As a child, Mandell Crawley envisioned himself a teacher standing at the front of a classroom, probably schooling his pupils in history, and perhaps offering guidance to at-risk kids. Initially, he thought in terms of working at the elementary school level, but as the idea incubated his thoughts gravitated toward teaching high school students or even young men and women at an institution of higher learning.
“My family was very connected and committed to our community church, so a lot of my worldview was shaped by the adults that I grew up around,” he recalls. “A number of them were teachers who had gone to Northeastern Illinois. Personally, I have fond memories of teachers who made an impression on me.”
He was also influenced by episodes of the TV program A Different World, which depicted black college life. One of the players Crawley felt connected to was a character named Dwayne Wayne played by actor Kadeem Hardison, who was an educator, further influencing his notions of a career in the classroom.
By contrast, Crawley knew no one working in the financial services business, though that changed when, at age 17, he gained exposure to the industry through a high school internship via Westinghouse High School, a vocational prep school that offered a business curriculum requiring 20 hours per week of work/study. Crawley happened to be one of five students selected to interview for an internship on the trading desk at Dean Witter (now Morgan Stanley). He got the nod.
“For me, circumstances were such in my life where it was a twofold benefit,” he says. “One, it fulfilled my curriculum of 20 hours of work per week and, secondly, my two brothers and I were raised by our grandparents, and when grandmother passed away the year prior it threw us into adulthood, so I needed a job for income.”
It was a classic case of the industry finding Mandell Crawley rather than him finding the industry.
“I came into the industry through non-traditional means.”
There was actually a third benefit, which was the wow! moment when Crawley realized he liked the financial services vibe.
But first came college at Northeastern Illinois University on Chicago’s northwest side, which had its origins as a teachers college before it became a full-fledged university. His Morgan Stanley internship had run its course, though Crawley’s performance did not go unnoticed.
“The manager of the desk at the time said, ‘We like your hustle. If you can balance your studies, your commute and your work schedule, we would love to keep you on.’ So I ended up going undergrad fulltime at night and worked on the trading desk during the day, and doing everything you expect a 17-year old kid to be doing — running errands, doing clerical work, grabbing lunch.”
A DAY IN THE LIFE
Fast-forward to present day, and Crawley’s alarm goes off at 5 a.m., giving him sufficient time for an hour-long workout at the gymnasium and his commute from Westchester to Manhattan and the offices of Morgan Stanley, where he is in charge of the financial giant’s private wealth division and its nearly 550 financial advisers. The workout routine typically includes a combination of weightlifting and cardio, with a preference for jumping rope, before arriving to his desk at 7:45 a.m. There are conference calls with his regional managers, a series of meetings with partners from across the firm, a couple of meetings with existing or prospective clients, which is the work activity that most energizes Crawley. If most of his workday goes according to plan, he returns home in time to bathe and read to his 4-year-old twin daughters.
The challenge faced by Crawley — like everyone in his position — is to grow the business, something he expects to come from several avenues. Besides attracting new clients, Morgan Stanley is aiming to garner a greater share of assets from its existing clients. On average, existing clients have about 45 percent of their assets in the hands of the firm, a figure that clearly signals the opportunity to expand those relationships.
“We subscribe to the view that there will be a great consolidation within the industry, so as our clients age and as boomers transition, we think the number of service providers they use will go from an average of three down to one,” he says. “If we are doing our jobs, putting clients first and leading with exceptional ideas, we think the confluence of those things will allow us to be a net aggregator of assets.”
The private wealth division’s $345 billion in AUM could plausibly be doubled by deepening the relationship with the existing client base, and the time is opportune, says Crawley, because the Morgan Stanley brand “has never been stronger” as a financial service provider that originates, trades, manages and distributes capital.
The formula for making that happen also includes greater collaboration among advisers, as well as using technology to modernize the client experience when doing everything from opening accounts with clients to moving from a paper/print/fax ecosystem to an almost entirely digital one.
Morgan Stanley has structural advantages for a couple of reasons, says Crawley, pointing out that many of its competitors have either a world-class investment banking franchise or a prominent wealth management franchise, but very few have both. Morgan Stanley boasts a leading investment banking, equity-trading platform, and wealth management franchise.
“The comprehensive nature of that approach is something that is pretty distinctive about us,” he says.
SCHOOLING BY DAY AND NIGHT
It was around the first semester of Crawley’s sophomore year that he enrolled in a macroeconomics course and did well with the subject, a good omen for a guy sitting on a fixed-income trading desk that lives and dies by macroeconomic (as well as microeconomic) indicators. The immersion of being on the trading desk by day and studying macroeconomics by night created a situation whereby Crawley could translate the theory of the classroom to its application in the business world. Also important was the collegiality of his coworkers.
“I can’t over emphasize how welcoming and warm my colleagues were on the trading desk, none of whom looked like me, none of whom were from the same area I was from,” he says. “It could not have been a better environment for a young kid from inner-city Chicago.”
The real turning point came when he moved to the company’s headquarters in Manhattan in 1999.
“That’s when the world truly cracked open for me,” he recalls.
The experience opened his eyes to the vastness of the company’s business ecosystem, an experience he considered the biggest catalyst for his career path. Another major turning point came in September 2014, when Crawley was offered the chief marketing officer’s post, though he initially turned down the offer.
“I had all sorts of concerns about taking on a role like that inside of an investment bank,” he said. “The average lifespan of a CMO was about a year, and that coupled with the fact that I was already the national sales manager and had been given some additional responsibilities in terms of professional development and talent management of our financial advisers. That had me feeling pretty well situated in the job I had.”
