How I Became an Investment Banker 9.3.26
When talking about the myth of the self-made man, there is a corollary myth that investment bankers like to tell themselves – that they are simply smarter, harder-working, and more resilient than everyone else. I believed that corollary myth for much of my days as an investment banker. It wasn’t until I looked back at my career that I understood how pretentious and ungrounded it was. Being smart, hard-working and resilient help in success. However, you also need luck and some angels, two of which appeared in my life in 1989.
When I graduated from business school at UNC Chapel Hill in 1987, I, like several of my classmates, wanted a job as an investment banker. I landed an interview with Wheat First Securities, Inc.’s corporate investment banking group, located in Richmond, Virginia. As I sat down across from the person who ran the group at the time, I was nervous. I really wanted the job. Partway through the interview, Ed asked me a question I wasn’t expecting. “What does your dad do?”
At first, I sat there dumbfounded. I didn’t understand what that had to do with my professional qualifications. It would not be until years later that I would learn how provincial and close-minded old Richmond could be. But I answered honestly. I told him that my parents divorced when I was ten. My mother eventually settled down with a man named Vernon, who was a welder at the Lake Anna Nuclear Power Facility. I told him it was Vernon, who was still living with my mom, who I thought of as my father. He nodded and said, “We hire people like you.” I was turned down for the job.
What “we hire people like you” really meant, I would come to understand, was closer to the opposite. They didn’t hire people like me — not then, and surely not for that specific seat at the table. So, I did what you do when the door you wanted to walk through closes — I walked through another door and I took a job as a consultant with a regional accounting firm, McGladrey & Pullen. That job was also in Richmond. I did not know that walking through that door would lead to the door I really wanted to walk through. But every door we walk through leads to other doors. The people at McGladrey were good to me. It had a great culture and I liked my colleagues. I participated on the office softball and basketball teams and made some lifelong friends. And I genuinely liked my boss, Scott Warren, who ran the consulting practice. But the work didn’t stretch me or challenge me. After a while, boredom set in — the restlessness of knowing you have more to give than what is being asked of you. So, I started quietly looking for something else. What I didn’t know was that Scott had his own plans. He and two other senior consultants, Katherine and John, were preparing to leave and start their own firm.
One afternoon, Scott called me into his office and closed the door. “I have something to tell you.” He explained that he, Katherine, and John were starting their own company — and that they couldn’t bring me with them. He explained that starting out they would have very few clients and that I “would be overhead.” But he wasn’t finished. He was worried about what the three of them leaving would mean to the practice and what it would mean for me — that if they left, my position might not survive.
He asked if I was currently looking for a job. I said I had begun looking. Scott indicated that my answer did not surprise him. He felt bad that my job might be eliminated and he wanted to take care of me. He said he had a friend, who worked at Wheat, First Securities, Inc. as an Investment Banker in both the Corporate and Public Finance departments, and that the Public Finance Department was losing a healthcare investment banker. He could line up an interview with Cameron Hogan, who ran the public finance group. “Was I interested in interviewing?” I said yes without hesitation.
When I said yes, I truly had no idea what Public Finance Bankers did. I did have a friend from Business School, Jim Thorsen, who was a bond trader before business school. I also knew that he had taken a job as a Public Finance Banker at Alex Brown & Sons after business school. So, I called Jim and picked his brain for several hours before I interviewed for the Public Finance job at Wheat. In addition to telling me the ins and outs of Public Finance investment banking, Jim also encouraged me to take the job if it was offered. He said I would love it.
So, I interviewed with Wheat, First Securities, Inc. in the spring of 1989, almost two years after I had interviewed and gotten turned down by the same firm the first time. But this time I was being interviewed by a very different person – Cameron Hoggan. Cam is what everyone called him. I found him to be warm and easy to talk to in a way that made the whole thing feel less like an interview and more like a conversation between two people who both loved math and finance. Cam had both an engineering degree and an MBA from the University of Virginia. He did not ask what my father did for a living. In addition, my friend Jim must have been a good teacher and coach. I got the job.
