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Superstar Investment Strategist Phil Maisano (‘69) Offers Wisdom, Tips On How To Survive In Our Current Economy

To borrow a famous advertising slogan from a now-defunct Wall Street investment firm, “When Phil Maisano talks, people listen.”

Indeed, these days, some of America’s most prestigious clients, as well as top financial news outlets like Bloomberg TV, Barron’s and Investment Age, are listening more intently than ever to what Maisano ’69 has to say.

And for good reason.

As the Chief Investment Strategist for BNY Mellon Asset Management and Vice Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of the Dreyfus Corporation, both headquartered in Manhattan, Maisano oversees investment portfolios that, in the aggregate, total in the hundreds of billions of dollars. During his more than 30 years in the investment business in New York, he has also seen some of the worst recessions in American history come and go. So he has some hard-won wisdom to impart to anyone wise enough to listen.  

Recently, Maisano was kind enough to take time out of his jam-packed schedule to share with fellow Abbey alums and friends of the College some of the same valuable insights he’s offering to his multi-million dollar clients.

We began Part I of our interview by asking Maisano to help us put the current economic crisis into some kind of historical perspective:

Have you ever seen anything resembling the current economic conditions, or is this a whole new ball game?

When I started in the investment management business in 1972 and ’73, things were certainly bad, and remained so throughout most of the decade of the ‘70s. People forget that. The ‘70s was a lost decade for securities. Inflation was roaring at double digits. Now, we don’t have that problem right now. We have the opposite problem – i.e. a deflation potential. Additionally unemployment was over 10% in the ‘70s. People also tend to forget that. And so far, we haven’t come close to breaching that number. It’s possible that at the BOTTOM of this downturn, we’ll get very close to that number, but I doubt that we will exceed it.

For your readers who are as old as I am, you may remember something called the Misery Index, which was the aggregation of inflation and unemployment. And at one point during the late ‘70s the Misery Index was in the mid-20s.

So the answer is that we have seen an economy this bad. In fact, many would assert that that economy was worse, because we had runaway inflation at the same time. Now, the runaway inflation was a product of the Vietnam War and massive deficit spending.

So yes, we have indeed seen the economy in this poor a state, but the current crisis does have the potential to be as difficult – if not more so. The reason we had so much inflation was we had so much stimulus in the ‘70s because of the war. Sure we have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now, but it’s nothing near the magnitude we had in Vietnam. So we don’t have inflation per se at this point. Of course, some of the spending ideas in Congress might get us there before three or four years have gone by.

Some seem bent on drawing parallels to the Great Depression. Are such parallels useful or accurate in any way, at least in terms of putting things in perspective, or are they unnecessarily panic-inducing, causing thousands of otherwise smart people to in effect suffer from self-inflicted financial wounds?

The press has been irresponsible in drawing parallels to the Depression – absolutely, totally irresponsible. However, they’ve been successful in creating enough panic that their dire predictions may well come true.

This is as much a crisis of confidence as it is a credit crisis. We do have banks that are in really difficult condition, and investors are concerned…in fact, for the first time since the Depression, they’re concerned that their financial institutions – i.e. the banks, the insurance companies – aren’t solvent. And when they feel that way, they retrench. If they’re not confident in their financial institutions, it’s very difficult for them to be confident enough to spend on anything, so they save – i.e. they put their money in their mattress. And there are various forms of mattresses available, money market funds or buying treasuries and the like. We have seen a flight to safety unlike anything I’ve seen in my career.

So yes, we’ve managed to induce a panic. I believe – and I don’t want to get too political here – that not having an incumbent running in the recent election really added to this crisis. Because we had BOTH candidates trashing the existing order, and as a consequence of that, people have less and less confidence, they start withdrawing from their financial institutions, that causes a runs on banks, and it all becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People start believing the world is going to come to an end. And then on the 6 o’clock news Chicken Little comes on and convinces you that the sky is falling.

So the confidence level is lower than we’ve ever seen, causing consumers to retrench, when consumers retrench, that means that retailers suffer, if retailers suffer, the manufacturers ultimately suffer because the retailers aren’t selling the inventory – they don’t need to restock. It’s the opposite of a virtuous circle; it’s a vicious circle.

Is there a way to follow the whole unfortunate series of events back to one or two major causes of the meltdown? Or is it all too complex to do that?