But he was re-approached about the CMO post and told by a senior executive that he wanted Crawley to carefully consider the opportunity. He ultimately accepted the job, in part because he realized that CEO James Gorman had previously served as a CMO earlier in his career.
“I really started to see the benefits of the role, and found my own voice in terms of the imprint I could have on the organization,” he says. “Once Morgan Stanley — like the broader financial services sector — had finally gotten to the other side of the financial crisis, we got to a point where we needed to re-establish trust in our brand. After being dark for a number of years, we decided it was an ideal time to start telling our story to the marketplace, and that was a real benefit for me being CMO and playing a role in articulating the narrative.”
Add to that a marketing industry turned upside down by technology, and Crawley found himself at the front edge of the digital and social media marketing landscape, giving him an education in tech’s ability to micro-target clients and prospects.
“Frankly, I enjoyed the job a ton.”
As CMO, Crawley sought to help Morgan Stanley, and the wealth advisory business at large, recover from the reputational damage it sustained during the global financial crisis. The resulting campaign featured firm clients such as Netflix, Uber and Unilever and told the story of the “transformative” things those companies were doing on behalf of U.S. society.
“We put spotlights on these companies and essentially talked about how capital creates change and went into the story of how Morgan Stanley was working with all of these companies that are doing great things in their communities,” he explains.
SAFE HAVENS
While his move to New York City turned out to be the most formative professional experience of Crawley’s life, the personal experienced that shaped him most was the death of his grandmother when he was 16. It was his grandparents who raised Crawley and his brothers, and her passing accelerated the teenager’s transition to adulthood, and gave him some additional responsibilities, including playing a bigger role in his younger brother’s life.
Crawley also emphasizes the leading part the Boys & Girls Club contributed to his coming of age, calling it one of the pillars of his upbringing.
“The Boys and Girls Club was truly a safe haven from all of the things that were taking place in our community,” he says, “and it played a role in everything from team sports to public speaking, and being introduced to computers to the great mentors who were staff members there. As I was transitioning from high school to college, I was able to apply for and win a number of scholarships that were fully funded by donors, so I will forever be indebted to that organization.”
Crawley has been doing his best to repay that debt by serving as a national trustee to the Boy & Girls Clubs of America, an effort that sits at the core of his “giving strategy.” He recently stepped down from the board of directors at Covenant House, an organization that has spent more than 45 years providing residential services to vulnerable homeless, runaways and exploited youth. Though he has stepped away from an official role with the organization, Crawley spends time with the young men of Covenant House, particularly young men of color, many of whom have experienced the trauma of poverty, abuse and abandonment.
“I could have easily have been one of those young guys,” he says, before paraphrasing a biblical passage from his Christian upbringing: “To whom much is given, much is required.”
In his current role, Crawley oversees nearly 550 financial advisers, all of whom he expects to embrace the organization’s credo that the client comes first, the firm second, and the adviser third.
“It is not sufficient to just to be a big producer, you have to do it the right way, in the context of serving the client,” says Crawley. “And there is no tolerance for those who represent any form of franchise risk. You cannot do anything that is going to harm the name on the front of the jersey.”
He notes that the firm’s fastest-growing advisers are those who tend to have a defined, repeatable, scalable process, versus those who take a more ad hoc approach.
One of Crawley’s goals is to, over time, bring additional diversity to the wealth advisory team at Morgan Stanley, noting that more women and people of color are going to be necessary to adequately serve an increasingly diverse client population. Crawley spent the first seven years of his career as the only African-American on the trading desk, a fact that Morgan Stanley and the financial services industry have been making strides in addressing.
Crawley refers to it as a “supply-side issue,” one that Morgan Stanley has been making progress on, in part because the firm has increased the number and types of places from which it sources talent, adding historically black colleges such as Howard University, Morehouse College and Spelman College to the mix, in addition to the likes of fully integrated schools such as Pace University and Fordham.
“We all tend to go to the same schools, the Ivy League schools and, by definition, you’ve got a smaller subset of diverse talent from which to draw,” he says. “Morgan Stanley specifically is being more intentional in its recruitment. It is a tone that is being set from the top.”
MONEY ON THE MOVE
While he touts the many tools and attributes Morgan Stanley has at its disposal for growing its private wealth footprint, Crawley is acutely aware of risk posed by generational wealth transfer, with trillions of dollars moving from parents to children who have different ideas about where or with whom they want to invest. If no meaningful relationship or connectivity exists for the inheritor at the time of transfer, the assets will likely be lost, he observes, pointing to industry research that indicates as high as 95 percent of the time business is lost to a firm during the generational transfer of wealth.
“That has not been our reality at Morgan Stanley,” he says. “But the risk for us is as great as it is for anybody.”
One of the firm’s lines of defense is technology, which millennials and successive generations is expected to use in a big way, while engaging less often with their financial advisers than their parents.
“We have to raise our digital quotient. Over the last 12 to 18 months we have invested a lot in terms of our digital capabilities to take friction out of the experience.”
Communicating with clients through their medium of choice is a key part of the private wealth division’s focus on broadening the relationship to include clients’ children and grandchildren. Under Crawley’s leadership, it has increased the emphasis on working with the entire family to define financial goals and plan philanthropic activities and gifts.
Using this family office model, the firm’s private wealth operation provides client families with retreats to discuss family governance, introduces them to Morgan Stanley’s investment platform and services, and plays a role in planning the family’s philanthropic activities.
CLASS STILL IN SESSION
The Morgan Stanley experience has been an education for Crawley — though not the classroom education he originally envisioned — but one that has allowed him to make a more broad-based impact than he probably imagined possible.
Mike Consol (m.consol@irei.com) is editor of Real Assets Adviser. Follow him on Twitter @mikeconsol to read his latest postings.