Chris Lesner
Bob, thank you so much for joining us.

Bob Doll
Privilege, Chris, I'm looking forward to our time together.

Chris Lesner
I am so excited. think when I think of you, I think of something a little bit strange. You're involved in something that people think about a lot. You're involved in money and people think about their money a lot. Talk to us about your journey. How did you get into what you're doing today and explain a little bit about what you

Bob Doll
Yes, they do.

Bob Doll
Yes. So, so how did I get involved? My family didn't have a lot of money, so we weren't in the stock market. I went to school, decided I was going to get an MBA. The wisdom was working between the two. So you get a little experience. I dated a girl whose father was an investor and I just fell in love with what he did. And I said, this, this is
This is the calling on my life. You can read your score in the newspaper every day. It's a combination of art and science. It's politics. It's economics. It's finance. It's math. It's psychology. And it changes every day. The day you think you figured it out, the market's going to turn around and smack you in the face. That's happened more than once in my career. think, well, I got this figured out. And the market says, not so fast, not so fast. So it's been a fun journey.
As I actually earlier today spoke with someone else in the business and we admitted to each other, it beats working for a living.

Chris Lesner
When you think about it, I'm sure people ask you all the time, when's the right time to start investing? How do you even get into investing? As we're talking, a lot of people are going to be listening and they're all over the spectrum, leaders and people who are just jumping into investing. What advice do you give beginners?

Bob Doll
Get started. It's like so many things. If you wait till you know everything about it, you'll never get there. Because I don't know everything about it. And I've been doing this for over 40 years. And I'm still discovering new things. So my view is get started. Do a little more if you can. And be smart about it. You put those three things together. You've got a shot at having a good nest egg when you need

Chris Lesner
When you're looking at all the craziness that happens in the market any time of year, month after month, a year over a year, how should people feel about it? Just being the general public, non -savvy investor.

Bob Doll
Yeah, so you're you brought up feel about it, which equals psychology. The longer I'm in this business, Chris, the more I realize it's fear and greed. When everybody is bullish, you should be a little cautious. And when everybody is running for the hills, that's the opportunity to step in. I mean, it's not a perfect guide, but you can track. They actually have, as you can imagine, sophisticated scientific measures of sentiment.
And, uh, sure as we're talking to each other, when, uh, the sentiment moves to the high end, uh, markets usually take a little rest and come down a bit and vice versa. So feelings are important, but understanding your feelings. So you can push them to the side when it comes to the objective nature of investing. That's very important. Uh, I try to do that. I always get there, you know, when I make a mistake
something goes down on me and I've realized I'm losing clients money. It's hard not to have feelings and get emotional about it, but you got to take that out if you're going to be successful.

Chris Lesner
One of the things, just knowing you and reading about you and seeing you in the news, one of the things that you talk about is faith, ethics, and how those are related to investments and how they should be. Explain some of your perspective on how you view investments.

Bob Doll
Yeah, so I'd start with a very big picture thought to that good question. Capitalism, which is what markets are part of, only works if there is a belief in doing the right thing and not doing the wrong thing. It takes that kind of warp and woof of a society for capitalism to work. And then you build on that by realizing
Almost any profession having integrity is going to get you further than not having integrity You know lots of lots of things that a lot of people do involve trust confidence and so if I'm gonna have trust and confidence in you and you in me Integrity is a big piece of what it is that we do So and you know the saying to build up a reputation takes a long long time, but you can destroy it with one stupid move
And that's the case for investors and frankly, almost for everybody.

Chris Lesner
Wow. When you're thinking about this, how do you make decisions and what to even look at? And how would you think people should even look at the market?

