Relentless

by Ted W. Baxter

  But first, Kelly and I had to find our way around the city. When we arrived in Tokyo at the airport, they told us that we’d have to take a train into the city.

  “What did he say?” Kelly asked, and I could tell that her nerves were taking hold of her.

  “We have to catch a train into the city,” I answered, and we both looked around. There were no trains that we could see.

  “Can you read the signs?”

  I shook my head and finally said, “We’ll have to take a taxi.” So, we decided to get a cab to downtown Tokyo—which took three hours in traffic! I asked a few questions of the driver, but he didn’t understand me. I could see him in the mirror, and it was perfectly clear that he wasn’t comprehending anything I said. To make things worse, once we arrived, the fare was unbelievably high!

  Our second night at the Westin, we decided to go to dinner at a restaurant the concierge recommended to us. We knew the place was near the hotel, so we didn’t worry about getting a taxi. We took a walk.

  But Tokyo streets are nothing like American streets. Here in the United States, addresses run sequentially: 2 Main Street, 4 Main Street, 6 Main Street, and so on. In Japan, the numbers run more like 865 Main Street, 16400 Main Street, 2 Main Street. I don’t know why, and at the time I didn’t care enough to ask. I had enough other problems on my plate.

  It took us an hour to find the restaurant, though it only should have taken us fifteen minutes. I realized then that the day-to-day in Japan would be like this. Simple things like getting to work, navigating grocery stores, reading the subway maps, and hailing taxis after a late night of work became major challenges.

  “How are we going to do this, Ted?” Kelly asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer. The truth was there would be much bigger problems for me to solve. I had the support of Price Waterhouse. She was, more or less, on her own, though.

  One Year to Profit

  The Price Waterhouse Tokyo CEO gave me one year to develop a cost-effective profit and loss (P&L) performance. That meant I had to staff my practice with quality people, but I also had to bring in billable clients and execute their services. Eventually, I hired expatriates who fit my needs—two Americans, one British, one Australian. Then, I had to scour the Japanese workforce to find three or four people who were Japanese, which I managed to do, but they could only speak a little English. Afterward, I hired bilingual people who acted as a bridge between those of us who only spoke English and those of us who only spoke Japanese. But, unfortunately, these talents were hard to find. It took me four months to hire two bilingual employees.

  Just getting to that point was a huge hurdle. The first time I met with a Japanese client, I couldn’t have a conversation. I had to have a person next to me who spoke Japanese and could translate. Finding these Japanese people who spoke English and who also had some knowledge of financial products was the equivalent of striking gold. These guys came from towns an hour away, which made hiring Japanese staff difficult.

  I wanted Japanese staff who could mimic what the expats were doing. I did a project with Chase Manhattan in Tokyo and had two staff doing the work—one expat and one Japanese—so one could tag along and learn. But I wouldn’t charge the client for the second staff. That’s how I started to change the metrics from mostly expats to mostly Japanese.

  The next major challenge would be selling services to Japanese financial firms. My bosses from New York, London, and Tokyo knew that would take more than a year to accomplish, so in the meantime, I did small jobs from “foreign” firms I knew already existed there in Tokyo: Chase Manhattan, Salomon Brothers, Morgan Stanley, and so forth.

  “Did you see the price, Ted?” Kelly asked when we looked at the listing for an apartment in the expatriate community that we had in mind. “That’s JPY 1 MM per month . . . nearly $10,000 per month!”

  “It’s pretty steep,” I responded. “But the company will cover it.”

  “Okay,” she said, looking back down, but there was hesitation in her voice. She had it rough. She was alone most of the time, and she didn’t speak any Japanese, but she was always there to support me.

  Kelly

  I was twenty-three when we got married, and for so long, my identity was Ted. Somebody would ask, “Where did you go to college?” And I’d say, “I didn’t, but Ted went to Wharton.”