Yes. At the genesis of the problem is the irresponsible granting of credit to less than credit-worthy borrowers. It started with sub-prime mortgages. But it didn’t start in 2007. You can trace this thing back to the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, when there was a concerted effort – which, by the way, was a good one from a social standpoint – to get home ownership up to the 70% level over a period of time. Politicians were frustrated by the fact that home ownership post-World War II kind of settled into a pattern where 60 % of families owned their own home, they wanted to increase the percentage of homeowners to at least 70%. They believed that doing so would certainly enhance the status of people in the lower middle class by owning their own homes; it would improve the cultivation of properties, because if you own something, you’re much more likely to take better care of it, etc.

But in order to get that extra 10% of the family population into homes, you had to change credit standards some or you had to come up with much more affordable housing. Well, here’s the rub. If you make it easier to get credit, you put pressure on home prices. So home prices skyrocket. And people have to borrow more to buy those homes, which makes the credit quality even lower. So what we had was another unvirtuous cycle where home values were being pushed up by the artificial demand we created by making credit too easy. And, by the way, it was all forms of credit.

You have examples of that right there on your own campus. When the freshmen come in,  they’re assaulted by credit card companies who are willing to give them a credit card, knowing they don’t have a the means to pay off the balances, they are totally dependent on their parents’ largesse to pay the bills. Oh by the way, after four years – or five or six, depending on the student – you have a pretty good credit rating because your parents have paid the bills for all of those years. And they’re apt to increase your credit line pretty dramatically. And you can see how that cycle can get ahead of you, enabling irresponsible habits. And what we need, maybe, is a little bit of a reversion to what we had 35 years ago, if you wanted to buy a house, you had to put 10% down, you had to have a job, and you had to be able to pay for that house with  no more than 25%  of your income. Somehow those common sense rules got suspended.

Look, I think the public purpose here was well taken. It is better to have people in homes they own. But you can’t let the public purpose override the basic financial facts. And we did that.

Who were the enablers here? The same people who are now vilifying Wall Street are the guys who passed the Community Redevelopment Act in the early ‘80s. Then refused to rein in Freddie Mac and failed? So I think there were a lot of enablers here.

It is not just a Wall Street thing – and I am not trying to be overly defensive about this – but this is not just a Wall Street thing. Again, we took what could have been a good, twisted it enough so that it became a rip-off.

It was well intentioned social policy– but lousy economics.

Do you think we’re close to bottoming out yet, or could it get worse for 6-9-12 or more months before it gets better? What are the brightest signs of hope, in your estimation? I.e. are there any silver linings to be seen in all of this?

I was asked a similar question by a reporter on Bloomberg TV recently, and here’s the analogy I used.

If you’ve ever been to a home that has an artificial pond, usually they have some black plastic at the bottom of the pond to seal it. That makes it very difficult to perceive the depth of the pond – because of the black bottom.

Assume the same thing, except it’s a pool that is all black at the bottom and the sides. If you look down from the side of that pool, you have no idea how deep it is. I think we’re in that situation with the current economy. And a major problem is if people can’t perceive the depth…that is, if they don’t know where the bottom is, they’re afraid to jump in the water. They don’t know if it’s 10 feet deep or two feet deep. If it’s two feet and you dive in, you crack your skull; if it’s 10 and you can’t swim, you could drown. So you don’t want to take the risk. And I think that’s the situation we’re in right now. It’s hard to discern the bottom. And it doesn’t look like we have clear signals on what that bottom might be.

So my answer is: I’m not sure we’re near the bottom. I do think we are beginning to recognize more and more of the bad loans. I think it may be important for us going forward to have some place to dispose of those loans – whether it’s a new resolution trust or whatever they come up with in the TARP program, or it’s simply a clearing house for these assets…they really don’t know what the value of them is because they won’t trade…and until they begin to trade and somebody discerns a bottom, we’re going to be stuck standing beside the pool and looking down, and we won’t be finished with this until that discernment is clear.

Are there signs of hope? There are always signs of hope. We have the most adaptable and dynamic economy in the world – in spite of what the Europeans would want to think about us.

I do think you’ll see some innovation come out of this which will create…some form of new energy technology – similar to the way broadband did in the late ‘90s, the same way cellular technology did it in the early ‘90s – if you get some new technology like that – I think President Obama hopes that it is energy-related – you create new industry, and if you can do that, you start ramping up new jobs very rapidly. That would be the sign that I am looking to see. I know there are things in this justifiably-criticized stimulus package that is coming out of Washington that are related specifically to that area, so it is the one bright spot that I would hope might come out of this. I don’t think it’s hybrid cars, but rather an alternative to hybrid cars like hydrogen cars – or some kind of technology that we can begin to mass produce pretty quickly that will be technology-based. Most major shifts in the economy are technology-based.

