Mike Trigg and Sanjay Ayer – The Discipline of Getting Better at WCM (EP.467)

24:48We've subsequently bought Rolls-Royce. There's a number of aerospace businesses we bought. And then from the GE Vernova spin, gone deeper into turbines as well with Mitsubishi Heavy, as well as Siemens Energy. And that reinforced this cycles view that we had about finding these situations in the same way that we had been hurt by companies that had been COVID winners and benefited from a pull forward to demand. How can we invert that? How can we find things that have been losers from that same dynamic. And that led us first to aerospace, then to turbines. And we've extended into things like senior housing.

25:25Obviously, there's not a lot of senior housing investment that took place post COVID, given what happened around that period of time, cruise ships. There's all sorts of different parts of the market that you could kind of apply this way of thinking to. It was at a conference with Larry Culp, the CEO of GE. I went up to him and I was like, you have no idea how transformative of our investment in your company has been for all of our portfolios because it was the seed that brought all these other ideas. That's probably the most illustrative example of maybe the new things that we're doing today that we weren't doing pre-2022, lessons born from that COVID experience.

26:02It explains why we're earlier to identify some of these areas, but also I think that we still believe that there's pretty significant tailwind to go and these trades are far from done. And how about something that you exited at that time? So one of the challenging things in investing is to sell great companies where there's nothing presumably wrong aside from maybe evaluation and things slightly eroding on the edge. Costco was probably one of the most difficult positions to move on from. We'd done quite well, as did everyone who had owned the stock for any point in time. It got to a point where you used to say, hey, Costco, I'll buy the 20 times earnings, trim it at 30.

26:40But then it went to 35 to 40 to 45 into the 50s. And you began to ask, can you underwrite solid double digit IRR with Costco? So you ask that question in the vacuum. But then we're also benchmarking every position relative to our focus list. And we start to do work on this company called 3i Group, which is based in London. It's a private equity company, but it's basically a holding company. they made this prolific investment in a retailer called Action, which it's basically Costco early days. Huge store runway, an incredible culture. They appeal to scarcity. They rotate two-thirds of the items.

27:18And it's worked in every geography they've gone in. Even the areas like Germany, where no global retailer has had success, they've been able to crack that market. They'll probably end up in the US eventually as well. So very early in a store runway, trading low 20 times earnings with higher growth than Costco. So you put those two together, you say Costco at 50s versus 3i Group or Action in the 20s, that seems like a trade we should pull the trigger on. And it's a great example of the specialist trap because Action is part of 3i Group. 3i Group is a financial company covered by financial analysts who don't really understand retail for the most part.

27:54It's an example of, wow, you see the value there is in retail. We're able to apply our retail framework typology to that position. And it's been a great investment. We're going to take a quick break in the action to tell you about SRS Aquium. Want to make sure your M &A processes aren't stuck in the past? Partner with a company that's been defining the future of dealmaking for nearly two decades instead. When it comes to M &A innovation, SRS Aquium has reshaped the way that deals get done, streamlining processes for maximum efficiency and minimum headaches. Professional shareholder representation, online M &A payments, digital stockholder solicitation, SRS Aquium pioneered each and continues to set the bar for game-changing innovation.

28:46So leave the days of disjointed deal management behind and define your future with SRS Aquium, the smartest way to run a deal. Learn more at srsaquium.com. That's S-R-S-A-C-Q-U-I-O-M.com. And now, back to the show. I'd love to turn to culture and how culture of WCM impacted you during that time, and also the lens of culture on businesses that are going through different inflections in a difficult period of time for them. The word trust is probably the first thing that comes to mind. I'm grateful that people trust us to be able to do what we do, but also iterate and evolve and do it the way we think we need to do it.

29:33If you talk to people inside the team that were kind of at the forefront of instituting a lot of these changes, they would say the same thing. We think this is the right thing to do, but there's a chance that it won't be. but I'm not going to let that get in the way because I know that I'm trusted to do what I think is best. One of the things that brings a big smile to my face is at any given point in time, we're both pretty good at figuring out what we need to do better. There's moments where we don't have the ideas. And the story we always tell is this offsite that we had in 2018 or 2019, where we spent the first two hours of the offsite.