Bob Doll
Yeah. So, uh, it's, it's like so many things. Uh, if you're investing full time at the endeavor, you got a shot. If it's part -time, it's a lot harder. It's sort of like, okay, if I go to the doctor and he tells me, Bob got bad news, you have a brain tumor. And then I get out of manuals says how to fix a brain tumor, you know, as if I'm going to fix this thing myself. No.
I want to know the best brain surgeon you can advise me to go see. It's the same thing here. It doesn't mean you can't make an investment on your own, but those of us that do it full -time, we struggle. And I know a lot of people do it part -time and you can't get your arms around everything. So that's the first principle to think about. Secondly, you asked how do I go about doing it? I start with a quantitative model. It has 55 variables in
Sentiment variables that we, as we talked about a minute ago, valuation, earnings, the balance sheet returns on all kinds of things. Um, how does the company use its cash? What's the return on incremental cash? All of these variables have some predictive power. And if you can put them together in a sensible way, you've got a good model to help direct where you should spend your time. No model has the answer in my opinion.
But boy, it's a good guide and I say it's my crutch to get me across the street. It's the starting

Chris Lesner
On this podcast, we talk a lot about leadership and servant leadership specifically. You've been a part of some amazing organizations. You've been a part of Merrill, BlackRock, Nuveen, now Crossmark. How are you seeing leadership play out in the finance world? How do you see servant leadership play out, if at

Bob Doll
It's a very interesting mix. As long as I've been in the business, I've observed a lot of leaders. And there are a lot of leaders I would say, you know, those three characteristics, please let me try to apply them to my leadership. And there are others where I say, I'm not going to go there. Probably not a good way to lead. And you use the phrase servant leadership. It works. Servant leadership often means you demonstrate by doing.
I manage portfolio managers as the chief investment officer and the CEO of the firm. But I'm also a portfolio manager myself. So I know when I'm in the trenches, sometimes I get it right. Sometimes I get it wrong. So that can be instructive and it can increase your credibility with your staff because you're serving them because you're working in the trenches with them. So that's one way to express servant leadership.
There are lots of ways and I underscore and believe it's a great way to go because, know, the Bible, the most sold and most read book in the world has a lot to say about servant leadership. And that's one of my models.

Chris Lesner
As you look through and think through building great teams and you've built many great teams and I know you have a lot of followers, people who listen to you and have tried to model their whole careers after what you've done. How do you best build into people and what do you look for and encourage them to do to build into other people?

Bob Doll
You know, mix of things. The first thing that comes to mind and anytime I'm interviewing somebody, I'm looking for curiosity. Somebody who's interested, why, how? You know, I've had people I've interviewed when I'm done in asking them hopefully good and tough questions. They turn around and I say, you have any questions for me? No, I don't have any questions. That's it. It's over.
It just not going to happen. There's got to be a natural curiosity to want to know, to want to figure out, to want to engage. That's pretty important. Work ethic. It can't be somebody that says, well, you know, you're in the office three days, you're home working home Mondays and Fridays. Monday and Friday, I twiddle my thumbs or I walk my dog or I watch a movie. Not particularly interested in that either. So curiosity.
Worth it ethic and I come back to something you already talked about integrity. I gotta believe this person is honest is true. It's going to admit when things aren't going well, not going to hide the mistakes. That's they're all key aspects, not just to work, but to life.

Chris Lesner
I think a lot of people are hoping for their next big break or the next big opportunity. You've had an interesting career where you've had a lot of highs, a lot of lows, but people also look to you and respect you and ask you to join programs like CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox, CNN, whatever it is to talk about finance. Those seem like really big opportunities. How did those even come about?
How do you think through like what the next big opportunity is in your own life?

Bob Doll
Wow. So when you've been doing something for 40 years, you definitely get a bunch of opportunities and you to figure out which ones to take. Therefore, you have to say yes sometime and no other times. know back to discovering the investment management business, I'm a portfolio manager. That's my trade. That's my ticket of admission, if you will. The management
And leadership roles are on top of that. I'll not forget when I became CEO of the investment management business at Merrill Lynch investment managers. managed, we were the seventh largest investment management firm in the world at that time. People all over the world. And my, my, my boss who said I was the next CEO said, so who's going to manage the money that you manage? said, I am. If it's a choice between being CEO and being money manager, I'm a money manager.
And I'm going to lead by example. Well, he didn't quite understand that, but he let, he let it go. And that's what we did. So my point is you got to figure out how you're wired, what your North star is from, from a career standpoint and go for it. So I've always had that as the center and then the other opportunities to lead, to manage, to be on television, et cetera. They've been ancillary in some sense.
to the core and you've got to get the core right if these other things are going to work out, Chris.

