MS in Electrical Engineering to CEO of Check Capital Management – How I Got Here with Steve Check

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Host - Daniel

My name is Daniel and this is the Engineering Success Podcast Episode 54.

Thank you so much for listening. This episode was filmed on December. 11th, 2023.  Yeah, I'm ahead.

I don't know what day you're listening to it, but it's definitely going to be December. 11th It's really cool.

We actually have a backlog of two interviews, so I hope you enjoyed our last interview.

Michaela Because I know that you're also going to enjoy this interview with our guest, Steve.

But before I give a pitch to Steve, let's give a talk shout out to our top tier supporters of the episode.

Thank you so much.

To Leroy Jenkins and John OTT for your support of the podcast, you too can become a top tier supporter of the podcast, either through Patreon or through Spotify for podcasters.

Info in the description box below.

The top tier supporters get a shout out at the beginning of every single episode of the podcast just to express my gratitude.

Those are the people that keep the lights on here at the Engineering Success Podcast.

I use that money to fund everything from our web domain which is where our website is at www.engringsuccess.com engineeringsuccess.com with a ENGR.

Spell Engineer and then we also have an e-mail address where you can contact me if you're interested in showing up on the podcast and sharing your career journey as a graduated engineer Daniel at ENGRING success.com daniel@engineeringsuccess.com Just shoot me an e-mail.

Let me know “Hey Daniel, I want to be a guest” and I'll bring you on and you can share your story also.

Yeah, lots of good things going on in the podcast.

I also just found a new website called podcastguest.com that I'm going to be using to find even more guests, I have 8 or 9 more people that are interested in being guests of the podcast, so really good things going on really cool stories, so.

Our guest today is Steve Check he is an entrepreneur, but he started out entrepreneur in the world of Finance but his career actually started out just like this podcast says, in engineering.

So, really cool journey that Steve has had in his career and I'm really excited for you to listen to this episode of the podcast.

So without any further ado, let's go over there.

Hey, I'm honored to welcome Steve Check to the podcast.

Steve holds a Bachelor's in Science in electrical engineering from Iowa State and a master's in engineering from the University of California, Irvine.

He founded Check Capital Management in 1987 and as their Chief Investment Officer, he's responsible for their overall investment policy and portfolio management.

Now, he was formerly educated as an engineer, and that is really interesting to me and why I brought him on to the podcast because we're all about learning about interesting engineering careers.

But his coursework in accounting and his passion for investing drove him to a career in finance.

He thoroughly studied great investors such as Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, etcetera.

And he learned not only from their techniques but the underlying mindset that they have.

And he has transferred their success into the success of his own firm as a member of the CFA Institute.  He is also the past president of the CFA Society of Orange County.  And I am so grateful to have Steve on the podcast today.

Steve, how are you doing today?

Steve

I'm doing great and how are you?

Host

I am blessed.

What did you do today, Steve?

Steve

Actually I had an eye doctor appointment and a regular doctor appointment, so I've been off on doctor appointments.

Host

Yeah, that's what comes with running your own business, right?  You get to control your schedule.  I'll be honest, I sat in an office and sat in a bunch of meetings today that were for other stakeholders that make a lot of decisions that impact me.  So maybe not the same type of day that you've had.  Well, it all went well, so I'm happy.  I'm happy to be here with you.

Steve

Good.

Host

Yeah.  And I'm glad that you can see well and that you can see me and all that and also that you can talk well and we're going to have a great conversation today about you and your career.

So how would you decide that you were interested in engineering?  Why?  Why did you study engineering, Steve?

Steve

Well, I like science and scored well on those kinds of tests, you know, in high school.  And it also came from the fact that my father was an engineer at IBM and he kind of gave me the advice.  And I was kind of torn between whether I wanted to be an engineering major, to be honest, or when I went to college or to be a business major.  And he said, you know what, you can go to college as an engineering major and switch to business, but you can't go as a business major and switch to engineering.