  That’s what happens in a relationship, I guess. There were times when I was his identity, like there were times when he was mine. But it was more noticeable on my end, because I wasn’t the one working. I wasn’t the more powerful force in the marriage. I was independent and strong—and certainly not fearful. But I was not the go-getter, not the money-maker, not the one we moved around the world for!

  When I brought in the international consultants from our Price Waterhouse New York, London, or Sydney offices, I’d have them bring their wives, if we had lunch meetings scheduled, so they had a chance to start their own relationships. The wives who accompanied their working husbands couldn’t work if they didn’t have their own work visas, but Kelly figured out how to handle things. For one thing, we all belonged to Tokyo American Club, and she spent a good deal of time there helping Japanese women learn English, and in turn, Kelly learned many basic Japanese customs. She also met many expatriates, mainly women, who went to the Club. They could talk about everyday things like grocery shopping, going to coffee shops, and working out, in English.

  Meanwhile, I was going out to Japanese financial firms to market services and to give presentations. The problem was, I only spoke English, and the audience only spoke Japanese. I filled my Power-Point slides with pictures that bridged the gap so the audience understood what I was saying. But I wasn’t closing deals because I was only getting one nod. In Japanese business culture, that meant that they were understanding the message. A second nod would have meant that they were able to translate to their business language. And the coveted third nod would have meant that I made the sale. I was only getting one. And while I brought staff with me to help, none of them translated, so it was all on me.

  My Look-Alike

  After a year, I finally went back to the CEO from Price Waterhouse in Tokyo.

  “This practice will not work if I don’t have great translation skills. I need a Japanese stand-in for me. He needs to speak Japanese, live in Japan, and get along with both Japanese and international colleagues. He also needs to be a marketer, in Japanese terms, and to have the basic building blocks of the financial services industry,” I said.

  “Go ahead! Good luck finding him. We were lucky to find you.” He advised me to bring all the information from New York that I had and to blend it with someone in Japan who could work with Japanese institutions and staff. If I could do that, it would work.

  I did find my Japanese “look-alike,” as the CEO called him (though we looked nothing alike). The firm had to offer an attractive salary to bring him into Price Waterhouse Financial Services Consulting.

  “You’ve done amazing things, Ted,” the Japanese CEO said to me, and I was happy to have this client under my belt, but I also knew what came next. “It’s year two now, though. You know what that means.”

  “I’ve got to sign a Japanese financial institution.” I had to break that wall, and it was hard that first year. My colleagues and managers didn’t know how to do it either, but I figured it out with the help of my look-alike. I taught him some of the financial services terms and tactics, and he taught me how Japanese businesses work in Japan—not from the Japanese business 101 textbook, but from an experienced Japanese businessperson. It was a two-way street.

  Three months later, I broke the wall. I finally landed a project with Nomura Securities, probably the biggest global securities firm based in Tokyo. It was my biggest personal achievement. That’s when I knew this practice would grow. Having Nomura as a client was the foundation of having a lot of chargeable Japanese clients. Soon, I had a lot of Japanese firms who wanted to meet us, so we listened to their issues, and then we talked ab
out our services. They wanted proposals from us. We quickly learned the term Keiretsu, which means a group of loosely affiliated corporations with broad power and reach like an informal business group. These firms that contacted us had ties to Nomura. Once I had signed one, the others wanted to follow suit. That was Keiretsu at its finest, which was all explained to me by my look-alike.

  By then, we were in the third quarter of year two. I had this major client as well as a few small foreign clients, and by the end of the second year, I had twenty employees, six of whom were bilingual. I changed the P&L metrics of my practice, taking it from a loss position to a stable one, and eventually it became a very profitable practice.

  I did presentations for prospective clients regularly. If I landed one of them, I had to organize a project team and follow up with the senior manager. I would often be onsite at the client’s office to make sure he was completing the job correctly. My day ran from eight a.m. to six thirty or seven p.m., and then frequently, I’d go out to dinner with prospective clients. It was intense work. Sometimes, my family didn’t understand that this wasn’t a short-term project; when you’re building a new practice, you have to be there and live by their way of life.