People are working on it, trust me, because there is a whole lot of money to be made, and if you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t have to worry about the limits on what you can be paid.

So that’s the silver lining. We are going to drive innovation. And we could come up with something, and everything could change pretty quickly.

You’ve almost certainly had to field phone calls from anxious clients, some of whom have tens of millions in the portfolio they’ve entrusted to you. What are, say, the top three pieces of advice you’ve used to quell/ease their anxieties?

I certainly have had plenty of calls from anxious clients.

My top three pieces of advice? Number one, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Investing is for the long term – unless you’re 78 years old, and then you have to shorten your horizon a bit. In which case you probably shouldn’t have been full-out invested in variable securities anyway. There’s an old rule of thumb that if you take 100 minus your age, that’s how much equity exposure you should have. It may sound simplistic, but sometimes simple rules like that work pretty well.

In the long run, you are going to be better off owning the equity of a company than you are owning a bond of the same company, however, over particular periods of time that’s not always true, and we’re in one of those periods now. Today I would balance my portfolio more towards high-quality debt – i.e. not government debt, but high quality corporate debt – and have a little less stock exposure than I would normally have. That is, if my normal equity exposure is 50%. I might be at 40% today.
Again, using the theory that this is a longer-range project…when you invest, it’s a much longer-range horizon than next week, and that is true of your 401k, your IRA, your 403b, that whole alphabet soup of savings products.

When we talk to the mutual fund clients, who are at a more modest level of wealth, I say you ought to have six months pay in the bank in cash. Of course, make sure it’s in a bank you think will be there in six months!

But those are old rules. A lot of people seem to have forgotten them during the go-go days. But those are old rules that still work.

The conventional wisdom is that there’s no better time to invest in stocks than when the market is down. One obviously needs to be very careful with such advice, given all of the ongoing volatility, but is there anything remotely resembling a “sure bet” – companies, industries, investment vehicles of any kind in which investors can have rock-solid faith under the current circumstances?

Just because the market is down doesn’t mean it’s cheap. It means it’s down. And when you evaluate where you are in a market, you have to evaluate a number of things. You don’t buy a company because it’s cheap. You buy a company because it’s well-managed, strongly capitalized and can weather the storm. So when you’re looking at stocks today, you would be looking at strong companies with good balance sheets who can generate enough cash from their own operations to fund themselves – i.e. they’re not dependent on credit to stay alive. Because no matter how successful a company looks, if they are currently dependent on credit they might get shut out of the markets pretty quickly. So again, don’t buy because people are saying that stocks are cheap. A) they can stay cheap a long time and B) you’re not sure what cheap means yet. If earnings continue to go down, then something that was selling at 10 times earnings will be selling at 20 times earnings if earnings are cut in half at which point it goes from cheap to expensive.

So you’ve got to pay attention to what the metrics are in an individual company before you decide whether it’s cheap or expensive, and whether or not that company has a survivability factor in going forward.

I hate using examples of companies, because people then run out and buy them, and if they don’t work out, they blame me. [Chuckles.] But look at a company like Proctor & Gamble. They’re in very basic industries – like razor blades, soap…we all know what they make…You’re going to give up a lot of things as a consumer before you give up your soap and your razor blades, and your floor cleaners, etc. So Proctor is in basic consumer consumables. They have very good cash flow. They don’t owe people money. They’re a very conservatively managed company. They tend to do pretty well in this kind of environment on a relative basis. So what does that mean? Well, their stock is down 20% and everyone else’s stock is down 40%.

What about companies like Amazon and Costco?

Those are very different animals, but with a model that maybe makes sense. Costco is essentially a wholesale to retail company – you know, you buy big quantities of stuff and you get a discount. That’s most attractive when things aren’t so good – and you don’t want to go to Harris Teeter or Lowe’s or wherever to pay the highest price. And you’re certainly not going to go to Whole Foods, because it’s too expensive. Amazon, because they have a model that has very low distribution costs, in an environment where you need to cut prices, they’re going to fare better than a company like Macy’s that can’t.

Right now, you have to look at things this way: if the economy gets worse, who survives? Because the survivors are going to be big winners coming out the other end, when they’ll have fewer competitors. So they’ll either be driven out of business – e.g. Circuit City vs. Best Buy: Circuit City is out of business, which is a terrible thing for its employees, but it’s a wonderful thing for Best Buy. Their major competitor is dead. But Best Buy now has to survive. Because if they do, they are a big winner.