I started at Wheat First Securities on June 6, 1989. I remember the date well because it was my birthday. I remember the mix of nerves and excitement that day — the sense that I was finally being handed the challenge I’d been waiting for. I thought I would love investment banking. I just didn’t know how much. A few months into the job, I remember walking into Cam’s office just to tell him so. “I was born to do this. I love this job.” Cam just laughed and said, “Franklin, get back to your office and get back to work!” I would love my job for the next thirty-plus years.
I remember having lunch with some of my older colleagues several years later at the Downtown Club, a private club located on the top floor of our building. The lunch included my boss and his boss. I said something like, “Are we not lucky to be doing this for a living?” Sometimes I can get overly enthusiastic. And when that happens, I need to be careful about what I say. Well, I said something next that was not too smart, especially in front of my boss. I followed the first comment with, “I would do this for less than what I get paid because I love it so much.” There was some nervous laughter and someone said, “Nice Joke. No, we deserve what we get paid, and we work hard for it.” I sheepishly finished my lunch without saying much else.
I have always asserted that people who work in the financial services industry get paid too much. And for those of us who worked specifically in the capital markets segment, we won the lottery when looking at our level of compensation relative to the value we bring to society. That is what I meant at that lunch meeting, and I continue to believe it. However, if society is going to overpay us, who am I to turn it down.
I now own my own municipal advisory firm, and I’m still doing the work that I fell in love with during my first year at Wheat First. When I trace my investment banking career back to where it started, it doesn’t lead to some individual triumph of ambition or talent. It leads to a boss who didn’t have to make a phone call on my behalf, but chose to do so, and a stranger who was willing to take that call seriously and to give a young man with a lot of ambition a chance. Without Scott Warren, I never would have become an investment banker. Without Cam Hoggan, I would never have become an investment banker It was like two angels in my life handing me off from one to the other. And Cam would impact my life in other ways for years to come. He taught me how to be a banker with integrity, something that is rare in investment banking.
He also helped me make some career choices. Once I was at Wheat, I would have the opportunity to go into Corporate Finance instead of Public Finance. When most people think of investment bankers, they are thinking of Corporate Finance Investment bankers – bankers who work raising capital for Corporations or who are doing Merger and Acquisition work. Public Finance Investment Bankers on the other hand raise capital for municipalities and not-for-profit entities. I had thought I preferred corporate finance over public finance. However, when the opportunity arose to switch, Cam, my mentor easily talked me out of it. He said I would not enjoy it as much. And he right. I loved helping non-profits. I never regretted that decision.
There is an irony in all this that I haven’t been able to shake. The firm that turned me away in 1987 — where a man asked what my father did for a living and then told me, not unkindly, that they hired people like me, and didn’t — was the very firm that gave me my start two years later. The company didn’t change. Many people at that firm thought the same way that the person who had interviewed me in 1987 did. This would be confirmed later from numerous situations. But there were enough people at the firm who did not think that way. Thankfully, another door was opened for me by one of those people – someone who judged me by different measures. And it turned out to be everything.
Looking back, I think Scott saw something in me — in the way a good boss sometimes watches someone who works hard and takes pride in their work. But he did not have to look out for me. He did not have to make that call to Cameron Hoggan. He wasn’t obligated to think about what happened to me after he walked out the door. But he did.
Angels like Scott and Cam seem to show up at exactly the moment we need them, open a door we couldn’t have opened ourselves, and then step back and let us walk through it. We rarely get to choose when these people enter our lives. What we can choose is whether we recognize them for what they are and whether we let ourselves accept the help – gratitude and grace. None of us are self-made. I am the product of a boss who saw a young man he thought was worth protecting, and a mentor who was willing to take a chance on someone else’s recommendation. Whatever I’ve built since, with the help of many others, started with them. Thank you, Scott and Cam, for opening that door together for me.