Chris Lesner
Hmm. As you think through some of your growth over the years, you obviously look to so many people for input as well. You know, and I think that that's something that we see constantly is being surrounded by good people. How do you figure out who to surround yourself with?

Bob Doll
Wow. Great question. And, uh, you know, I've been at, at it for a lot of years and I still struggle with that question. It's more, let me take the good things from this guy and avoid the bad things. And, uh, rather than this is the guy I'm going to follow. Uh, and I've tried to do that over the years. And, um, you know, some people are really good at some things and not so good at others. Same with me. I'm sure.
So it's a matter of characteristics and can I imitate that? Can I copy that? Can I advance that after taking it in to fit your personality and your particular role at a point in time? I know the easier side is to I'm not going to be like that. And we've all had a bunch of those. And part of it is personality driven, how God's wired us.
But part of it, think also is how does it fit with what I'm trying to accomplish? I know as someone who's had leadership and management responsibilities, you have to be a good delegator. And I know from people who've worked for me, they'll observe, Bob, if you have trust and confidence in somebody that they're going to get the job done, get it done well, be honest with you, you give them all kinds of rope.
If it's somebody you're not so sure of or you did not have as much confidence in, you're there on their backs all the time. And I may have, I may have that schizophrenic nature in me because of the subject person I'm seeing in front of

Chris Lesner
love it. Talking to people about their money, I don't know if it's weird for you, but I feel like it's a weird conversation that a lot of people have, always wondering if they have enough, if they don't have enough, if they're going to have enough, what they have compared to other people. All these questions just run through people's mind. How do you help people even think about money from the basics?

Bob Doll
The first thing is popping into my head. I have seen very wealthy people be incredibly generous. I've seen very wealthy people be incredibly stingy. I've seen very poor people be incredibly generous and very poor people being very stingy. So there's a matrix there and you got to figure out where does this person fit in when you're trying to talk to them about it.
Look, money is a medium of exchange. It's a means to an end. Too many people think it's the end. know, dealing with these wealthy people, sometimes they'll ask, how much you think is enough? And I know the answer is always the same. A little more. If I have a zillion dollars, I need another half zillion dollars. If I have 10 zillion dollars, I need at least two more zillion. You know how it goes. So yes, it's a touchy subject.
And most of the time it's, I'm dealing with a portion of their money and they're assigning to me or to our firm at Crossmark a piece of it. Let's say it's the equity portion for Large Cap US and they've got the other pieces doled out. So you interact with them on a segment rather than the whole

Chris Lesner
Have you found it hard to, or do you ever try to convince people of different ways to view money? Or are you not necessarily trying to convince them of different things? You're more just trying to understand where they're

Bob Doll
It depends on the setting and what the opportunity is and what the obligation is. When I'm in front of organizations that are faith based, which I often am because I am a man of faith, my first principle is to educate people that the money they have is not theirs. It's God's and he's entrusted us as stewards with that money for a point in time. And it's not just our money, it's time.
It's relationships, it's our mind, it's our body. These are on loan to us. So that doesn't work with every audience as you can imagine, Chris, but it does stimulate thinking.

Chris Lesner
I love it. How do people respond when you start talking through some of that with

Bob Doll
Yeah, it depends. Some people, oh, I hadn't thought of it that way. Other people say, yeah, I'm right with you. Tell me more. And other people say, no, no, no, I worked hard for that money. It's mine. So you get all kinds of reactions that you can imagine.