30:06I made this like 60 page presentation and we went through all the embarrassing, stupid things we've done over the prior 10 years. And that was kind of at the peak of our success at the time. And the point of that was, hey, look how well we've done, but also look at how many dumb things we've done over the prior 10 years. Don't think that we have all the answers. I was trying to open the door for everyone not to fall into the trap to say, hey, Mike and Sanjay have all the answers. They'll figure it out. I just want to do what I can to support them. That's the absolute wrong thing to be thinking.

30:37We did that and nothing really changed in the first few years. But when 2022 hit, I didn't really know exactly what the next steps were after that. I had an idea of some of the mistakes or areas of improvement, but I didn't necessarily have all the ideas on how to go solve and iterate those. for the first time in a really meaningful way, we had people on our team step up with new ideas. My job at that point was to determine whether it was a good idea or not, and then support them and remove whatever barriers I could to make it the most successful as it could be. To me, that brings so much pride and joy.

31:16It's made our culture better. It's created more leaders within. It's made it a stronger team because we now have stronger peer-to-peer relationships than we even did prior to that. We've always been trying to innovate, make the process better. It's easy to get stuck in the bright lights of Mo trajectory and culture. These are these incredible concepts and maybe even taken too far at times. If you're sitting there and thinking, what can I do to add value to the core philosophy? You get stuck. I can't come up with anything better than Mo trajectory and culture. the changes that took place coming out of 2022, it was a lot of those small 1 % incremental improvements compounding every single day.

31:56The unsexy part of the investment process is really where we made a lot of the biggest gains. I've used that as a teaching lesson when I talk to people throughout the entire company that are coming to me at times saying, I want to add value. I want to do more. They'll look at what is the most exciting thing going on in the firm right now. And there might not be a visible opportunity for you there right now. I would really focus on the 1 % better every single day. And there's all sorts of examples of people inside of our firm who have become stars, not through some seminal breakthrough, crazy innovation.

32:29They just find little ways to get better every single day. That's a pretty good lesson that I learned. And it's got really strong examples now that we can point to. Our culture always incrementally improves. We're always focused on it. In the last few years, there's been a step change and that's serving others value that we've added as our third core value as a firm in addition to fun and gratitude. And there's a contagion at play when you see other people waking up every day, asking the question, not how can I make my day the best it can be, but how can I make the people around me better? And they're rewarded for it.

33:01It starts to build on itself. The other thing I'd highlight that appears very nicely in this put the trajectory back and mode trajectory adaptation we've had is a lot of our decisions on team design have really paid off and have allowed us to flourish in recent years. Three choices we made is one, we're going to be lean. Two, we're going to be generalist. And three, we're going to be flexible. And there's trade-offs to all of that. Being lean makes our lives harder at times. So much to do. You're pulled in many different directions. In an environment like this, where we've been the last few years, you see it's a relatively frictionless environment.

33:36So we're able to piece together insights across geographies, across regions, across market caps. without the things that afflict bigger teams, ulterior motives, information silos, obsession with optics, things like that. I think you've seen that unlock a lot of insights quicker than would have been the case if we were more bigger and bureaucratic. From a generalist standpoint, there are clear trade-offs. Specialization means more domain expertise. Those late years heading into COVID, being a generalist wasn't a major advantage. The more you knew about SaaS or semiconductors, the better you were.

34:09In some cases, we had to play catch-up on domain expertise. In this market, it's been fun because we are viscerally exploiting or have been the specialist trap, where if you're an industry Wall Street specialist, you've looked at the same industry for 15 years, you're in an echo chamber talking to peer analysts, management teams all day, you're underexposed to what's happening in the rest of the world. Someone comes to you and says, hey, this time is different. This change at play in natural gas turbines or aerospace engines. You're rolling your eyes. I've seen this before. This time is never different, but it turned out to be.

