kill me if she heard me say this, I will never forget myself and another analyst. She took us aside and she was very direct, which I also admired. She said, 'I implore you to start reading the Wall Street Journal.' And no one had ever said that to me before. So for any young people out there who think that finance is not a path for them, I too implore you: FT, Wall Street Journal, Economist. And this podcast is all about stories. That's what I love. It's about narratives and stories. And it's really interesting other words of wisdom that have stuck with me. I have been very blessed. And by the way, I have so many extraordinary men who to this day have been enormous sponsors of mine. But I was also really fortunate, especially 25 years ago, and never mind for the women who came before me, but when women were just much, we're still not fully represented today, but obviously two decades ago much less represented. And I for whatever reason have just found my way, been blessed to work with some extraordinary women. So this one woman took me aside very early on in my career and she said, 'Laura, there are three things you can control. Three things. You can control your actions, your reaction, and your attitude. And that's it. You cannot control for anything else outside of yourself.' And I still employ that every day. So it really, I can't worry about controlling for everyone else but I can control the way that I approach situations and behaviors and my attitude and my tone. So that always resonated with me.

So, probably not too surprising that I'm going to go back to my childhood and this very defining moment in my life when my father passed away. And again, he was only 39, but you just don't know what's going to happen in life. He didn't have a will. My parents didn't have a will. It was just something that in your 30s, who would possibly think of? My parents had never focused on that. And it wasn't as if, look, they were teachers. My mother was stay-at-home at the time, right? So it wasn't as if there was some enormous amount of wealth to be organized and redistributed. But it's still at this hideous time for my mother, who I think was 36 or 37, and it doesn't matter. Fast forward to if you're 86 or 87, to have to just worry about probate. And while you're trying to mourn this event that's happened to you, to then not have all of your finances kind of ticked and tied really resonated with me and stayed with me. And that's why I love what we do for clients because look, people get busy, right? I say this myself. It was a lesson that was just indelible in my memory watching my mother and my aunts and my uncles have to kind of figure this out at this horrible sorrowful time of their lives and even my husband and I. It took some prodding from our financial adviser and I'm someone who this resonates with and she really kind of said, Laura, we've got to get, you know, we've got to get wills in place. We have to get everything set up. So that's the beautiful thing about Rockefeller Global Family Office, Rockefeller Capital Management is that that's our job is to remind people that you have to have just a baseline level of preparedness because you never know, life is so fleeting. You never know what's going to happen.

Yeah. With dialogue and topics that are difficult for them to talk about and we're there for them.

So, my earliest memories of money, a little embarrassing to admit, but I was in the back seat and we were driving through a bank like drive-thru. And I remember my parents were sending in a check to get cash back. And I remember thinking at that moment as I'm, you know, saving money at home and counting all my change and putting it in coin wrappers, I remember thinking, why am I doing all this? Like I'll just write a check and get cash back. I just had no understanding of how anything worked. And that really inspired me in that moment. And I was in elementary school. This was a very young age. But I vividly remember that moment where I thought it can't really be this easy. Clearly, it's not. So that was actually the same time that I got my own bank account. And I really started to want to understand and to learn. And then I also remember a great class as early as, you know, sixth or seventh grade where they took us through the basics of finance and that really inspired me to then want to learn about investing. And again, it's just people planting the simplest seeds and you figure out who they grow in and where they grow and when they grow. And that was one that grew within me. From there, I think about what somebody told me once. We were talking about money and how much is enough and how do I save it and I think we were thinking about cars in college and they said as long as you remember it's never how much money you have but it's the impact you have and what you do with it. And that for the first time in my life and really, you know, inspired me to think about at any level something can be done. And that's something that really resonates with me as it relates to the Rockefeller and the family and the impact that they've had worldwide and that really being the base and the foundation not only that they have set forth for all of us as a firm, as a community, but also what that really means for our clients. And I think we do that as well. We give them a plan, we set the course but then we think bigger and more broadly as to what does that mean? What impact can that have? How do you plan for it? You know, multigenerational. And so for me, my first memories were a little silly, but what it led me to was really thinking even on the most basic levels about it's not what you have, it's what you do with it.

I'm going to talk about it through an asset management lens because when I got into the business 25 years ago, I was working for a long-only traditional equity and fixed income manager. I heard someone else on a podcast recently saying in the late 90s, in the early, the marquee job was if you were portfolio manager of Fidelity Magellan, for example, right? I mean that's what I thought of active management, kind of traditional investing. And it's so obvious to say that the biggest evolution when looking through that particular lens has been the shift to alternatives. And when you just look at even the universe of publicly traded companies has just shrunk over the last decade in particular. You have companies that are staying private so much longer. So of course that has implications on investment portfolios, asset allocation strategies. And I think the beautiful thing about Rockefeller Capital Management is that we have just an alternatives platform, investment solutions and capabilities to offer to our clients. Now of course we have the foundational elements and many of those are still in more traditional liquid forms of investments and this has been very deliberate and very much by design for our client base of high net worth and ultra high net worth clients. We have built out over the last five plus years an extraordinary approach to the alternative space broadly. I couldn't even imagine in the late 90s talking about anything other than US large cap value or core taxable fixed income and you've just seen a momentous shift to where appetite is and thinking about risk return profiles and then just the opportunity set that has transformed markedly. And I'm proud to say that I think we're at the cutting edge, we're innovating on the side in particular around alternatives and the way that we approach them for clients.