  Nancy

  I never saw him. I understood it was his career. He lived in Japan for five years . . . or however many years it was. He was on such an intense career path that I only wanted the best for him. I couldn’t believe what he was accomplishing. So I understood, but I didn’t like it. None of us had moved away from Long Island. It was only the six of us, and we were definitely a close-knit, tight family.

  During year three of my Japanese adventure, I made partner, and by year four, I had seventy-five employees: sixty to sixty-five Japanese and ten to fifteen expats. I was the only partner there running the financial services consulting area in Tokyo, which meant I no longer had time to go out and meet clients. I’d become an administrator, working behind a desk.

  On to Hong Kong

  Administration was too tame for me. I needed a more challenging game. So, I called my boss at Price Waterhouse in London, but none of his ideas were as appealing to me as the one I was offered by a global investment bank who wanted to lure me away.

  “So, I was approached by an executive recruiter today,” I mentioned to Kelly, between bites of food. I wiped my face with my napkin to hide my expression. I’m not sure if I was excited or nervous or a little of both.

  “Oh yeah?” Kelly answered as she swallowed, but I could tell that it hadn’t really sunk in.

  “He has a fantastic opportunity for me from a major global investment bank.”

  That got her attention. “Really? What kind of job? Would you really leave Price Waterhouse?”

  “I might. I’m not in love with the desk job, and my boss hasn’t proposed anything better . . .”

  “So, what’s the position?” she asked.

  “Asia Pacific regional head of financial control.”

  She took a moment to digest it. “What’s the company?”

  “Credit Suisse First Boston.”

  “Does this mean that we are moving back to the US?”

  “No. We’d have to move to Hong Kong if I get the offer from CSFB,” I said.

  So, after I had visited Credit Suisse First Boston’s (CSFB) main office in Hong Kong and interviewed with five or six people there, I had the offer. It was a perfect match for me! A leading powerhouse global investment bank offered me a prestigious position with room to move up quickly, and the vibe was fast and exciting. Kelly and I made plans to move.

  “Ted, I want to do something,” Kelly told me one day before our move.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her, confused by the statement.

  “Something. Something. I want to do . . . something. If we move to Hong Kong, I won’t have a work visa.”

  “What do you want to do? Do you have something particular in mind?”

  “I want to learn how to cook. I mean, I want to learn how to really cook, like a chef.”

  “Okay, so you want to go away to culinary school?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, I do.” She handed me a brochure for a French culinary school in Manhattan.

  “You want to go back to New York City?” I asked and then looked into her eyes. “I can’t go with you. I have to take this job.”

  “I know,” she said, and it was clear that she knew exactly what it would mean—six months apart. “Are you mad?” she asked.

  I thought for a second. We were accustomed to spending time apart, and as I considered it, I knew that this was a great opportunity for her. I also knew that she would be coming back to be with me in Hong Kong after the schooling ended. “No. You should go.”

  So, I organized and coordinated our move from Tokyo to Hong Kong, while she was in New York. That meant that I came home to an empty house in Hong Kong for six months, but it didn’t matter to me because I was all about my career moving ahead. I was visiting and managing my staff overseas as well as my staff in Hong Kong. I was living only in my Hong Kong apartment for about half of the month. I traveled to a different country every other week. It was a blast for me. I was feeding on the constant adrenaline rush and loving every minute.

  When I had to go back to New York, maybe two or three times a year, I’d tell my brother Tom, and he’d give the rest of the family notice.

  Credit Suisse First Boston was a big change for me. I was on the other side of the coin now, with the client that firms like Price Waterhouse courted. I had been a partner of Price Waterhouse, which was smaller than CSFB. The latter employed more than eighteen thousand people. As financial controller for Asia Pacific, I had nine country financial controllers who directly reported to me, and I visited them and traveled to New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, China, Tokyo, India, Russia, the Philippines, and then back to Hong Kong over my two-year term.