34:43There's like a naivete that comes from the top, where you don't have the scar tissue of the sector specialist. Exactly. You've seen that across multiple of the areas we've had success in. And then probably the most interesting one is we're flexible. If your view of solving the market is it's lock and key, you're trying to find the key to unlock the market. Once you do that, you're golden. The The game becomes about minimizing variability and instituting rigidity. Protect what you do, make sure there's very little variance in the system. That would be one point of view. Our point of view is the market's ever evolving.

35:17It's a puzzle that keeps changing. You have to keep adapting to solve it. And if you believe that, you want to have a lot of flexibility in the system. There's times where people will push back on that, saying you don't have enough guardrails, or should you have more guardrails? In our view, there's a trade-off. One of the reasons people stepped into the void and carried the torch here is when you have too much rigidity, you sap curiosity, you sap creativity. Having a flexible team that you can put the directory back in most directory and people feel ownership or empowered to take down a run with it has been huge.

35:53Without that, we wouldn't be where we are today. How have you thought about continuing to foster the talent that you want inside the organization? The matching function of external talent with WCM is a tricky one, in part because of our history of being under the radar here in Laguna Beach. I think the big catch is we have quite a high bar. We've been told that by recruiters time and again. Hiring is the field of compounding knowledge. The more you do it, the more you should get better at it. It's a discipline. If you asked me a year ago, what are the hardest qualities to find? In the investment team, might point to things like true self-awareness, people who could live in cognitive dissonance while still having an opinion, serving others, active curiosity versus passive curiosity.

36:40But one thing I've been thinking a lot more about lately is the blend or combination of creativity and what I'll call investment empathy. Creativity is shockingly hard to find in the investment community, people who can truly live a few years in the future and envision how today's fundamentals and narrative can evolve. There's just such a reflexive tendency to drag current or recent results forward in perpetuity. And when you do get creativity, it tends to be this too much of a vague long-term, here's how the world's going to be in 2065 type thing. Creativity is one, but that needs to be balanced with this concept of investment empathy, which is can you see the world through the eyes of an analyst who's covered this company for ages, for decades, who's built up a lot of biases and entrenched views from that long history with the name?

37:35Maybe they've lived in a bit of an echo chamber. They've been told this time is different many times over, and it's never proven to be. That notion of true perspective taken and empathy balanced with that creativity, that's how you can get from here to there as far as both the qualitative and quantitative picture as far as how a company can evolve and how a stock can evolve accordingly. It's hard to talk about innovation in any process without talking about AI these days. And we'd love to hear how you've thought about using AI in the process. So we start with, let's avoid vapor. There's a lot of AI vapor that's chasing what's hot.

38:16We come back to first principles. What's our philosophy? What's the game we're playing? It's really to identify underappreciated change before others do through this toolkit of mode trajectory and culture. That's the game selection here at WCM. So when we think about AI, we think about alignment with that goal. How can we get better at diagnosing mode trajectory and culture, both sharpening our edge on each and amplifying the breadth? Once you approach it from that angle, you start to pull that thread and say, wow, AI can clearly, from an amplification of breadth, help us. We've chosen to be lean.

38:52There are trade-offs to that. Perhaps AI can help solve that. We're building tools to really codify mode trajectory and culture into a model. How do you diagnose change in the company's mode? Look at it today. Put all this data in there, whether it's SEC filings, transcripts, sell-side reports, expert transcripts, and look for change. You can take mode trajectory, break it down by multiple terms, and then look at the company today, look at it 18 months ago, and this model will flag. Is there a material change at play, both positive and negative? Is it intensifying? And then what's the level of conviction the model has?

39:29So that's something we've built in the last two years around that. We're doing something similar around culture, codifying it and having a model tuned to that. So you can view it as a research partner. What we're trying to think of is where are the areas where it's best to automate? Can we reallocate our time towards judgment and intuition? It's a continually evolving toolkit we're building, but I think we're pretty early. we've adopted technology in our firm quite a bit. This is the fastest diffusion of technology we've seen. That's a sign that we're onto something here. In less than a year across the team, there's been thousands of reports that have been generated.

