WH155 Steve Garrow, Travelin Bone Entertainment, CEO/Co-Founder

So after I graduated college, I went to work on Wall Street.

I went to work on the trading desk of a institutional trading firm, which meant, institutional meant our clients were all mutual funds, investment advisors, hedge funds, state pension funds, and working on that trading desk.

At that time, I don't think it's changed a heck of a lot, but back then, there was a real caste system at Wall Street firms.

So upper management was typically run by know old old men wearing gray suits who are coming out of ivy league backgrounds and maybe mbas and some women a little bit too starting to at that point the next level was the some of the investment bankers the traders uh bankers might be more educated the traders may be a mix of street smart guys and guys with good college educations and then the last level would be the back office people These people typically did not go to college.

Maybe they graduated high school, and they typically were commuting in from Staten Island and Queens.

And that was kind of the dichotomy of people in the firm.

On the training desk, it was kind of forbidden to kind of spend a lot of time in the back office because you were supposed to be mingling with your folks out front.

But there were dead times when I was training and even dead times when I wasn't training and had my own little book of business where I would go to the back office and hang out with the guys to understand more about the settlement stuff.

Number one, these guys were closer to my background anyways, even though they thought I was this college guy.

They were the same kind of guys hanging out in the taverns when I was six, seven, eight years old.

So I started spending time with them understanding it because I would get questions from from my clients on settlement questions or money questions that I couldn't answer.

And typically the answer would be, I'll have my settlement person call your settlement person and he'll work this out for you.

I felt it would be a lot better customer service if I could actually answer the question myself.

Like I knew I knew what the heck he was asking, what the heck the answer was.

So I start spending some time in the back, learn the operational stuff, started backing up one of the ladies out front whenever she was out of the office, even though I was frowned upon.

And then a few years after I started doing that, and I was in the middle of my...

I went to get my...

Executive MBA at NYU.

And at the time, I think my title was the Assistant Director of the International Department.

We did some trading in Tokyo overnight, in Hong Kong, and that fancy title, The glamor of that fancy title translated into, I was able to carry home the mobile phone, the one mobile phone that the firm owned.

I got to carry it home at night, it weighed about four pounds, and I got to wake up at three in the morning, get the reports from Tokyo, figure out an average price, call back the customer, try to get some sleep, and go back and be on the desk by 8.30 the next day.

So it wasn't that glamorous until the head of international left the firm in a big kind of a scandal, and the firm came to me and said, you know, no one else really understands what's going on in Hong Kong and Tokyo and London except you, even though you're only, I don't know what I was, maybe I was 28 or something like that.

And they said, will you take over the international department? So Besides some of the lessons I'd learned from about people or being observant with numbers from the numbers game, I also kind of, you know, maybe maybe I was at the time too dumb.

I probably should have said no.

I need some more money for our store.