So that made a lot of sense to me and that's what kind of pushed me probably in the direction of pursuing an engineering major.

Host

It's interesting that you say that, because I actually had the exact same advice from my parents.

My parents were like, man, you know, you really want to study business.

What are you going to do with the business degree?  You can do anything that you want to do with the business degree, with an engineering degree.  So then you did it.

You went to Iowa State.

Why Iowa State?

Steve

Well, actually I went my freshman year to University of Portland and I was from Minnesota, I went to the University of Portland.

I had a scholarship to be an engineering major, but I had never been in Oregon before going you know arriving there to go to college and when I went and I got to Portland.  While Portland's a beautiful city, it's beautiful because it rains out about four or five days a week at least during the school year and after one season I guess we could call it that.  I decided that I wanted to transfer back a little bit closer to home and Iowa State was known as a very good engineering college back in the Midwest.

Host

It is.  It is a phenomenal engineering college back in the Midwest.

I have some friends that went there that were engineers.

I interned with a couple of Iowa State engineers, and it is a phenomenal school.

So the reason why you transferred there, was it was a combination of the location and the prestige of the program.

Were there certain things that you were looking for in the program whenever you were picking out which one to transfer to?

Steve

You know how it works.

So when you're that young a good friend of mine was going there that next year I said you know what it wasn't really any more sophisticated than that and it was in a college town.  Before I picked Portland.  The one other college I had really considered strongly was the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

And that would have been a really fun place to go for sure.

But it was a little bit bigger city, and I like the idea of kind of a college town, which Iowa State presented.

Host

Yeah, that makes sense.

Steve

Yeah, I'll say though you know University of Wisconsin, Madison maybe also difficult on the on the weather maybe not as nice as Iowa State or is about the same.

Host

Oh, I think it's, I think they're both not too well.

I mean, if you want to have, you have all four seasons, so you're definitely going to have cold weather in the winter at either place.

Yeah, and I can thank the University of Wisconsin, Madison for having horrific weather in the winter for my parents meeting one another.

My mom, she moved to the US from Hong Kong and when she came to visit universities to tour, she toured University of Wisconsin, Madison in the summer.

And as you can imagine, it is absolutely gorgeous up there in the summer and being from a relatively humid and hot climate in Hong Kong, she said, that's a wonderful she didn't last one year.

Within one year she transferred to the University of Texas.

And she's like, I'm out of here.

And then a long story short, eventually, a few years later, more than a few years later, my parents met in Texas.  So yeah, that's a good factor.

And I've heard of the worst reasons for people choosing to go to a college.

I've heard of people following girlfriends, boyfriends, and then breaking up within the first semester.  So having a friend there and a great engineering school is a perfectly valid reason for choosing Iowa State.

I understand that.

So what kind of what kind of student were you at Iowa State?

Were you pretty studious?  What kind of grades did you have as an engineering student?

Steve

Well, I always felt like I was an above-average student and I probably really was.

But I always felt like there were certainly other students that were quite a bit smarter.

But I did become I do remember now the kind of the class representative both in my junior and senior years for the IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and I did also get a scholarship to really it paid for my college education both my junior and senior years by Caterpillar Tractor Company.

They had a really great scholarship program and I was I was selected to be the student, at least from Iowa State, for my class.

Host

That's phenomenal.  So was that something that was always the case for you?  Were you just as good of a student in high school?

Or was it one of those things where you just turned it on in college and you had one of those realization moments?

Steve

Well, I wasn't told quite a bit later that my mom put together a little book on my life almost I guess you could say.  And she put my report card in there from high school and I was about 20th out of like 600 in my class, so I guess I was.

Host

Yes, you're always a good student.

Steve

Yeah, I never considered myself that high, but it was like, in retrospect, it was pretty high-ranking.

Host

Yeah.  And it's interesting that it was consistent for you because you know you hear a lot of stories right where people they they're a good student in high school and then they burn out when they get to college because they reach that plateau and then they burn out and then they have to turn it back on.