40:06There's no skepticism about this because it's been built to be so consistent with the philosophy itself. It's an extension of the existing investment philosophy that's making the lives of the analysts easier and the PMs from both an idea generation standpoint and a monitoring point of view. All the other stuff that you hear about and people talk about around writing reports, summarizing, that's all permission to play off the shelf stuff. There's no edge there. There's no competitive advantage in trying to think too deeply about any of those things or build that stuff yourselves. We've gone to great lengths to make sure the entire organization understands the importance of AI and how that can improve their day-to-day.

40:49We go out of our way on the investment team. We have a weekly Wednesday stand-up meeting that people from different parts of the firm attend. And we actually share a recent use case of how we used AI in an interesting way that helped us solve some pain point. And other people, whether it's in sales or operations or marketing, they can see examples of that and then try to go figure out how to kind of apply it to their day-to-day. We're so lucky. We have the size and scale of a large asset manager, but not a lot of the bureaucracy. I've had a couple conversations with people at really large asset managers.

41:24I'm like, oh, we must be so far behind you guys on ALE. You must be doing some incredible things. The data that you must have or the amount of information that you can pull to create tools. And they'd be like, no, actually, maybe there's certain PMs in certain parts of the firm doing some cool things, but you've got silos, you've got bureaucracy amongst the large firms. I'm hearing cool examples of stuff that people are doing. I just want to make sure that everybody in the firm knows this isn't something to be afraid of. This is something that could make us a much, much better company. I went out this great lunch a month ago with two people from the operations team and one of the individuals confessed that he's like, yeah, I'm kind of worried about being made irrelevant because of AI.

42:06And the young person at the lunch said, if you have that attitude, you will be made redundant by AI. So try to make sure that we embrace that and that we're not afraid of that. And then casting the vision for how this can make all of our lives a lot better, I think is a really important thing, not just for an asset management company, but that's really what every company should really be thinking. Where our industry falls short a lot is we don't turn the mirror on ourselves. We're just out there critiquing companies. Hey, you're not embracing AI quick enough. and you look at your own company, there's no AI to be found.

42:37The privilege we have is we see the cutting edge, how AI interacts with culture, which is a really rich topic, and you could pick the best things that apply to your own organization. We had our annual culture event sandbox in June, and AI was a predominant topic. There was really interesting insights that were drawn, and when Mike and I came back, we're like, okay, let's internalize some of these and apply them to WCM and let's help galvanize the organization. If you look at WCM business and the trajectory of the business, so much of the initial success was in the core flagship international global growth strategies.

43:15What's happened over the last couple of years as you've gone into different strategies that are adjacent to what you're doing? I don't think the firm's ever been better positioned in that the firm has had some meaningful product concentration risk over the years. Today,$120 billion in AUM, we actually have nine products that have more than a billion dollars in assets. Those smaller, call it billion-dollar products, have incredible tailwinds behind them. There are very, very good times ahead. And that's exciting to see because those efforts to get smaller strategies up to different levels of scale where they can attract large institutional flows is very hard work.

43:54The investment team, the sales team, the whole firm has gone to great lengths to put all of those in a position to succeed. The thing that's a natural extension, but that's maybe new in the last couple of years is what we're doing in private markets. We started thinking about private markets a long time ago. It's something I knew I wanted to do, largely for research and investment reasons. When you're growing as fast as we were growing, you don't want to upset the apple cart and just focus on what's right in front of you. And then life brings a little bit of serendipity and certain people come into your life and you think, okay, maybe now's the time.

