Sallie Krawcheck: Watch Me Go. How Sallie Beat the Odds and Became One of the Most Powerful Women in Business | E36
36:29 Share

There was nothing they could do to me on Wall Street that was as bad as seventh grade. So when I was getting the proverbial elbows to the side and Wall Street was like, yeah, I've had worse than this. I ate lunch alone at my all girls school. And I think it ignited two things in me. First of all, just the grit. And I hate to sort of admit this, but I'm going to I'm going to show you all.

I'm going to show you all. Watch me go. And then when I come back, I'm going to have conquered Wall Street, raised $150 million of venture capital dollars, changed the world for women. These girls don't remember me at all from middle school, but I still use it as a little bit of extra push.

Welcome to A Search of Excellence, which is about our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be, to learn, educate, and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential. It's about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication, and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face on our way there. Achieving excellence is our goal and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings. We all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there.

My guest today is Sally Krawcheck. For the last 30 years, Sally has been one of the most influential and powerful women in business and on Wall Street. Sally is the co-founder and CEO of Alvest, the digital investment platform and advisor for women and has more than $1.5 billion in asset center management. She is a former chief financial officer of Citigroup, the former CEO of Citi's wealth management business and private bank, the former head of Bank of America's global wealth and investment management division,

the former CEO of Merrill Lynch, the former CEO of Smith Barney, the former CEO of U.S. Trust, and the former chair and CEO of Sanford Bernstein. Sally is also the author of the book Own It, The Power of Women at Work. And in addition to these incredible accomplishments, she also holds the world record as the only woman to be fired on the front page of the Wall Street Journal twice. Sally, it's a pleasure to have you on my show. Welcome to In Search of Excellence.

All right. Well, you got the world record in, which is important. Good to be here. Got to start with the world record. I always start my podcast with our family because from the moment we're born, our family helps shape our personalities, our values, and the preparation for our future. You grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. Your parents were married in their early 20s, just as your dad, Leonard, was starting law school. And your parents had four children in just under four years. You were close to a family of modest means. Your house had one bathroom, which meant that you were all on top of each other all the time.

We're going to talk about the value that your family placed on education a little later in the show. But I want to start with talking about research that you cited that shows the most important relationship a professional woman can have, if she's lucky enough to have it, is a relationship with her father. Can you tell us why and how your relationship with your dad influenced your future, and

And if we want to take luck out of the equation, what's your advice to the dads and future dads listening and watching today on how to build a special, loving, and nurturing relationship with their daughters? You're right. It is the most important relationship for a professional woman if she's fortunate enough to have it. And I certainly was. My dad, growing up in 70s, 80s, late 60s, Charleston, South Carolina, told me I could do whatever I wanted to.

pointed to Gloria Steinem as someone that I should look to model myself after, which is a big vote of confidence. By the way, it was when I came home wearing glasses and I was crying and he's like, oh, Gloria Steinem wears glasses and she's beautiful and she's changing the world. And I thought, ah, that's what I want to do. And really invested in us and invested in our education when we were children. So, and then I'd say the final thing that my dad did, which didn't feel great at the time,

But we celebrated achievement. And if you wanted to have daddy proud of you, you would bring home a great report card. That was the fastest path to his favor. And so I learned pretty quickly to achieve was to get my father's favor. So I was achievement oriented.

Taking luck out of the equation because you had an amazing dad, what's your advice to the dads and future dads out there watching today on how to build a loving, special, nurturing relationship with their daughters? Well, build a loving, special, nurturing relationship with your daughters and recognize that they can go as far as your sons and open that world in front of them and give them the positive reinforcement.

Because if tomorrow is anything like today, women will, and women of color in particular, will still suffer from biases in the workplace. And if she has you, dad, as that strong foundation where it's, well, that guy's a jerk, but my dad really believes in me, if that most important man in her life believes in her, then if other men

throw obstacles up in front of her, she won't lose her confidence. You said believe in you. I think the four most important words in the English language someone told me once are, I believe in you. I have five kids, four daughters. I tell them that all the time and it makes a difference in their life. A huge difference. A huge difference. And the earlier, the better so that it's really part of who they are.