But it it goes to show that somebody can be a consistently good student from high school and then take the momentum from high school into to college.

Now you said that you were a member of I Triple E and you were the president.

I was also a member of I Triple E and I also competed in my local ethics competition as an I Triple E member while studying mechanical engineering.

Interesting story there.

Maybe we'll, if we have time, we'll dig into that, but, what kind of involvements were the most important involvements for you as a student?

Was it mainly I Triple E or were there other things that you got to take part in?

Steve

You know, I ended up being, you know, as far as the I Triple E part, I ended up being the student representative for my class.

I did meet with the faculty and try to help shape the curriculum, I guess you could say.

So I was really the, you know, like student government, if you would call it that, but just for, you know, just with the engineering college and just really specifically the electrical engineering college.

So trying to get professors to do things that they didn't really like to do and pressure them from a student's point of view, I guess was kind of my goal.

Host

Yeah, I imagine that was actually probably a pretty valuable experience when you look back on it on thinking about business relationships and how that all works.

I'm sure that was the first of many rounds of negotiations that you've had in in your career.

So, OK, you did Iowa State and then you graduated, you had internships and we can talk about those in a minute.

But then you decided to pursue a master’s, Why a master’s?  And I believe it was in electrical engineering.  Why did you take the next step further into your engineering degree at this point?

Did you still have aspirations of working as a design engineer for your career, or was that finance thing creeping in the back of your mind while you were still doing this?

Steve

Well, it actually kind of swings back to the weather again, believe it or not.

When I was a freshman, again, at the University of Portland for spring break, I went to Southern California and the weather in Southern California is unbeatable.

And that was stayed in the back of my mind when I was graduating from Iowa State and wasn't 100% sure what I wanted to do and decided to pursue a master's degree as we talked about and in Southern California, so UCI, you know, University of California, Irvine.

So that's what kind of really brought me there.

And I was still, like I said, still kind of exploring how much I really liked engineering or not.

Host

Makes sense.

So, so then you got the masters. Did you pick a specific specialty or concentration within electrical engineering?

Steve

Yeah, I did.

Really I focused on digital signal processing.

Host

OK.  Makes sense.  Right.  You went to work for IBM, right?  And was that kind of related?

Steve

No, I wouldn't say it was related.

I just when I got to the University of California, Irvine and they had to kind of specialize a little bit.

I really did find the kind of computer programming and the modeling interesting and then the professor that was really the lead professor in that area at University of California Irvine was kind of world-renowned I think and kind of led me into that direction.

Host

Yeah, that makes sense.

And so looking back on that experience, knowing now where your career is taking you, are you happy about the way that you handled your education from going from 2 engineering degrees?

Do you value that experience?

Steve

Well, very much so.

I mean very much so like we talked about just a little bit ago as an engineer background you have the confidence you feel that you can really go into anything and talk to anybody and you know we all as engineers between us engineers we always felt we were the smartest guys at school, right.

And so we always felt very confident as engineering majors in school and so it really gave me my background now in digital signal processing when I ultimately, we're going to talk about the fact that I got into the stock market.  When I looked at the stock market it looked like a bunch of random signals that I thought some digital signal processing filtering could work very well with.

Host

That makes, that makes sense.  I’m excited to talk about that.

So, so would you say that there's a particular class then that ended up being the most valuable class for your career that you look back on and you value the most?

Steve

Well, probably noise cancellation kind of software and along those lines of digital signal processing.

So trying to again take a random signal and predict the future of that random signal and and then apply that to the stock market is where I ultimately went with it.

Host

That's exciting.

So let's talk about that career maybe not in the stock market yet we'll build up to that right we'll build into the stock market where we'll index our way into it.

So first, that was a horrible pun.

I'm going to be trying multiple puns by the way throughout the yeah we'll I'll be trying more throughout the way and we'll see if I can get you.

So your first experience working in the industry was working for IBM.

What was that job like and what did you learn about the engineering industry and about yourself working for IBM?