So you try to pick the survivors…who have solid balance sheets and can finance themselves without depending on someone giving them a handout to get by, or borrowing from banks that are generally not anxious to lend.

I don’t accept strategies like buy when other people don’t. That’s baloney. You have to do a thorough analysis as to where a company sits, and hopefully you can get professional money managers who are good at it – but they’re understanding that they’re buying the intrinsic value of a company, not just because the market is down and it’s going to rally. It just doesn’t work that way.

Any counter-intuitive investment tips you’d like to give our readers – just between us?

Yes! Given what I just said, you’re going to think this is a little crazy, but if you want to take some risk – if you’ve got a risk appetite – and let’s put that at 5% of your assets, you can buy something like high-yield debt today. It’s yielding, 15-20%. If they just pay the interest it takes about 5 years to get all your money back. If you look at these – which, by the way, used to be called “junk bonds” – there are some pretty decent companies that are having difficulties raising money, but at 15+% interest they’re not going to stay around forever – as long as they carry that coupon. So there is a kind of a risk, because it’s backed by the assets of the company, it’s not the common stock. But even if they do go belly-up, the assets back the securities. So they might sell their factories and what not and get enough to pay off the bondholders.

So there are some places that sound really risky, but they’re not quite as risky if you do the analysis.

If you could sit down with President Obama, Paul Volcker and Lawrence Summers and tell them three key things they should be doing right away to improve market/investment conditions for the broadest range of investors, what would they be?

I’ve met two of the three.. But if I could sit down with the three of them I’d say to them that the single most important thing you can do is restore the confidence of the consumer. The consumer needs to be confident enough to believe that he or she will have a job. They’re not going to spend unless they believe that, and that’s why they’ve pulled their horns in so much. Additionally, the banks have to know that the securities they’re holding in their portfolios can be traded at some reasonable value. And right now, it’s not happening. It’s why I think we need something like a Resolution Trust II, and we clearly need the bully pulpit being used to convince consumers that the world isn’t coming to an end. And quite frankly, the daily press conferences that tell you how bad things are really should be stopped.

In the Age of Obama, do you think certain industries will be hurt by the new government philosophy, while others will be helped, or is it too early to tell? Ergo, are there any specific stocks or bonds or other investment vehicles to keep an eye on in that light?

Well, it’s pretty clear to me that Wall Street is not going to fare well in the Age of Obama, although for those of us who work in the field know if you don’t have a vibrant financial intermediary system, you’re not going to have much of an economy. So we really ought to stop bashing Wall Street and say, “Things could have been done better, but here is the function of Wall Street. Here’s why we need financial intermediaries.” These are not handouts….because if the banks don’t have the ability to obtain money from Richie Rich and lend it to  Joe the Plumber, you’re in big trouble. We need financial intermediaries to make the system work.

I would at some point stop beating them up, because somebody needs to be out there selling stocks, selling bonds so that we can have a vibrant economy. 

Now what is going to prosper under Obama? Clearly clean technology. We just launched a Global Sustainability Fund at Dreyfus.  We certainly support environmental sustainability, but the investment opportunity is going to be very attractive. Companies that are more environmentally aware are going to do better than companies that aren’t. Companies that produce products that help sustain a clean environment are going to do better than companies who produce products that move in the other direction. So I think it’s a theme that’s pretty easy to follow.

What are the top 3-5 lessons you learned in your economics courses here at the Abbey that have stood you in get stead during your career – through the good times and the bad?

What did I learn at the Abbey? You know the very most basic of the economics courses gave me principles that I go back to almost every day: Supply and demand. Price curves. Sort of the old Stan Dudko stuff [laughs appreciatively] …I also had a professor there named Isabelle Hart, who was then the head of the economics department. The best information I came away with was the stuff I learned in the preliminary economics courses I took when I was a sophomore. And supply and demand absolutely works 100% all of the time! It’s an irrefutable law of economics. And if you didn’t believe it, the so-called energy crisis proved it to you. When the price of energy got too high, people stopped using it, or they used it a lot less. And when they use it a lot less, guess what happens to the price.

So people ought to pay attention to the fundamentals. The nice thing about a good liberal arts college like the Abbey is that it forces you to learn some of those fundamentals. Economics is a social science – and I’d like to see everyone take at least one good economics course, because I believe it would change the nature of the way many people think. In fact, I wish those dunderheads in Washington had taken a good economics course, because they clearly don’t understand it. [Chuckles.] They think creating more demand is the right thing to do. That’s not it. You’ve got to have equilibrium between supply and demand.