44:28And we didn't really get going in private markets until 2022. You could have thought at the time maybe we're too late. Some of our peers had already started to move in a big way in that part of the market. The timing turned out to be great. We avoided a lot of frothy deals that took place in 2020, 2021. And our story quickly resonated. I thought the hardest part about moving into private markets would be getting brand awareness and access to deal flow, partly because how good our story is, how refreshing it is. Our ability to access the best of the best late stage private growth assets has blown away my expectations.

45:08And then having a lot of early success. Our first investment was in Andrel at an$8 billion valuation. We were also the first crossover fund to invest in Andrel. So you have a couple early wins. That investment was a great example of why you want to be in private markets. One of the reasons we were early on this defense thematic was we had some andrel learnings as well of what was a tailwinds around defense. That's become a huge part of our portfolios, that theme or that tailwind. And andrel was a key part of that. So that was very thesis confirming why we want to go to the lengths to spend time building a competency in private markets.

45:47Fast forward, we got an amazing opportunity to co-lead two rounds with Databricks. We were just involved with Anthropic raise. We're getting access to all the deals that we want. We've seen a ton of stuff. And you think about right to win. And one of our colleagues, Alan, who leads a lot of the research effort on the private side, he put this basic framework together. Think about how we can differentiate ourselves from the other players in private markets. You've got the traditional VC players. They're involved in lots of deals. We're different. We're taking a very curated, concentrated best ideas approach, which resonates with founders and with clients.

46:25And they want to know what they own and they want to know why you own it. You've got the hedge funds. They have some similar advantages to us. They can move quick. They're nimble. They're not necessarily going to have the staying power inside of a name that we're talking about. We're going to be with you through your entire journey as both a private and a large public company over time. So that's meaningful. And then if you think the other lawn onlys who have done well in private markets, those firms, they're a little bigger. They're a little more bureaucratic. They can't move quite as fast as us.

46:54And the companies, they struggle to know who to deal with inside these firms. You might get a large round at a large asset manager, but the thing gets sliced and diced and is in a million different portfolios. we've purposely built our private market operation to be part of our public team. It's the same team. Regardless of what stage you're at as a company, private or public, you're going to be dealing with the same group of people. You're not going to get handed off to a different PM who's going to have a completely different framework to how to think about your business. We'll have still been there the entire way.

47:24That's exciting to me. And I wanted to do it most importantly because I wanted the research synergies, but also I want to do if we can be meaningfully different. Look at the last 20 years, it's fortuitous, but we staged these new products at the right time to unleash the right insights at the right time. And I've been skeptical oftentimes on new products. This notion of synergy always seems a nice buzzword, but do you actually get it? So when we launched Emerging Markets back in 2010, it was exact right time, just as the key risk for most of our holdings was the rise of these local consumer brands.

47:57You've seen what's happened to Starbucks and Nike just getting chipped away relentlessly in China, private markets is similar. Take the AI thematic. If you did not have visibility into what was happening on the demand side in the private markets, which is where the big use cases are emerging, and on the cultural side, which is where all the AI native companies are born, you would have a very different view of AI. So you take that, you layer it on China, the emerging competition you're seeing there in Taiwan and China, enables you to have a much more informed view on this AI thematic, which is obviously a big driver of the markets today.

48:31The timing was very fortuitous. And whether it's defense AI, we are seeing the research synergies have definitely eclipsed my own expectations. What new research initiatives are exciting you? Well, the AI, it's called Sherpa. That's definitely the single most exciting new thing that we're doing, but we're also always trying to push the framework further. We have this culture philosophy. It's around these three pillars, culture strategy, alignment, strength, and adaptability, but we're always tinkering and trying to make sure that we're making sure that that's relevant and that's evolving. And one of our culture analysts just wrote this great paper called Putting the Cult Back in Culture.

49:12And her basic premise of the piece was that we've done a really good job at isolating the behaviors that are necessary to achieve culture strategy alignment. That's a big part of what our team does when we go in there and we're like diagnosing these companies. Maybe where we spend less time or have spent less time is trying to understand the social mechanisms that reinforce those behaviors. You can have two, three, five companies that talk about the exact same behaviors, whether it's lean or the Danaher business system. All these companies are talking about the exact same behaviors, but maybe they don't have the right social reinforcement mechanisms inside their organization.

