Trusted Partners featuring Fidelity Investments

You brought up the term trusted partner and the namesake of this podcast is partnering with great people.

And, you know, like I said in the intro, it's all about highlighting those partnerships, what's meaningful to everybody and what's meaningful to clients.

But what does it mean to be a trusted partner? Can you define that for us?

We spent a lot of time on our last offsite.

So we have five offices on the 401.

We're in Toronto, Waterloo, London, where we are right now, Chatham and Windsor.

And over the years, we've been acquisitive.

We've merged with a couple of different teams.

We've bought some businesses.

We've grown considerably to where we are today, you know, around three and a half billion dollars in assets, you know, that spread out all over the place.

But what ends up happening when you're growing, whether it's by acquisition, whether it's by merger, whether it's just bringing clients from other institutions, what ends up happening is you have a whole bunch of stuff, right? And when you have a whole bunch of stuff, you know, you have to sit back and say, what stuff should we be keeping and what stuff should we be getting rid of? So the concept behind the trusted partner was we need to first and foremost streamline the investment process.

And streamlining the investment process is rolling up our sleeves and figuring out what we want to keep, what we want to get rid of.

And again, what do we want to keep? We want to keep top performers.

We want to keep the managers and the stocks or the bonds, the investments that are doing what matters.

we either hired somebody to do for us or the stocks that, you know, the fairway portfolio managers are picking.

So when you sit there and go, oh my goodness, you know what? In a perfect world, we would maybe have 500 positions.

And then you wake up one day and you have 5,000 positions, right? And you got to sit there and go, okay, we need to come up with something to change this.

And we need to come up with the names that we really, really like.

And that's where it came from.

That was the genesis of this idea of a trusted partner is let's roll up our sleeves, figure out who's doing the best job for us and get rid of all of the other ones.

And it takes a long time.

And those are pretty accurate numbers because you're probably left with a thousand positions that you're just stuck with, right? Why are you stuck with them? Large, unrealized capital gains, right? So you're not going to blow something out just to make, okay, I got one less position, but a client just paid, you know, $50,000 in capital gains that he or she didn't need to.

You're not going to get to that 500.

You'll never get to it, right? It's a little clunky.

And sometimes people want to hold on to things.

You brought up the term trusted partner and the namesake of this podcast is partnering with great people.

And, you know, like I said in the intro, it's all about highlighting those partnerships, what's meaningful to everybody and what's meaningful to clients.

But what does it mean to be a trusted partner? Can you define that for us?

We spent a lot of time on our last offsite.

So we have five offices on the 401.

We're in Toronto, Waterloo, London, where we are right now, Chatham and Windsor.

And over the years, we've been acquisitive.

We've merged with a couple of different teams.

We've bought some businesses.

We've grown considerably to where we are today, you know, around three and a half billion dollars in assets, you know, that spread out all over the place.

But what ends up happening when you're growing, whether it's by acquisition, whether it's by merger, whether it's just bringing clients from other institutions, what ends up happening is you have a whole bunch of stuff, right? And when you have a whole bunch of stuff, you know, you have to sit back and say, what stuff should we be keeping and what stuff should we be getting rid of? So the concept behind the trusted partner was we need to first and foremost streamline the investment process.

And streamlining the investment process is rolling up our sleeves and figuring out what we want to keep, what we want to get rid of.

And again, what do we want to keep? We want to keep top performers.

We want to keep the managers and the stocks or the bonds, the investments that are doing what matters.

we either hired somebody to do for us or the stocks that, you know, the fairway portfolio managers are picking.

So when you sit there and go, oh my goodness, you know what? In a perfect world, we would maybe have 500 positions.

And then you wake up one day and you have 5,000 positions, right? And you got to sit there and go, okay, we need to come up with something to change this.

And we need to come up with the names that we really, really like.

And that's where it came from.

That was the genesis of this idea of a trusted partner is let's roll up our sleeves, figure out who's doing the best job for us and get rid of all of the other ones.

And it takes a long time.

And those are pretty accurate numbers because you're probably left with a thousand positions that you're just stuck with, right? Why are you stuck with them? Large, unrealized capital gains, right? So you're not going to blow something out just to make, okay, I got one less position, but a client just paid, you know, $50,000 in capital gains that he or she didn't need to.

You're not going to get to that 500.

You'll never get to it, right? It's a little clunky.

And sometimes people want to hold on to things.