For me, going on to graduate school and into the MBA program – that was the trade school. That’s where I learned how to do securities analysis and the like. But I learned how to sort of compartmentalize my thinking in my undergraduate days at the Abbey, so that I could understand the context in which companies operate in an economy.

Now some of my other grades at the Abbey I wouldn’t want exposed! But the economics courses that I absolutely fell for – even though Dudko claims he never gave me anything but an A…that’s a lie: he gave me plenty of Bs! [Laughs – again, appreciatively]

But that’s where I got the building blocks that helped me think the way I’m able to think about the economic and investment world.  And as I say, grad school gave me the tradesmen’s tools – how to buy a stock, how to buy a bond, how to understand cap structure…all of that. You don’t get some of that in undergrad school. Although I will say my accounting courses at the Abbey helped a lot. Because it’s fundamental to learning finance.

Has your grounding in the liberal arts while you were a student here at the Abbey helped you navigate the potentially treacherous professional and moral waters of working at huge investment firms in New York City in any way? (Have you ever heard anyone actually say something like “Greed is good” – and you’ve felt compelled to correct them?)

Yes, I’ve heard people here say that “greed is good” – but only when they were parroting the movie it comes from, “Wall Street.”

Actually, I’ve seen people live that. I’ve seen people who allow their sense of morality to be corrupted by their sense of achievement. And it’s a pretty ugly picture.

One of the nice things about all of that Catholic schooling I received [chuckles] is that there’s enough guilt that is laid on you somewhere – whether it’s called guilt or values, it almost doesn’t make any difference, but you somehow sense that if you are taking advantage of someone else to advantage yourself, and that’s your consistency in life, it’s hard for you to live with that. I won’t tell you that it’s impossible, because some people have figured out ways around it, but it’s hard. I’m very fond of the whole idea of a Benedictine education, because there is a real balance that is emphasized in how you treat others…that it isn’t okay to do anything it takes to succeed. And if you do succeed, you should reach back to help the person behind you. So yes, that kind of education matters.

And listen. Although we’re getting trashed in the press and on the TV news every night, Wall Street people are generally very, VERY generous. I’m afraid charities in New York are going to get clobbered as Wall Street people try to get back on their feet.  But I think you’ll find there are more generous people here than there are people like…Bernie Madoff…

I think we need a balance of fiscal and monetary policy to get out of this. And there’s going to have to be some trial and error that goes on here. How much do you stimulate, how easy do you make money…after all easy money got us into this mess. So the monetarists are going to have to pay attention to that, and at some point they’re going to have to remove the punch bowl. So next time we’ll go right back to the same thing…but next time we’ll have the same thing: no growth, high unemployment AND inflation, which is the worst trifecta. And we don’t want that.

Would you say there is a moral grounding in the investment advice you give your clients?

I try to be honest with my clients. I always explain what risks they’re taking, trying to get them comfortable with the risk, and if they’re not, I don’t overwhelm them with a lot of statistical baloney. Because if they’re not comfortable, I’m not comfortable. So I try to get them sort of the furthest out on the risk curve I can get them, but still stay in their comfort zone.  I educate them all along the way, I give them more and more information, I try to cushion all of the blows where I can, but I think you need to get people to sort of maximize their risk quotient within their comfort zone. And if I get a client who’s comfortable taking a 100% risk, I have to back them off that ledge. Because that’s not practical.

If you look at an average client that I advise, you’d see a third of the assets in something very safe – it might be municipal bonds, it might be treasuries…something that is probably not going to be very volatile. You’d see another third of the assets in something that kind of swings – it might be an account that can either go to stocks or bonds or cash, and I can make those decisions for you. And then another third of the assets that are supposed to generate large capital gains – because even if you lose a half of this third, that’s only 16% of your total! [laughs gently]. And I think you can live with that. And it’s not overly scientific but it works.

You’re a member of the Board of Trustees here at the Abbey. Are you impressed with  the investment strategies being followed here?

Since I created a lot of the strategies for the Abbey’s endowment, I’m impressed with all of them! [Laughs.] So you can’t ask me this question!

We’ve tried to manage around the way the College is situated at a given time. And for many, many years, we were much more equity-oriented than we are today, because we had virtually no endowment and we needed to grow it, and in many cases we then took the money out to support the school.

So that equation has fortunately changed some. And I think we’re in a slightly less risky mode right now.