Chris Lesner
So explain to the audience a little bit more about Crossmark specifically. What all you're doing, how they would even find Crossmark or where they can read about Crossmark, things like

Bob Doll
So Crossmark is a faith -based money management firm that manages money in a values -oriented way. We try to help individuals, financial advisors, and institutions to line up their investments with their values. And that comes lots of different forms and shapes. sitting down with somebody at the front end and saying, so what are your values? Oh, I never thought about that, but often,
That's the beginning of an interesting journey where people say, no, I would never want to invest in that, or I'd never want to invest the other. And it's not just what are we against and going to exclude from the portfolio, but it's also who's doing good. What are the companies that are making a difference in society, educating, feeding the poor, all kinds of good things to look at, not just do they have a good balance sheet, a good income statement and strategic plan. They need all those things. Don't get me wrong.
But when you layer these other things on top of it, all of a sudden there's a deeper purpose. So that's what Crossmark does. manage mutual funds and separate accounts, primarily in stocks and bonds.

Chris Lesner
So I think a lot of people, when they listen, will hear companies like Merrill, hear companies like BlackRock, hear companies like Nuveen, even like wherever. And there's all these great people, and they're just, and I mean this in a good way, they're money hungry. They're trying to get the most for people out of their money. And then maybe is there a perception, and is it a real perception, not a real perception, that trying to choose good, ethical,

Bob Doll
Yes.

Chris Lesner
just moving in the direction that Crossmark has moved, is it as quality? And obviously, you've proven over the years that it is. Explain that a little bit, how you even came to this conclusion.

Bob Doll
Yeah. So several different thoughts, Chris. First of all, the returns profile. 10 years ago, I haven't been in the values -based money management all my career, but I'm there now. And among the reasons I am there is there now a whole lot of empirical studies that show you don't give up anything. If you had asked me 15 years ago, if you go that route, you have to give up a half a percent a year, 2 % a year.
And we would have gone, maybe we don't know. Now we have empirical studies that you don't give up anything. Returns are almost identical. Some years a little better, some years a little worse. So that's taken this thing out of a lot of people thinking about this potential space. I, in my career of at the beginning of every year, done 10 predictions about the economy and markets and politics and all those good things.
And one this year, prediction number eight, is faith -based money management takes an increasing share of assets under management for the eighth year in a row. We recently got the first quarter data and it shows a little uptick. It's a small piece of the money management world, but more and more individuals, more and more financial advisors, and more more institutions saying, yeah, I line up all my life with my values. Why not my investments?
So that's part of the background for Crossmark and the other folks that we have in this little part, this little corner of the money management industry to repeat that's growing nicely.

Chris Lesner
That's super exciting. And it is crazy to think through that it is just a crazy perception. I think that people think, hey, I can't do good and make more money. know a lot of the best investments. I know you're not going to go out there and give straight up advice to people necessarily on this. I know a lot of the investments are investing in companies that are going to last. And the companies that are going to last and do well are the companies who are doing better for people.

Bob Doll
Hear, No question about it. it's, you bring up a point or you remind me of a point. About a quarter of the money we manage, 25%, we manage for people who don't necessarily share our faith. And I get close and I say, well, why you having us manage your money? And the response is you have good products, you have good performance, you're good people and I trust you. Will you manage my money? That warms our hearts.

Chris Lesner
love that. So you talk a little bit about these predictions that you make every year. I know there's some of the most sought after predictions out there. People literally wait for these predictions every year. How do you even come up? mean, obviously, there's some logic behind them. They're not random. What's the process to come up with these?