Steve

So my IBM job was probably, I think, right after my freshman year of college, and it was really just manual labor.

I was putting together printed circuit boards and putting the kind of components in the circuit board that the automated machines, you know still at that time Quinn put in, you know through automation.

So, it was sitting at a desk all day with kind of a bright light type of thing and putting pieces on a puzzle.

Host

Did you like it?

Steve

No, I wouldn't say I really liked it.

I realized that I wanted to do something that was, you know, a little more using your mind than putting pieces into a puzzle.

Host

OK, so then did you get to use your mind a little bit more at your next internship with Caterpillar?

Steve

Yeah.  Now Caterpillar was a very interesting job and because I was as I'm of the age, I'm 62 years old where personal computers were just coming into the market and putting automation in the market and so I was able to do some really interesting things with learning, with control systems and how to operate you know the assembly line and automate all that.  And Caterpillar was really upright on the front edge of all that.  So I learned a lot at that job.

Host

Really, were they doing that for industrial equipment that they were audit like putting like I guess operating computers into the equipment or what were they doing?

Steve

Well, a lot of this actually had to do with actually just maintaining the facility, so just the control systems around the facility.

But ultimately I was working at the at the foundry that made the engine blocks for the big engines, but it was again controls around the air conditioning and the heating and everything else that went into it.

Host

And was this all within close proximity to where you were going to school at the time, or did you have to make any kind of, I don't know, lifestyle changes to pursue the internships that you were pursuing while you were in school?

Steve

Well the the Caterpillar one was just actually over the summer between years of college.  So then they picked one student from most of the big Midwest engineering colleges and they said I was picked from the Iowa State.  And so we all ended up in Peoria, IL at Caterpillar's headquarters, at least at the time and we all worked there.

Host

Yeah, that's a cool experience.

And then after that, then you're in grad school and you started working for Hughes, which I believe is an aircraft manufacturing company.

Is that correct?

Steve

Well, I think they made one aircraft.

Howard Hughes made this goose in World War 2 but I for some reason took that name but I ended up in Southern California and I got offered a job with satellites which is now turned into by the way DIRECTV.

That particular division OK, but it was up in Los Angeles, and I had actually already moved to Orange County just South of Los Angeles and I liked Orange County better than Los Angeles.

So instead of working at the satellite Division I ended up working ultimately at the at the integrated Circuit division in Newport Beach CA.

Host

OK.  And what were you doing there?

Steve

I was actually a circuit designer and I was an analog circuit designer, which is kind of an interesting area of circuit design.

But we ended up making circuits really for different military applications in general that Hughes was working on throughout the company.

Host

So is that kind of their own in-house fab and integrated circuit design you know facility that's cool?

And so you're doing this and you've got your master’s or you're working on your master’s and you're working for this company and you're doing some intense electrical engineering.  What are you?  Are you enjoying it, or what are you realizing about your relationship to engineering at this point?

Steve

Well, I was enjoying it.

However, I wasn't really enjoying working for a huge company like Hughes Aircraft which by the way was even a private company and for most of the time I was there was owned by Hughes Medical Foundation something that Howard Hughes set up in his life.

And I was a little bit more entrepreneurial than working at A at a big company like that where the best employees might have got an 8% a year raise and the worst employees might have got a 2% a year raise and so, so I got a little itchy.

Host

Yeah.  And so where, where was that itch taking you at that point in time?

What was what was brewing in the back of your mind as you were sitting and you were designing circuits?

Steve

Well, coming from the Midwest, I noticed that the people, at least from where I came from, the Midwest, which was Rochester, MN, the people in Southern California, were very entrepreneurial.

They were always kind of looking to do other things, maybe make other money in other ways.  And it was expensive.  It's expensive relative to living in the Midwest.

So I kind of had my eyes open and there used to be a channel on UHF channel 22 they called it here in Los Angeles which was a real precursor to CNBC today and it talked about the stock market all day and I started watching that and I kind of got hooked on it I guess you could say, yeah.

