After a decade working in the world’s financial capitals with some of the biggest names in the business, Tim Andrew chose to return to Perth. But it wasn’t an easy transition, as Mark Pownall reports.
In a state screaming out for skills and experience at every level of almost every industry, it seems absurd that one of the world’s most qualified equities analysts was told by the experts that he should look elsewhere for work.
But that was very much the case for Western Australian-born and bred Tim Andrew, who encountered some severe frustrations at the beginning of his long-planned return to Perth after about a decade of working in the world’s financial capitals.
Fresh from managing 300 analysts as Deutsche Bank’s New York-based head of US equities, Mr Andrew sought the advice of a top WA head hunting agency at the beginning of the year.
While it was just a preliminary chat ahead of an anticipated year off, the news he received was sobering.
“I was told that I was unemployable here,” Mr Andrew said.
“I was told point blank ‘you don’t have enough Perth experience to walk into a senior job in this town’.”
Forget the experience in the heart of the world’s financial capital, discard the role at the heights of a global investment empire, and ignore the time spent managing a major team at a time of significant regulatory change.
The problem, he was informed, was his contact base was too weak after so many years away.
Thankfully, a Perth employer thought differently, though his opportunity only came after a chastened Mr Andrew started to look to Asia for work, albeit at a leisurely pace as he started to wonder why he returned to Perth in the first place.
“Ironically, the job came from my contacts here, after a game of golf,” he said.
Three months shy of a year off, Mr Andrew is back behind a desk – this time as head of industrial research at Perth-headquartered Euroz Securities Ltd, where he has a seat on the board and in which he has taken equity.
While Mr Andrew has just two analysts under his direction, as part of a research team of six, when compared to his high-flying role at Deutsche Bank he has not found the two jobs worlds apart.
“It is weird in some ways but, management aside, in terms of equity research the process is pretty similar,” Mr Andrew said.
“The process to analyse GE is the same as Futuris, you just take six figures off it.”
Mr Andrew said the shift to working in Perth – and leaving management in a global company behind to embark on something much more entrepreneurial – had been refreshing.
Wall Street, he said, had become over-regulated and his job involved as much legal and compliance work as it did running a team.
“The regulatory environment is much more sensible in Australia,” Mr Andrew said.
“Being an analyst in the US, it got too hard from an administrative point of view.
“That made the job a lot less attractive than it should have been and a lot of talent left that field.”
It was so stringent that even a private conversation between an analyst and someone on the corporate or investment banking side of the business required a “chaperone”, most likely from the company’s legal department, listening in.
“The industry has gone through massive change,” Mr Andrew told WA Business News.
“In four years it probably had more change than it had since the 1930s.
“Managing through that process was fun and challenging but, by the end of it, it was no longer interesting.”
Apart from the upheaval and change driven by regulatory change and enduring a tough bear market that required him to make about 100 people redundant over a three-year period, Mr Andrew said there were unique aspects of management in his past role that simply came with the territory.
“Managing 300 Americans in an industry full of egomaniacs was difficult from an organisational perspective,” he said.
“I had over 70 direct reports, which clearly you won’t find in any decent management text book.
“My number one management mantra is to always hire smarter or better people than yourself.
“Ultimately the people you recruit is the number one reflection on you as a manager and the performance of your team.
“Too many managers are insecure and afraid to hire smart and motivated people with the concern that it may show them up.”
Mr Andrew is a big believer in using equity as part of a remuneration structure.
“Having appropriate equity instruments is the best way of motivating senior management, although, like everything, this can be made a problem if abused,” he said.
“We won’t forget [the financial disasters] Worldcom, Enron or Tyco any time soon; living through that was interesting.
“The smaller the entity, the more effective a tool it is, just because of your ability to influence performance is greater.”
Mr Andrew said one of the hardest elements to manage at Deutsche was the intercontinental competition between the regional arms of the bank, notably across the Altantic Ocean.
“Internally, Europe and the US were very competitive with each other, and from time to time we would become a little too myopic in our view of the world,” he said.
“We were truly operating in a global environment but at times, our local biases got the better of us.”
The reduced likelihood of global conflict, though, is not the only major difference for Mr Andrew from his life a year ago.
The other thing that has changed is the transition from a Manhattan apartment and house on Long Island to a far culturally quieter life in Perth.
Mr Andrew said that the opportunity for his three children, soon to be four, to be in close contact with their grandparents was a real drawcard and he and his family were very much enjoying taking advantage of what Perth has to offer.
However, he admits it was not an easy transition and that for every “lifestyle” benefit in Perth, New York offered its own array of stimulating things to do.
“I loved New York, we had a great lifestyle there.”
A big difference, he notes, is that he is now home when his children go to bed – something that rarely happened when he was in the US.
But the day still starts early, and he reckons he’s in the office most mornings by 6.30am.
Mr Andrew said it’s a great challenge to build up the industrials side of equities analysis at Euroz, which has built its business around being a specialist WA broking house for institutional investors.
He believes the entrepreneurial attitude at Euroz suited his need for a change from the culture found in a giant multinational such as Deutsche, and may well be the only place he would have felt comfortable in WA.
He is very bullish on China and India, where spectacular growth has fuelled WA’s economic boom in resources.
“That is driving the broking houses revenue at the moment,” he said.
“Euroz has a lot of foresight in the management team, we all know markets are cyclical and you need a rounded portfolio to make money in all markets.”
To do so, Euroz has realised it needs to build the industrials side of its analytical experitise.
“Euroz wants that and there is a real opportunity in the marketplace, that is the fundamental reason I wanted to do this job.”