Bob Doll
Yeah, it's, it's, it's a rigorous, um, time consuming process. I view it every year as like a master's thesis. I start about the beginning of the fourth quarter, recognizing, you know, in 10 weeks, I've got to come up with these predictions. So I start making notes. I'll be in a conversation or I'll listen to a podcast or I'll hear somebody interviewed, or I'll read a piece of research and I'll take a note or I'll rip, rip it out. If it's a piece of research, underline it. And I assemble a pile.
Second week in December my assistant knows no meetings no travel no phone calls and I literally come in Monday morning of that week and by then I have a pile and I start Chris put them in little piles. This is earnings. This is the economy. This is interest rates This is politics, etc, etc, and I start making notes I should come up with though 20 or 25 of them and I begin to say well This one's inconsistent with that one gotta use one not both of
and you narrow it down to 10 that you hope you can live with. We don't change them all year long, so we get some right, we get some wrong. And yeah, we don't want to get them right, but the real purpose is to help people think. So that's the process, and we release them New Year's Eve as soon as the market closes every

Chris Lesner
How can people access them every New Year's Eve?

Bob Doll
crossmarkglobal .com. Go on our website and you can find them there. thankfully when January comes and we've released them, you'll find them all over the press.

Chris Lesner
love it. When you think through those, how many differ year to year versus how many are the same with different numbers, I guess.

Bob Doll
Yeah, yeah, the subjects generally are the same, but the prediction is very different. There's always one about the economy. There's always one about the direction of interest rates, earnings. always have the tenth one's always a political prediction, et cetera. asset classes. So the subjects are reasonably consistent through time, but the actual predictions are very different year by

Chris Lesner
Wow. When you're doing all this stuff, obviously you have your hands in so many different worlds. You're trying to understand so many industries. You bump into a lot of good leaders. You bump into a lot of bad leaders. when you think through it, how do you measure how successful you are as a leader, personally? What are you looking at to figure out, you doing

Bob Doll
Yeah, great question. It's not just the bottom line and the results, but it's not just what we do. It's how we do what we do. I asked my direct reports on a regular basis. How am I doing? How am I doing with you? How can I do better? So that's among the ways we occasionally do a 360 review. And that's a sobering process when everybody gets a chance
Tearing you apart as it were or patch you on the back and it's usually some combination of the two So we're always learning we're always growing and we're always wanting to be better So you're right The first thing is you've got to ask the question and then you can figure out how you ask the question And who do you talk to when you ask those

Chris Lesner
OK, I've got 10 rapid fire questions that I want to ask you. And just say the first thing that comes to your mind for any of these. So question one, who's the first person you think of when I say servant leadership?

Bob Doll
Okay.

Bob Doll
Jesus Christ.

Chris Lesner
All right, five words that most describe yourself.

Bob Doll
Oh, uh, hard charging, never give

Chris Lesner
Love it. Favorite author or book?

Bob Doll
The Bible.

Chris Lesner
Love it. Favorite movie.

Bob Doll
Ah, favorite movie. Oh, I just re -saw the sound of music. I just love the setting, the story, and the music.

Chris Lesner
favorite food.

Bob Doll
Favorite fruit, anything Italian.

Chris Lesner
All right, favorite thing to do in your free

Bob Doll
Sleep. I do that. I read a lot. I listen a lot. I love to play hearts with a few friends, card game hearts.

Chris Lesner
Wow, I was going to say and still answer the surprising fact about you, but that's a good fact. Any other surprising facts about

Bob Doll
I direct the choir at my church and I play the organ. And that's another great pastime. Totally different from what I do all week when I'm busy playing a prelude and fugue on the organ. My mind has no time to think about the stock market.

Chris Lesner
Favorite place you've been.

Bob Doll
Ugh, Paris.

Chris Lesner
Alright, place you want to visit that you haven't been to.

Bob Doll
Hmm.

Bob Doll
You stumped me. I'd love to do a safari in Africa somewhere. I haven't done

Chris Lesner
All right, last of the 10, what's the best advice you've ever gotten?

Bob Doll
Um, other than buy low, sell high, uh, you know, I'm going to be a similar theme. Follow Jesus. That doesn't get me into much trouble when I get that right. And when I don't, it gets me in

Chris Lesner
Wow, this is so good. Well, Bob, thank you so much. I'm so excited for people to be able to follow you, listen to you, hear from you on today's podcast. This has been an awesome treat.

Bob Doll
Thanks for the opportunity, Chris.