Let's talk about what you were like as a kid. You had two dreams when you were younger. You dreamed of being a princess and dreamed of being the girlfriend of David Cassidy. For our viewers and listeners who don't know, David was an actor and singer who at the peak of his career was the highest paid live entertainer and who had the largest official fan club in the history of pop music. In the third grade, as you talked about, you discovered Gloria Steinem, who was the spokesperson for the American feminist movement. At the same time, as you also talked about, you became the first person in your grade at your all-girls middle school to get classes.

And let's just say the glasses weren't pretty. They were the Coke bottle kind. The lenses were thick and they had a round shape, shaped like the glass of a Coke bottle. They were tinted yellow lenses, very 70s, and the students bullied you badly. You were the smart kid who got all As and you had these Coke bottle glasses. You had braces and you were Jewish, which in the Charleston community was rare where you experienced anti-Semitism. As you said, your dad tried to help you and he talked about Gloria Steinem and her glasses. He wore glasses too. It helped a little.

Also, not that much. You ate lunch by yourself every day, which was traumatic, which led to you being insecure, part of which has carried forward to this day. In search of excellence, how did the experience of being badly bullied and not liked and being alone and the insecurity you started experiencing in the eighth grade ignite and motivate your future? And what's your advice to those out there today who were bullied or are still being bullied, but don't have or didn't have the support of parents like yours and are still profoundly affected by it?

Yeah. When you talk about it like that, I want to go back in time and give me a hug. And as you can tell, I've still got my glasses. I'd say they're a bit more chic today. There's no yellow tinting, no yellow tinting to them at all. But I love to say that there was nothing they could do to me on Wall Street that was as bad as seventh grade. So when I was getting the elbows to the side, the proverbial elbows to the side and Wall Street was like, yeah, I've

I've had worse than this. I ate lunch alone at my all-girls school. And I think it ignited two things in me. First of all, just the grit. You had to go to school the next day. I mean, maybe you could get one sick day out of your mom every once in a while, but you had to show up every day and face it every day and find the strength within you to keep going and to have lunch by yourself and act like it didn't matter.

and to take the barbs and be the second to last one chosen for the team. And so I think it really was the grit. And there's so much research now about how important grit is. You know, we're all smart enough, but it's hard work. It's grit. It's showing up. And the second thing is, and I hate to sort of admit this, but I'm going to, I'm going to show you all. Watch me go. And then when I come back to visit, I'm going to have

pick thing, conquered Wall Street, raised $150 million of venture capital dollars, changed the world for women. These girls don't remember me at all from middle school, but I still use it as a little bit of extra push. I started as a kid, was badly bullied, used to come home crying from school every day to my mom. I don't want to go back. She said, don't worry, you're going to be fine in life. And

It was traumatic. And it did, similar to you, I always wanted to perform well for myself and my own personal satisfaction. But there was a little element in there that said, I'm going to show you one day. And when I had some success, I was more proud for myself than to show people. But there was a little bit in there as well. I have to admit that as well. Yeah.

You were born in the 60s and grew up in the 70s and the 80s in the South. It was very different back then than it is today. There were quintillions and debutantes. It was a quieter lifestyle. You were always full of energy, sort of like the Energizer bunny and wanted to go places, but you quite didn't know where you wanted to go. So your parents moved you to Porter God School, a prep school in Charleston, where Stephen Colbert was a class ahead of you. And things improved dramatically for you there. You went from getting Cs to being the top student in your class.

In high school, you're the homecoming queen. You ran track. You were a cheerleader and you dated the starting quarterback of the football team who was the coolest kid in school. Can you tell us about a particular moment you had in high school where your guidance counselor pulled you aside and how what she said to you influenced your future? And in search of excellence, what's your advice to us on how to proactively reach out to others and give them support and advice about their dreams, which is something that's not on our everyday to-do list, but which I think is an incredible way to give back

because it can dramatically and positively influence the lives of others. Yeah. So you're exactly right. I went from the scorned kid in middle school at the all-girls school to, as you said, the cheerleader and the homecoming queen at the high school. Now,

