There's a War for Talent on Wall Street: : Ares Management CEO

Oh, you're welcome.

I'm so happy. So Kip Deaver and Blair Jacobsen, who I think you're sitting down with later, are two of my oldest friends. We've been friends for 30 years, business partners for 25 years. In the case of Kip, 15 plus years and in the case of Blair. So any time you can elevate good quality people, it's cause for celebration. But as you hinted at, we've been, I think, really good at succession. You know, private equity firms historically are great at succession, I think, within their portfolios, but when it comes to themselves, have sometimes missed the mark. And I think any good high quality growth company needs to be great at succession and needs to create pathways for growth for future leaders. So the reality is over the last year we've elevated co-heads in our European direct lending business. We've elevated co-heads in our US direct lending business. We've elevated people in real estate, and there's just been this massive wave of growth and promotion. I think part of what makes our culture unique, speaking to the friendship that I have with Blair and Kip, but it pervades the whole organization is we have people here who are now running businesses that started in Ares 20, 25 years ago as analysts and really grew up in this culture. So I just couldn't be happier.

Look, I think you win in this game by developing and retaining great talent. I think we've been fortunate. We have very, very low turnover. And you can see that in the way that our leaders are growing and developing here. There's always going to be a war for talent. I think the reality is the large firms in our business are getting larger. There's huge benefits to size and scale. So I'd like to think that we and others are kind of net beneficiaries of that war for talent. I would imagine certain other parts of the market, whether it's some of the investment in commercial banks or, you know, probably struggling to maintain talent, just given some of the secular changes that are happening in our market.

We did. So we grew our investment teams over 10% last year and we just came out of our planning meetings for this year and I would expect growth this year will be similar. So obviously the businesses are growing, they're diversifying, they're globalizing. And the way you support that growth and complexity is, you know, adding high quality 100 more people.

You know, the growth is coming against an interesting backdrop. I was looking at the 10-year yield from the beginning of the year to now, and the drop off is pretty stunning. You are more than a half a percentage point from the highs that you saw just in January. The market is afraid of growth. Are you?