Host

So you got hooked on the stock market, but you're still working for an engineering firm or you're working as an engineer.

So there has to be some moment where you realize, OK, I need to absolutely break out.

So what was that moment that enabled you to break out and eventually start your own financing financial services company or financial advising company?

Steve

Yeah, it was not an overnight process.

I mean, I became aware of the stock market.  I became aware of ways to maybe invest in stocks.

I tried to apply, as I said, kind of my engineering background, my software writing skills to track stocks.  And next thing you know, I started showing other engineers at work.

You know, what I thought was a good way to invest.

And before long I was managing money for other engineers.

So my first ten clients as a registered investment advisor or an asset manager were actually engineers, and engineer colleagues.

I started managing accounts for them.

Host

Wow, so you were working and you actually got your certification to be a registered investment advisor, and then you picked up clients.

Were you also still working as an engineer while you were advising them and managing their finances?

Steve

Yeah, I was really my first official year in business was 1987, and at the end of 1987 there was a thing called the stock market crash and people were not that interested in the stock market at the end of 1987.

So rather than quit my job, my kind of secure engineering job, and pursue this investment advisory business full time, I waited another year.

So there was two years of overlap, 1987 and 1988, where I was really doing both working full time as an engineer, but kind of at night thinking of ways to invest.

Host

How, how was managing that balance between the two houses that kind of ran your life?  Was it a pretty manageable balance or were you pretty taxed in that process?

Steve

It was pretty manageable.  Like I kind of felt, I mean really the stock market thing was just my big hobby.  It was just and I really had a passion for that.

And then I also realized that you know, that was that was fulfilling, that entrepreneurial bent.

Every time you had a new client you kind of gave yourself a little raise and ultimately you know I could almost hardly wait to leave engineering and actually pursue financial advising if you will or investment advice business full-time.

Host

Yeah.  Was there a specific moment that you remember when you realized yourself, man, I can do this. I can quit my job.

Steve

You know people probably look back at me and I might even look back at me and think I was kind of crazy to do it too because I was I guess around 26 or 27 years old.

But when you're 26 or 27, you probably think you can do almost anything.

And it was you know I just said to myself if I quit and get one new client a week or something of that sort I can make a living at this.

So originally like a lot of people I worked out of my home for my first year or two and worked on building up the business and also kind of a key was I kind of figured out you know I just can't go out there maybe and find clients completely cold.

I was able to work out a relationship with a discount stock brokerage firm where they help refer clients my way and I would give presentations on what I thought we could invest in and it was a very low-key way of just really educating about how to invest and if it made sense then I got clients through that.

Host

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.  And so, you're doing this all by yourself.

For how long was it that you were doing this by yourself before you hired your first employee?

Steve

Yeah, I think my first employee came like three or four years later, three or four years into it.

Host

Yeah and what was the thing that you hired your first employee to do?

Steve

Well, I think it was actually, I think it was actually my wife who I took out of her job started doing some of the bookkeeping here at the house and keeping track of the client portfolios with the software that was just coming out to do that.

So this was very front edge by the way, the whole investment advisory industry which is now a very big industry, but in the late 1980s it was in its infancy and so the software around that industry and the firms like Charles Schwab and Fidelity which have a big business of partnering with investment advisors, they were just looking at going into that business back at that time.  Schwab was actually the 1st, and they started it in the late 1980s.

Host

Yeah.  And you having started in 1987, you've seen a lot of things happen in the industry and the economy and everything like that.  And you've also seen your business grow substantially since obviously 1987.

How many? How many employees do you have now?

Steve

Well, the number of employees is still relatively small.

We have like 11 or 12 employees, but we do manage about $1.7 billion, which is a quite a bit of money for even a 11 or 12 person employee firm, yeah.

Host

And so yeah, that give me a second to take that in.

Yeah that is a sizable amount of money.