To be fair, there weren't that, you know, it was still the boys' school. So there were like 60 guys and 10 gals, but still, but still, it was a metamorphosis. And I was living the high school life that a young gal in Charleston, South Carolina at the time wanted. And I was probably headed to secretarial school and on to the next phase of my life to get married, have kids.

be in South Carolina. Fantastic. One day as I was walking down the hall with my boyfriend, the guidance counselor who I have a picture of right there on that shelf pulled me aside. She was a mean old bird and she pulled me aside and she was waving my SAT scores.

which I'm going to tell you were pretty good, and waving them at me and pulled me aside and said, look, you can go down this path of giggling and girly and that kind of path, or look at your scores, look at your IQ scores, look at your grades. You can really go places. And it was just a moment where the whole thing opened up for me. The challenge of it opened up for me.

It was an absolutely game changer, absolutely game changing moment for me. And when you think about particularly women in the workplace today, the research shows we get less feedback than men do. And we don't naturally come out of the womb knowing how to be great managers and great leaders. And even Michael Jordan needed a coach selling a group of women today. And so you don't always want to get feedback, but it is such a gift.

And if we can, particularly women to other women, give each other the feedback, the coaching, deliver sometimes the hard messages, those can be absolutely life-changing for us. And women just get much less of it in the workforce today than men do. You went from scorn to the most popular. That must have been a great, great transition for you. I

I went to a new high school in ninth grade. I was cool for about two months. I went to homecoming with the homecoming queen, Marcy Thompson. Still friends today. Hello, Marcy. Shout out to you. And then things reverted again. And then in college, things changed. Things in college change. And from there, it's been okay. But you do grow into your own and you do get over the bullying. And we all blossom into who we're going to be. Let's

Let's talk about education, which I think is one of the most important ingredients of future success. It was also very important to your parents who went into debt to send you and your siblings to private school. They did it because South Carolina had some of the worst public schools in the country. You graduated high school and then went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on the prestigious Moorhead Scholarship. For our readers and listeners who don't know, the Moorhead Scholarship is the first merit scholarship program in the United States. It was inspired by the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University and established in 1945.

It's a full ride that covers tuition, room and board, and summer experiences for all four years in college. When you were growing up, your parents' highest aspirations was you was to be a secretary, which is what they were called back in the day. You had a very different plan. You wanted to be a business reporter and graduated with a degree in journalism. But when you started interviewing for jobs after graduation, the starting salaries for journalists were $13,000 a year, while at the same time, many of your friends were interviewing for Wall Street roles that were paying $32,000 a year.

So you had this recalibration of sorts, and it wasn't a hard decision for you because you didn't come from money. And you convinced yourself that you could work on Wall Street for a couple of years and then became a business journalist later on. We're going to talk about your first job at Salomon Brothers and your career in more detail in a few minutes. But before we do, the punchline here is that you went for the money and hated working on Wall Street. You said it was absolutely awful. I do a lot of mentoring and coaching. One of the biggest, if not the biggest question people ask me is,

What should I do when I graduate? Or if they already have a job and are looking to do something else? In response to this, we go through a whole bunch of factors. And most of the time, money ranks first. What's your advice about this? Should students or people who are already in the workforce, regardless of their age, go for the money? Or should they find a job and career they're going to like and have a passion for? And for the parents who are listening to this and who can afford to support their kids when they graduate from college and help them get on their feet, what's your advice to them?

I know what I'm supposed to say. I'm supposed to say, go for what you're passionate about. But what you left out was, yes, I went for the money, but I also went for the learning. And I knew that if I went to the Wall Street firm, as horrible as it was, and we could talk about it in a minute, I would be learning an enormous amount.

And my calculation was if I can earn the money and I didn't come from money. So when I graduated, you know, that was a thank goodness I didn't have all the student loan debt because of the scholarship that so many kids have these days. But still, I was in credit card debt. You know, it was a problem. And so my calculations, let me go for the money and let me learn. And then once I get my feet underneath me, I can figure these things out.

So I know it's supposed to be go for the passion, go for whatever. But I went for the money and then got to my passion a handful of years later with a bunch of emotional scars from having worked on Wall Street in the late 80s. If we're talking about, we'll just freeze frame it there for a second. We're talking about passion, money, and learning. How should those rank? Early in your career, learning. Or in your 20s.

