{"id":1601,"date":"2013-05-15T14:20:56","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T18:20:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/?p=1601"},"modified":"2013-05-15T14:20:56","modified_gmt":"2013-05-15T18:20:56","slug":"purposeful-in-the-choices-one-makes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/2013\/05\/15\/purposeful-in-the-choices-one-makes\/","title":{"rendered":"Purposeful In the Choices One Makes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Matthew

Matthew Clemmer ’02<\/p><\/div>\n

Among the 150 alumni contacted for this Crossroads,\u00a0this note was struck often: the importance of the integrity of the individual financial expert and, by extension, the company represented by that person.<\/p>\n

Most interviewees seemed to feel they had secured the right work situation for their skill set and ethical values. But they didn\u2019t always arrive at this point immediately upon licensure as a CPA, completing an MBA, or earning a Certified Financial Planner designation. Perhaps a dozen interviewees parted from jobs at some point in their work journey as a result of feeling compromised or burned out, eventually finding something that fit them better.<\/p>\n

Matthew Clemmer \u201902<\/strong>, for example, was looking for a way to get a toehold in asset management when he landed a job in October 2005 with a Chicago-based private equity firm. There he joined an investment team managing a portfolio of over $200 million worth of real estate and commodity assets. Initially Clemmer thought this was his first big opportunity. Yet he left in July 2006 (10 months later) \u2013 so suddenly that he had lined up no other job \u2013 after realizing that his integrity was being compromised by dubious ethical practices.<\/p>\n

In August 2008, at the start of the Great Financial Crisis \u2013 about the time his former employer was entering receivership \u2013 Clemmer was enrolled full-time in the MBA program at Boston College, while his wife, Sara Joy Bergey Clemmer \u201903<\/strong>, was a campus recruiting manager for KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went underground [i.e., to grad school] for two years, while the financial world unraveled,\u201d Clemmer jokes.<\/p>\n

Today Clemmer loves what he does and, more importantly, who he does it for. Employed by Trilogy Global Advisors, a boutique investment management firm that manages $14 billion of institutional equity assets, Clemmer is an investment analyst focused on industrial and material companies domiciled in emerging markets \u2013 such as those in China, Brazil, and Indonesia. He is part of an investment team in Orlando, Florida, which manages assets for large public and private institutions globally.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe invest so that pension-holders can retire,\u201d he says. \u201cWe look for high quality companies that have durability, that are not a flash in the pan.\u201d And such companies, by definition in his mind, need to demonstrate high ethical and corporate governance practices to be sustainable over the long term.<\/p>\n

Importance of \u201cguiding values\u201d<\/h3>\n

Allon Lefever, an adjunct business professor at EMU, urges his MBA students to start with \u201cguiding values\u201d \u2013 put in writing and reviewed regularly \u2013\u00a0in any enterprise they undertake.<\/p>\n

He often offers his own example: He worked with his son, Rod, and another business partner in the late 1990s to build an Internet service provider, OneMain.com, that went public in March 1999 with an Initial Public Offering that raised $215 million. They more than doubled OneMain\u2019s customer base in 18 months and then sold it to Earthlink for $308 million in September 2001.<\/p>\n

Before they did any of this, however, the three business partners agreed upon these five \u201cguiding values,\u201d which were presented to all potential investors:<\/p>\n