But that’s as much of a comment I’d like to make on the matter [since I’m so close to it].

What can various donors – particularly large donors – do to most effectively help Belmont Abbey College reach its intellectual, spiritual, financial and physical plant goals in the next 5-10 years? (Planned giving?)

THEY CAN GIVE THEIR MONEY!! [Laughs.] And remember that as you do your estate planning, it’s a pretty painless way to give money after you’re gone – when you don’t need it. So I think you ought to try to figure out a way to make the Abbey part of your bequest.

I think planned giving does really work. If you look at the great endowments, that’s how they got great.

What do you like most about what you see going on at the Abbey these days?

Besides Jillian, my daughter-in-law, you mean? (Laughs.) [Jillian Maisano is the Abbey’s Assistant Director of Marketing.] I like that basketball coach Stephen Miss a lot. He lives the Benedictine values as a coach. And that’s not a common thing these days…he’s an impressive young man.

When I was there, it was before the campus was as great-looking as it is today. There was a lot of crimson sod back then. But the campus is idyllic today. And I think it’s a great learning environment.

I like the closeness of the faculty and staff with the students.

You know, you can’t apply your own needs to others. But I came to the Abbey as probably – hopefully – someone with good potential, who hadn’t displayed a lot of it – certainly with respect to academics – but it allowed me to realize that. It didn’t assume that  – oh well, here’s just another guy who’s kind of average…One of the things I often say about the school is that it takes the seemingly average sort of student and allows him or her to aspire to, and actually achieve, great things. The Benedictine inspiration is there. You know, think larger than you actually are. But because you’re in a small place, you have an opportunity to display your talents.

The Abbey is good at “coaching people up,” if you will.

Are there any current or past “Abbey heroes” of yours that you’d like to mention?

I’m not mentioning Dudko, because he’ll WANT me to mention him.[Laughs heartily.]

There are definitely people I’d like to mention who had an influence on me. Certainly Father Kenneth [Geyer]…and only because I was such a lousy French student, and he figured out a way to get me through it! He was our fraternity counselor and was able to take kind of a raucous bunch and to get us to start thinking right – without moralizing to us.

On the academic side, Mrs. Hart and Stanley Dudko – both – they were darned good teachers of basic economics. So they gave me a nice foundation – which certainly helped me in graduate school. I had better grades in grad school than in undergraduate school.

And there was also a political science professor – Father Edmund McCaffrey – who had a big influence on me. He eventually became the abbot, I believe.

Most importantly, my wife of over 40 years (Mary-Alice) who I met on my first day of Freshman orientation! She has always inspired me.

How do you keep your balance in life during such stressful times? Is there a prayer regimen or something of that sort that helps you retain your equanimity – and even joy –during the toughest of days? A saint you pray to?

How do I keep my balance? I don’t. [Laughs sheepishly.] When it’s high stress time, your balance has got to be found in what you’re doing day-to-day. For example, when the Lehman Brothers crisis hit – when they went bankrupt that weekend – we spent several weekends in a row, working through Saturday and Sunday trying to figure out how we were going to handle the default of their securities, what it was going to mean to our over one trillion dollars worth of accounts…and in that kind of situation, it’s very hard to keep a balance.

I do manage to stumble into church on Sundays, and I try to play golf periodically, but as Jillian will tell you, not nearly enough.

But it’s hard. I’m very fortunate that I have an understanding wife who has dealt with it gracefully for many years, and our children have grown up, so they don’t require nearly as much attention as they used to. Although having said that, they still require some!

It’s really important, and one of the things I did during my career –  I did forcefully carve out time to coach my boys in one sport or another. Football and baseball for both of them. But it was a great way to spend time with my kids – AND to get to know my kids’ friends, which is very important.  But you HAVE to carve the time out, and you have to have a really understanding wife, because the stuff you do with the kids takes away from her, too.

You have to be smart about scheduling your time. But I traveled a lot – and still travel a lot – and a lot of the burden falls on the wife when you’re gone.

So we tried. Was I as successful as I would have wanted to be in that dimension in my life? Not as successful as I should have been, but they got to go to the schools they wanted to attend, and they didn’t have any student loans.

Whatever you decide to do for a career, though, if you don’t have passion for it, you won’t be successful. And if you DO have passion for it, it will make up for a lot of your lack of certain skills. And I really have loved my career.

This job is like facing a big puzzle every day that has sort of multiple ways it can all fit together. And you don’t always get it right, but if you get it close to right, it all ends up looking pretty good in the end.