I think it should all be about optionality. How do you increase, not reduce your optionality? If you can go into something where you're learning a lot, you're broadening out, you're seeing what you're good at, you're seeing what you're bad at, you're seeing what you like, you're seeing what really gets your heart racing. For me, that was my 20s. And there were parts of being on Wall Street that I liked. I liked the

analysis. I liked, I missed the writing. I wanted to write. I wasn't writing. I missed that. I loved engaging with smart people. What I, I didn't like being on teams, being on a team in wall street as a young woman in the late eighties was a disaster. And so I was happy to take personal responsibility. So I was able to take that learning and

and turn it into a career as a research analyst where I was successful very quickly. I was never going to be successful in investment banking. So I think you optimize for learning and from there and building your skills and getting to know yourself. And from there, you can make a great decision for your 30s, 40s and 50s.

You learn in your 20s and you earn in your 30s. That's something that's kind of a saying that's been around there for a long time. And I agree with that as well. It's interesting. I have a summer intern program with 35 kids every summer, very talented. And they all talk about what they should do next. And so many of these kids, I tell them they have to stay in their first job for two years, no matter what. Because the job hoppers, it looks terrible. They don't like their job.

They don't like their boss. And I said, welcome to real life. Life isn't like that. You have to be able to get along with a bad boss. And some of these students go off and someone's paying them $10,000 more or $15,000 more. The grass is always greener. And it's interesting. They rarely look at the opportunity to learn. Young kids these days. It's different today than it was years ago.

It definitely was. You just took the punishment. You just took it for some period of time and, you know, hopefully worked your way into the next job. But there's just more optionality now. There are

Back in the day, how did you know there was a job available at XYZ company? Today, it's in every platform. It's sort of like online dating. I don't know. Maybe there's someone who's more attractive and better suited to me, as opposed to, well, I just met this person and probably as good as it's going to get. There's so much optionality that it's easy to get your head turned.

This episode of In Search of Excellence is brought to you by Sandy.com. S-A-N-D-E-E.com. We are a Yelp for beaches and have created the world's most comprehensive beach resource by cataloging more than 100 categories of information for every beach in the world, more than 100,000 beaches in 212 countries. Sandy.com provides beach goers around the world with detailed, comprehensive, and easy-to-use information to help them plan their perfect beach getaway at home and abroad,

and to make sure you're never disappointed by a beach visit again. Plan the perfect beach trip today by visiting sandy.com. That's www.sandee.com. The link is in our show notes. Stay sandy, my friends.

So you graduated with a degree in journalism and then went to work as a junior analyst at the investment bank, Solomon Brothers, which was an awful experience, worse than anything you had read about. But despite being miserable, you stayed at Solomon Brothers for three years, then got an MBA at Columbia. In your summer before your second year, you had a summer internship at Time Magazine, but they didn't offer you a full-time job after that. But you did get an offer from Disney, which was your absolute dream job. The job was supposed to be in New York, but it was in LA instead.

You were married at the time and turned down the job because your husband at the time didn't want to move, which is really a bummer because he was having an affair with one of your friends, which you found out months later if you had already gone back to Wall Street to work at a firm called Donaldson, Lufkin & Generate, DLJ, which is one of the best investment banks on Wall Street at the time. You were an associate there, like your first investment banking job at Salomon Brothers. You hated the DLJ job too. The work ethic was crazy. So was the schedule. The

The bankers there would mess around all day and then work all night and mess around during the week and work all weekend. And there were times when somebody told you to leave for the airport at the last second without any warning, which was stressful and all but guaranteed that you'd be running into the airport to make your flight. In addition to the crazy hours and ridiculous schedule, you were sexually harassed. The environment there was a sense of underlying and muted disdain for women. There were frolicking parties, crude jokes, men making passes at female colleagues and you.