  When Kelly came to Hong Kong after culinary school, she didn’t know anyone. We had left all our new friends behind in Tokyo, and she had to build a new circle of friends yet again.

  During our stay in Asia Pacific, Kelly would set up incredible vacations for us to get away. We went to Bali twice—once with my brother Tom and his wife. We vacationed in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Sydney, and Melbourne. We went to Hawaii twelve times while we lived in Tokyo, because it was so close. It was also great to be able to take a vacation within the United States. Hawaii was a secret hideaway for us, a needed break for me. We’ve been to all of the Hawaiian Islands.

  I didn’t want to be an absentee dad, and Kelly didn’t want to be a married-single mom, so we didn’t try to have kids while living in Asia-Pacific. But this began to take its toll on our relationship. We grew a little bit more apart every year.

  In 2001, my global boss from CSFB, Dave Fisher, called me from New York. “You’ve been out there in Hong Kong for us for two years now—six altogether, including Price Waterhouse Tokyo. It’s enough. We want you back in the United States to be the Americas Controller, based in New York.”

  CHAPTER 11

  I Wanted More

  After six years living out of the country, three years in almost constant motion, living and working for CSFB in New York was . . . quiet. I read textbooks from regulatory agencies dealing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Stock Exchange. Boring. I didn’t like staying in one place, especially in a location that always seemed to be in the middle of one political upheaval or another, as CSFB was.

  “What can I do for you, Ted?” my boss asked when I came in for a one-on-one meeting.

  “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I’m just not cut out for this job. I’m not a desk job kind of guy,” I told him.

  He nodded in response and thought for a moment. “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “I just need . . . a bit more excitement. I liked the travel,” I replied.

  “All right. Give me some time, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  He pulled the necessary strings and jumped
through the requisite hoops, and several months later, I was promoted to global head of strategic change management for financial control. I was still based in New York, but since the job was global, I was able to travel. I went to London every six weeks. I had to go to Asia Pacific once every three months, which was like going home. But then, I had to fly back to Manhattan, to sit behind a desk again.

  By 2004, I’d grown tired of dealing with CSFB’s daily internal politics. An executive headhunter I knew was looking for a young, dynamic global financial controller who could soon be a chief financial officer (CFO). It took nine months of flying back and forth between New York and Chicago and going through many tests and interviews to land the job. It was quite a change. I left a massive global corporation to join the organization in Chicago that had only 1,500 people. But I loved the job, which was focused in an area of finance called hedge funds (i.e., alternative investments using pooled funds that use a number of different strategies to earn return for their investors). It was a dream!

  Citadel Investment Group was small in terms of the number of employees, especially when compared to CSFB, but it was large in the world of hedge funds. It was also globally diverse in terms of alternative investments producing assets. It was, in that sense, a big business, worth $15 billion or more in 2005.

  The firm assembled different financial products for groups of wealthy investors and served as a hedging vehicle for the banks and investment firms. As a global financial controller, I analyzed the performance of each business division. I presented this information daily to management. In addition, I was responsible for reporting the monthly firm-wide performance to the CFO and dealing with regulatory agencies. I played a large part in the financial systems that controlled the transactions after the daily trades’ execution. I also improved their processing system by putting business unit control, financial control, and systems under one roof. Besides dealing with the SEC and NYSE in Chicago, I was charged with overseeing financial control activities in London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, as well as some remote locations in Bermuda, Mauritius, and Luxembourg. I loved the travel, but the job was intense—besides the above, I made sure we met all deadlines for the on-line production, oversaw financial IT development, handled staff issues, and more. The firm’s dynamic style and speed, the bustling, active vibe, and my job, which was so much more than the standard description of the role of global controller, was so exciting. It was perfect for me.