49:55They don't do enough job instilling those things into just the day-to-day grind of being at the company. Her clever way of summarizing that point was that you need to put the cult back in the culture. And so we need to better diagnose what those companies do to make sure that everybody's living out those behaviors. That's a pretty cool example of something that we've recently done to push the culture framework further. It's constant iteration. I can guarantee that we'll continually incrementally get better across these dynamics. But more trajectory, culture, construction, and now you can layer on AI and technology.

50:29The step changes are harder to see. Oftentimes, there are things that are just triggered in the moment. So we've had a big step change in portfolio construction in recent years. Culture is an area where we've been at it for a long time, but there's no book written on how do you evaluate culture. There's no framework. We're building our own framework. Sometimes, despite our best efforts to figure out the areas for improvement, I thought our construction framework around defensive growth, secular growth, and sickle growth was perfectly built to make sure that we had a concentrated portfolio, but one that was diversified by bet type that helped inform the breadth of the focus list.

51:05Truth be told, having learned the lesson from 2022, there was some imperfection around some of those tools. They needed to get better. They needed to improve. Sometimes it's like the mistakes that then lead to the next insight. In the meantime, it'll be AI and it'll be these constant chipping away, 1 % incremental improvement. Yeah, I think it's that mindset. We have a lot of raw material we can learn from. We built this software app called Everest, which we log every decision or thought or opinion we have across the team in this app. So you have a lot of raw material for this core value of getting better.

51:33And I don't think we fully unlocked that. with AI, my dream world would be to show up in the office Monday morning and I get an email. Here is the two most interesting podcast insights, one from Capital Allocators, of course. And then here's a multi-trajectory flag or a culture flag you should pay attention to. Might take a while, a few years, but I think it's well within reach, whereas I wouldn't have said that a few years ago. I'd love to ask you a couple of fun questions to wrap up. What is a mystery that you wonder about? I do think about the literal nature of the Bible, what really happened, how accurate is everything.

52:10That's partly informed by different morning routines and things that I have. That's probably the one that I more often than not sometimes think, oh, that was incredible. Could that really have happened? Of course, there's things like UFOs and space and who killed JFK and stuff like that. I'm not a big conspiracy theorist, mystery guy myself. I guess they're the same. I'm not a big conspiracy theorist either. I don't think enough people can keep secrets for that long. There's just things around parenting and whatnot. I wonder about how my kids are so different and the mysteries behind that. How about a recent investment pet peeve?

52:49It's maybe more cultural than investment, but people will come to us and say, what can I do for you? How can I help? That question is very well-intentioned, but it effectively puts the burden on the receiver. So then you have to think through this person in their shoes, with their context they have, with their skill set, how can they help me? Versus this notion of there are people in this organization, otherwise, who will really take the effort behind the scenes to understand how they can help, and then will just do it. You could call that passive curiosity versus active curiosity. I'm not exactly sure the right phrasing, but that is a pet peeve.

53:24And again, it's tough to really be too critical because it is very well-intentioned and people do want to help. But it's an extra effort to really read between the lines, understand at this moment in time, where can someone add the most value? And then they just step into the void. Those are the people that do best here. There's this story that I immediately thought of when he said that about an individual that we've recently hired on our sales team. His name is Justin Watson, and he lost his house in the Altadena fire. after I had chatted with him, I ran into this interview that he had given on local television with his family in Altadena, burned houses down to the chimneys behind him.

54:05As the interview was kind of winding down, I actually turned to the reporter and he says, can I just quickly say something to the audience? She says, of course. And so he says, a lot of people are going to watch this or they're watching all the coverage that's going on in the Palisades, in the Eden fire, and they're going to ask, what can I do? How can I help? And he goes, my advice to those people, just do. That is so similar to what Sanjay was just saying, just do it. One of the things we do inside this company, and we don't talk about this publicly, but I'll do it on this podcast is years ago when COVID hit, we canceled our Christmas party.