Every day, there was somebody who left the Xerox copy of a mail on your desk. You rarely received what were considered the good assignments and were asked to babysit a mediocre and more senior banker. You knew you'd been put on the C-team, and after a year, you quit. You got divorced while you were working at DLJ, but there was something good, actually great, that came out of that. You met your current husband, Gary Appel, there. At this point, you felt like a failure and wanted to take time off. You hated yourself when you did take time off.

Can you tell us about the eureka moment when you were standing in your kitchen peeling a pear? And tell us about all the firms. Tell us about all the firms that turned you down because you were a woman and had a baby at home. In search of excellence, what's your advice to people who hate their careers? Is it ever too late to switch to a new one? And does the answer depend on your age? Okay. No, no, no, no. The answer doesn't depend on your age because I switched my career when I was 50.

So we'll get to that later. But boy, is that a depressing series of events. Just to hear you sort of list it out like that. Yes, my 20s were career-wise a disaster.

And in fact, what you refer to standing in the kitchen eating a pear was when I was 29 years and 11 months and I was unemployed. I had a baby. I was remarried. And I thought I took this scholarship I had and all the investment my parents made in me and I've thrown it out the window and I am a failure. And for a while, I even tried to get back into investment banking, which I hated, but just to do something.

But the smart thing I had done was I had, as we talked about before, really gone deep on what I wanted to do, what I was good at, what I liked, what I didn't like. And I couldn't quite put the pieces together. But I'm standing in the kitchen one day eating a pear. And I don't know, Randall, if this has ever happened to you, but I sort of was like, there was a moment and I thought I'm about to have a big insight. It's happened to me about three times in my life.

And I knew it. And it hit me like a lightning bolt. And I love to say, as happens to so many young women at that age, that I wanted to be a sell-side equity research analyst. I know your listeners are like, that's the least sexy thing I've ever heard. But what fun, right? I would be able to do the things I loved, have personal responsibility, so intellectually interesting, really measure myself against all these smart people on Wall Street,

know whether I was right or wrong, make recommendations on stocks, deal with smart people. I mean, what could be better? So I just had to go out and find a job. Now I'm an unemployed mom.

with an investment banking background. And so I went out and I was told, no, bye, you know, and I won't do all of them because we just don't have time. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Nomura, UBS, Dylan Reed, Solomon Brothers, Smith Barney, Smith Barney, the director of research there said they were turning me down because he didn't think I would work that hard.

which I reminded him of later when he worked for me. And by the way, I later fired him. The best. Yeah, the best. It was the best. Morgan Stanley gave me an offer and then took it back when they found out I had a baby. And I said, you wouldn't do this if I were a man. And they said, of course we would not do that if you were a man. Lehman Brothers, Shearson,

I, you know, Credit Suisse, I mean, I could go on. First Boston, everybody told me no. And I was to the very end of all of the research places and then was introduced to a firm I'd heard of before, but didn't really know, Sanford Bernstein, which, you know, was not one of the Wall Street bulge brackets, but was known for its high quality research.

And they gave me the job no one wanted, which was covering life insurance, which I believe me, I was happy to have. So I guess the question is, can people change? I have changed my career probably once a decade. And each time has involved

some degree of real introspection and real revisiting of what my values are, what I love doing, what I've learned about myself and where the opportunity is. And the terrific thing about being a research analyst that I only learned much later is if you're going to be a research analyst and you're going to be competing against all the other research analysts, you better have something to say because I...

I agree with them, does not build a career. And so the skill I found as a research analyst was to take the same information everybody else had, no inside information, and everybody would paint a certain picture. And could I paint a different picture? Could I build with the pieces a different mosaic? And everybody's building a, oh, look, it's a cow. And if I could be over here and say, no, it's actually a tulip.

And let me tell you why it's a tulip. And if it were then a tulip, you could be accelerated to success. And so my very first piece of research, which probably came from my outsider status, was one where everybody said, oh, it's this life insurance company. It's growing its loans so quickly. That's great. We're so bullish.

And I said, it's a life insurance company. It's growing its loans quickly. If you play around with the numbers, the credit is deteriorating. It's making loans no one else wants to make. It's about to crash. I titled the piece, Whoa, Nellie. And I was right two months later. And so I believe not to brag, since women are taught not to brag, but I think I was the most quickly ranked number one analyst, the Financial Times said, that it ever happened before.

