Growing Rich - Arabictrader.com

GROWING RICH WITH GROWTH STOCKS
and our marketing director Diane Kotil were working out of the
basement of his home. Once Yacktman Asset Management was approved
by the SEC about a month later, Ron came with me. The first
building we were shown was at 303 West Madison, that same one I
thought was so ugly. Well, that’s where we wound up. Incidentally,
I was wrong about the building. It’s really very nice.”
A TRAILBLAZER
Yacktman’s departure from Kemper was a momentous event in the
mutual fund world. It marked the first time a high-profile fund manager
had left a large conglomerate and successfully started his own
fund from scratch. It was a groundbreaking move that would pave
the way for many more entrepreneurial managers in the years to
come, including Elizabeth Bramwell. Not that others hadn’t tried it
before. They had. But most resigned their previous jobs with little
fanfare. Some quickly failed, since the economies of scale in the industry
are such that a fund must have a significant amount of assets
to justify the high cost of running the operation. Others stayed afloat,
but didn’t attract enough money to receive much public attention.
Because Yacktman was charting new territory, he had a ton of
homework to do, especially since he didn’t have much time to get his
business set up in the first place. “Before, I had only dreamed about
having my own fund,” he reveals. “It was nothing serious though. I
remember the first time I thought about it was in July of 1991, right
after my boss at Kemper had first proposed a salary-reduction plan.
My son Stephen was working at Quaker Oats in Barrington, Illinois,
that summer, and we went to Brian’s ball game together. I remember
telling him that night, ‘I wonder what it would be like to have the
name Yacktman down at the bottom of the list of mutual funds in
the paper.’”
Yacktman’s decision to start his own fund, by his own admission,
was predicated by a combination of determination and stubbornness.
“I just really felt I had been wronged by Kemper,” he shares. “Yes, I
wanted to run Selected American. But if that wasn’t an option, the
next best thing was to use the other name most people associated
with that fund, which was Yacktman. It really wasn’t an ego trip.
Calling it the Yacktman Fund, instead of something else, was just an
inexpensive, value-added marketing idea.”
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