Corient fully integrates acquisitions on day one

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:00:26

   And it's great for them because they have total clarity in terms of what they're looking for. So let's go back to this obsession of alignment. Explain, you acquire my company, what happens the very next day? You told me the story in Miami. I thought it was very fascinating. Yeah, so we've kind of, let's just, so the business is about six years old, a little more than six years old. There's kind of really called three phases of building the business to get to the state that we're in.

2. 1:00:48

   So the first phase was acquiring enough scale. Again, this is a proof of concept. I thought there was a tremendous opportunity. the question is, was it going to resonate and take off? And so there was, call it a period of time, let's just say the first 18 months, where we were focused on accumulating the scale. And the reason that's important is because the scale drives how you think about integration, the services that you're going to integrate, the providers that you use. If you're going to build a $5 trillion company versus a $500 billion company versus a $50 billion company, how you think about integrating is very different. So there's a period of time where we were accumulating the scale to start the integration journey. Second piece was effectively starting down that integration journey. So we had scale and it was a matter of now, how do we pick or make the various decisions

3. 1:01:32

   that ultimately drive integration and morph the organization? So some things come faster than others. And then the third piece was where we're at now, which is a fully integrated state. And I think that's really, really important. And if you had asked me when I started, again, because people love optionality, which of those three phases would people be most comfortable with, I would have said people would have been most comfortable with the first phase, right?

4. 1:01:54

   Because it's the least amount of change at the start. It's actually not true. People are most comfortable with the current state because they know exactly what they're getting into, which is interesting. So you know, like if you're selling the firm to us, here's exactly what life is going to look like on the other side. You're going to know it two ways. One, because I can tell you what it looks like from the conversations. But also there's a ton of people now, 3,000 in total, that you can reach out to and interact with what is life like here. And the people who've been through the journey with us tend to be the greatest ambassadors. And I think a lot of our success or the reinforcement of the success comes from people who've come.

5. 1:02:30

   The clients and themselves have had a great experience, and they become great ambassadors for the business as we continue to grow. But what does total integration look like? Everything. So on day one, you're on our brand, you're using our technology, you're working in our offices, you're collaborating together across the firm. The collateral's been changed, you're on our comp, you're on our benefits. So it's effectively a full integration.

6. 1:02:52

   With one caveat, though, this business is all about continuous improvement. And so I'm a huge proponent of, again, constantly changing, constantly evolving, constantly pushing ourselves. So while that state of being integrated is true, every single acquisition that we make, every hire that we make, every conversation we have, creates an opportunity for us to think about how we continuously improve the business.

7. 1:03:15

   So we're benefiting as well from these acquisitions in the same way that the acquisitions are benefiting from us. And to me, that's the— Can you explain a little bit more about that? Yeah, because I mean, if I think about like, if I'm looking at, again, if you have a business in the space, the only reason that we should work together is if two things are true. I make you better and you make me better.

8. 1:03:34

   If those aren't true, in my opinion, then it becomes a financial transaction. And that's fine, but that's not ultimately the objective that we have in place. So we're looking, what are you doing for clients? How do we benefit from that? What expertise do you bring? How does that expertise translate to better outcomes for clients that we have? Same thing, there's hopefully things that we're doing that benefit you.

9. 1:03:55

   So it becomes immediately this mutually beneficial experience. I'll give you an example. So when you grow up in management consulting, right, a lot of the work that you do as a