I had been so thoughtful about what I was good at and had found that product market fit for a career that it worked out. After all these years in my 20s of nothing working, this worked beautifully and very quickly.

You asked me about my Eureka moment. I got a Business Week subscription when I was 13 years old. And in sophomore year, I took econ class. I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. We took a field trip. If you remember this company, Federal Mogul, it was a public company making parts for cars, trucks, I think some planes as well. And we went into the CEO's office. He wasn't there. His name was William Russell.

And I asked the tour guide, can I sit in the chair? And my teacher's looking at me and the guy's looking at me. He said, okay, why not? It was this huge desk looking out over the huge floor. And I thought to myself a couple of things. I thought, one, at some point, this was just a piece of paper. Someone had invented this company and look at where it,

is today thousands of employees, billions of dollars in value. Very, very cool. So I thought, someday I want to try to grow something like this. And sitting in the chair, you felt powerful with this amazing, just weird thing the minute you sat down in the chair. And I said, someday I'm going to have my own companies. That was my eureka moment there. And like you, I've changed careers a bunch of times. I was a lawyer, investment banker. I worked at Sun America. Eli Broad was my boss. I was the assistant to the chairman there. That was...

investment banking job, entrepreneur. Now I'm a podcaster and a real estate investor, and it's been fun. I like learning about new businesses. It's been fun to start over. It's been very hard as well. It's been very challenging, and I think we're all motivated at some point by not failing at what we're going to do next.

Yeah. By the way, I covered Sun America and Eli Broad as a research analyst. I know. I read every report. My job was, we didn't have a head of research, but if we did, I was at. And when they all came out, I would circulate it to the whole team. I was technically part of the corp dev team. So we were always looking at companies to buy. I met

the top bankers at all the firms who cover the financial services group. And you would know them all. And they were on the other side of the Chinese wall with you. But I read every report you ever did, by the way, while I was there in three years. So we'll go back to 1995.

know what you want to do. You send out all these resumes. By the way, you forgot Lehman Brothers. You did mention it, but you were turned down three times at Lehman Brothers. You got the one job offer. When all of us are looking for a new job, we send out tons of resumes, 10, 20, 50, sometimes even here 100 resumes. Most companies don't even reply. When we are lucky enough for someone to say, come on in for a meeting, we're usually competing with a lot of other people. If you want a job at Goldman Sachs, you're competing with hundreds, if not thousands of people. And

And the rejection is depressing. Yeah. What's your advice to those that get dejected and how do you stay positive? And in the competitive world we live in, what should job candidates be doing to separate themselves from everybody else?

Yeah, I don't know any better advice than just keep going. I tell my kids who are in their 20s and beginning their careers, you need one yes, that's it. It doesn't matter if you had five no's or 20 no's or 10 no's, you know, 100 or 1,000, one yes, get to the one. And look, the way you separate yourself is to try to, in your career,

as I did as a research analyst, what can you see that's different? What is a strategy that is not same with me? I want that strategy too. What can you see?

that to build or to write about that is outside of the pack. It doesn't mean that shows up every day or every week, but where are those opportunities for you? And for me, again, as a research analyst, how can I take the same information and put it together in a different way? My daughter, when she was looking for her job, how could she stand out in that? Well, she had had a series of summer internships in which she did research.

not Wall Street research, but company research. And she put together a little package of it, a little portfolio of it. And was the only kid who walked in and would walk, would you like to see some of my work? Let me show you. These are the slides I put together. This is what I showed. I thought that was so clever because she had a prop with her. And so what at the very least happens then

is when you leave, they remember you, as opposed to it was person number 12, and I think they had brown hair. So how can you pop in order to be memorable? When you start the job, I tell you there's one really direct means to standing out. Work your tail off.

I know it's very young people, young people today, again, grandma here. But when, you know, work life balance, when's my vacation? When do I get time off? Do not be that person. Let someone else ask that question. You find out later. You be the one. And I, again, I, my kids, I told them you want to be in before your boss and you want to stay after your boss. You want to ask for extra projects.

