Climb the Mountain First, Then Hold the Meeting

The seventh anniversary, in Shenzhen. A group born in the nineties and after 2000 climbed the Dragon's Back in Hong Kong first, and only then sat down to meet. They call themselves racers.

The name was not mine. They claimed it themselves. Our position first. Racer is not a slogan. It is a duty roster. When things are unstable you can lie flat, or you can stroll. We chose a third option — no strollers, everyone on the front line. Why? Three layers below.

A race team means anyone can cover any position at any moment

Roles differ and positions move. There may be only one most valuable driver, but there can be many excellent ones. One second you are in fifth place, the next you are pushed to the front. So reviews and war-gaming are daily work, not ceremony. On this team there is no bench.

Our favourite image is the pit stop. A stop takes about two seconds, and in those two seconds the front wing is adjusted, fuel goes in, and all four tyres change at once. Nobody waits for anybody. That is our ideal description of delivery, not a metaphor. On this one we are fairly confident.

There is no such thing as "the person who fills in"

A self-narrative goes wrong here easily. Define yourself as the one who fills in, and you can only wait for someone else to speak first; the work gets harder and harder. Define yourself as an engine, and you have a reason to walk in and to go and build the relationships yourself. Same duties, two ways of telling it, and the output that grows out of them is nothing alike. But calling yourself an engine does not count. So what is the ruler? The work speaks.

Follow that through and the lines of Glacier culture are not hard to read. No pedigree test: degrees, rank and seniority decide nothing; reward follows actual contribution and results. Intent comes first: where the intent is sound, act decisively, and the cost of being wrong is carried by the organisation. Distil and share: take a good colleague's method and sense of a good decision, strip them out completely, and share them across the firm. As for refusing internal friction, the word colleagues use most often to describe Glacier Capital is exactly that — "no internal friction."

People can grow in number. Mandates cannot

An FA sits too close to the money, and the path to cash is short, which makes it the easiest place for values to get diluted. Our answer is plain: keep the source of people clean. Most are people we have worked with for years and know well, and young people referred by friends we trust. People you trust, plus money split properly. That is the root of our low attrition.

But the team can add drivers; the race calendar cannot add races. The partners drew a line for themselves: our people can grow in number, our mandates cannot. Why? Because there is a finite total of devotion. The capacity of a boutique investment bank is never a headcount. We take twenty to thirty mandates a year, half new and half existing clients coming back for the next round. Double the mandates and each one gets half the attention; standing beside a company falls back to matchmaking. People are the numerator, mandates are the denominator. The arithmetic is not hard.

There is one more phrase: flying low and fast. Fly fast, stay low, rely on speed rather than volume. Good things spread far faster than they used to, so we compress the tempo to the quarter: every quarter we count the supplies and set the grid again. But fast is not the same as rushed.

So why climb a mountain before a meeting? Move first, decide second. After a proper workout people are calm and can stand back from the thing they are looking at. Hierarchy is a means of management; the council of elders is a way of doing the work. One team: sweat together first, then go on track together.