54:41A few of the guys were down at the bar at the restaurant and right next to our office having drinks and talking about that. And it's a proper, pretty big Christmas party. The budget's pretty high. So it's a decent amount of money. And so we're like, what are we going to do with the money that we're not going to spend on the Christmas party? One of our sales guys by the name of John Carl had this idea to essentially create a fund that anyone in the company could access to help people that had been impacted by COVID. So people that had lost their jobs, a waiter that you know that could no longer work because the restaurant was closed, but it wasn't designed to be for a charity or anything like that.

55:18Go out, find people in your life, ask them how they're doing. And then if you want to come to the company and ask to make a contribution, we'll match four to one, whatever contribution you personally want to make to this person. And we'll use the funds from the Christmas party to fund that. Well, the response to that was just off the charts. We went way over the budget of the Christmas party. And then we decided to make it a permanent program. And it's not just during the holidays. It's a year-round thing that now exists. And there's so many incredible things about it, so many stories that I could share about people that we've touched.

55:59And it's been amazing to watch that giving gene develop and how much fun people have helping other people. But I think the coolest thing about it by far is that the overwhelming majority, if not all of these gifts, come out of the complete blue to people. And it's just doing. Somebody hearing a story, talking to somebody and saying, okay, I'm sorry to hear that you're going through that. Two weeks later, a check shows up in the mail. This program is called helping hands. It is the perfect embodiment of the just do. One last question. If the next five years are a chapter in your life, what's that chapter about?

56:40As it relates to the firm, I try to kind of reinvent myself every five years. And I try to do that based on what I think the needs of the organization are. And I really enjoy that process. Just going through this period of running these incredible products, helping grow these incredible products, us kind of being at the driver's seat of all that. I view my next five years to be more about continuing to develop the kind of next generation of people. And there are people that have stepped up and emerged in recent years. I just wake up every day thinking, how can I make that person more successful?

57:17How can I remove barriers for them? How can I encourage them? I really want my next chapter to be less about me and more about, I don't want to say I want to be displaced, but in a way I sort of do. Leadership, mentoring, coaching, those are things that animate me a ton today versus maybe COVID era time. I was thinking about how to respond to what was going on in the world and things like that. So that's probably what comes to mind for me. My five-year hope is that being on top tick with this podcast. It's going to sound crazy, but in many ways, I think we're just getting started. Sounds wild.

57:51But this is really the first time Mike and I feel like we have what we need. We have the team. We have the culture. We're clicking. Process is good. Philosophy is sound. Now it's about unleashing the potential of that. And so when you ask a question about can we be one of those managers who stand the test of time without succumbing to preservation mindset? because every incentive today is to enter preservation mode, become benchmark hog, coast on the brand. And now it's really about staying true to who we are and being different and getting better and serving others. If we can do that and do it over the next five years, then we start to really stand out as a firm relative to the base rate of other managers.

58:32I'm incredibly excited. I think we have everything we need and now there's really no ceiling to our aspiration. We had an offside night throughout this crazy notion that can we be one of the best money managers of all time? And that's purely from a client point of view. Can we be one of the best asset managers for them as far as significant and durable alpha? And I think we have a shot. I think it's a very exciting time. Well, Sanjay, Mike, thanks once again for sharing this next stage of your journey at WCM. Thanks, Ted. Thanks, Ted. Thanks for listening to the show. To learn more, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com, where you can join our mailing list, access past shows, learn about our gatherings, and sign up for premium content, including podcast transcripts, my investment portfolio, and a lot more.

59:22Have a good one, and see you next time. This testimonial will be provided by Ted Cites and Capital Allocators, who have been compensated a flat fee by WCM. This payment was made in connection with capital allocators' testimonial and production of podcasts and does not depend on the success or level of business generated. The opinions expressed are solely those of capital allocators and may not reflect the opinions of others. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Please visit wcminvest.com for WCM's ADV and further information.