You want to be the go-to person who solves the difficult problems for your boss. That's the way in those earlier years to be successful. The word we use at the office that I tell all my interns is philo, F-I-L-O, first in, last out. You're guaranteed to be successful at whatever you do if you just follow that strategy. And it's amazing how many people don't do that.

But I do want to go back to standing out. Actually, Randall, I'll interrupt because when I was earlier in my career, I always thought, well, I hoped I would be smarter than everybody else. And I found out quickly I wasn't. But I could outwork everybody else. That's what I could do. And I was smart enough so that if I outworked everybody else in those early years that I could stand out.

Same DNA here. I think if you're the smartest person in the room, by the way, you're in the wrong room. We've talked about Michael Jordan. Yeah. You want to play with Michael Jordan because he's going to make you better, but it's not the smartest people who usually win. It's the people with the work ethic. We're going to talk about preparation a little bit later in our show today, which has been one of the hallmarks of my career. And I want to know how it has been for you as well. But I do want to talk about something. My daughter's friend, she goes to Wisconsin. They both do really well. There was a job fair.

It was constant. So he texted me, hey, I'd like to get your views on this. Can you give me some tips? I said, all right. Did you make a list of all the companies you want to meet with? Yes. Do you know the names of the people who are coming from those companies so you can look them up on LinkedIn? No. I said, okay, do they wear name tags? Yes. Can you read the names? Because he had gone the day before. This was day two and day three coming up. Can you read the name tags? Yes. Can you see them from 10 to 15 feet?

Yes. Here's what you're going to do. You're going to make a list, spreadsheet. You're going to go get and go look at the name tags. And you're going to write the names down in your spreadsheet. You're going to go on a corner. You're going to regroup for 10 minutes. You're going to look them up on LinkedIn. And you're going to get bullet points of their careers. You're going to be the only one in the room who does that. You're going to be the only one in the room who comes and incorporates all of their research and data into

the meeting, the interview, and you're going to knock them off their chair. How did you do that? You want them to ask how you did that, and they're going to know. And it's not only the fact you did it, it's the process by which you did it. The second thing I told them was, do you have stationery with your name on it? No. This particular... I mean, most kids don't. So I said, you could either print some out on paper, but make it not thin paper, because thin is flimsy, and you don't want... You're not flimsy, and your name's on that paper. Go get some cardstock.

But better yet, you go spend $30 and get that thick paper, the notecard paper. I asked him if he's bringing one of those leather folders. And there were 15 companies on there. So I said, if you put four and four notecards in there, can you do so without a softball in the middle of that folder? And he said, yeah. I said, you're going to pre-write the thank you notes.

before you go in there, and then you're going to go fill it out. And I want you to make sure you time it. In less than an hour, hour max, you go back and write 15 thank you notes. Aha. He was the only one who did both. It blew them off their chair, which is my standard. Go blow someone off their chair. And I give this kind of mentoring all the time. I push my kids to do it. I'm their dad. They don't always listen to me. But the other kids do, and it really makes a difference. That's how I tell people to stand out. And it's like you said,

making a PowerPoint. My daughter wanted a job this summer. I said, you should go make a PowerPoint. And what the company does, I'm not going to mention the company. She still has not heard from them. But there was some hesitation there. And I think doing exactly that, what your daughter did, go in with a PowerPoint, go in loaded with information, show them you've done the work and differentiate yourself from everyone else. Because guess what? Like you said, there's of the 3,000 candidates that want the Goldman summer banking job,

1,500 of them are going to the best schools with the best grades, and it's a matter of separating yourself from everybody else.

- Well, and here's another one. I think I separated myself coming out of college by not going to Harvard. That people would think that going to University of North Carolina maybe was a little bit of a negative. But again, how do you separate from the pack? Oh, she's the smart gal from the University of North Carolina. There's only one or two of those, right? As opposed to I'm the smart person who went to Harvard in the middle of the class.

And so then it gets to be very interesting. How did you go from North Carolina to Wall Street? You need to be memorable in a positive way. 100%. Thanks for listening to part one of my awesome conversation with Sally Krawchuk, one of the most influential women in finance in the last 30 years. Be sure to tune in next week to part two of my awesome conversation with Sally.