Were there any I guess pivotal or formative moments in the history of your business that that stand out as the defining moments of your business that allowed it to become so successful to this point?

Is there anything that you can reflect on?

Steve

Yeah.

I think if I really had to go back to it, it was around about three or four years into the business and I started charging our management fees in a way that's different than what you normally find in our industry.

Most people in our industry charge usually 1% of the assets per year to manage the accounts.  That's kind of the standard fee schedule.

And the problem with that fee schedule, at least from a client's point of view, is that even if the account goes down or goes sideways, the money manager still makes 1% of the assets as a management fee.

And I decided that I wanted to not work that way, at least if I could.

The SEC does have some rules around that, but as we started offering, I could say almost I, but there's only like two or three of us.

But I started offering a fee schedule that was based on 10% of the profits of the client’s accounts billed once a year.

So doing that around 1991, early in my career I found a lot of clients that hey I'd like to find a money manager that only gets paid when he makes me money and that that was kind of a defining moment and it's a real hard, it's a real hard business move.

I mean and if you have a larger organization, you can't go a year or two without any revenues often which could happen if you have a down year or two, which you won't do, which you will have.

But again doing it starting off fresh like that and starting off small and then thinking along those lines, I was able to carry that through and we still carry that through to this day.

And by far the vast majority of our clients have hired us under that kind of a fee schedule.

Host

That's impressive.  And what I mean is that requires a certain level as you said planning and foresight and maybe also this your side of your organization contributes to that.

But are there any insights that you've learned from having to think long term like that in the way that you operate as a business and maybe communicating that to the people that work for you and work with you?

Steve

Yeah.  You do need to keep it relatively lean and mean just so that if you have a down year and you do have to make sure that you have reserves set aside just like any retired person would do and have reserves set aside for living expenses, we had to have reserves set aside for, let's say, operating expenses of the business.

Host

That makes sense.  So we've talked a little bit about what you do and what your business does and what sets you guys apart.

Have we missed anything about it?

I feel like we've just scratched the surface, so maybe why don't you give us a little bit more info about your business and what you guys do?

Steve

Well, ultimately the software that I learned in in engineering wasn't really that useful in in in in the sense of predicting where the stocks were going to go.

So it was a little humbling to find that out.  But the software was very helpful in automating a business that's for sure.

But ultimately I still I think use kind of my, my engineering mindset and problem solving you know mindset and back engineered my way into kind of the investment philosophy that we ultimately you know started using way back let's say in the early 90s now.

But you know what you should do is look for successful examples and try to figure out, you know, how they are successful.

So what I mean by that is look for successful money managers and learn from their example.

And fortunately for me, I became aware of Warren Buffett early on. Early on meaning that not that many people knew about him in 1990 even though he had been around and managing money successfully very quietly for a long time as of like around 1990 when I became aware of his investment philosophy, buying good quality, you know, being patient, being disciplined, letting the market work for you and not against you, you know keeping your emotions in check etcetera.

All these kind of teachings that we all know of from Warren Buffett today was kind of kept under wraps back in that time.

But when I became aware of that and employed that into again into our into our investment philosophy that was a another major turning point I guess you could say.

Host

Yeah, that makes sense.

So what is your average?  Do you have an average type of client?

Is there a specific type of person that comes to you and works with you?

Steve

Yeah, I'd say an average client probably has about a $3,000,000 net worth and has maybe about a million or a million and a half dollars under management with us.

Host

OK, makes sense.

I'm almost there.  Just kidding, Not quite there.

I don't know if you can tell, but I'm like in my early 20s and I have a semi successful podcast and an early career engineering job.

So we're not quite there yet, but eventually I'll be there and I'll give you a call.

Steve

When I was only about 10 or ten years or so older than you, I went to an annual meeting with Warren Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger.

And he looked out in the crowd and said, you know what, anybody that's in this meeting I think is going to be probably pretty successful someday.  And I'm going to look out at you and say I feel the same way.

So I think you got a great future ahead of you.

Host

Thanks so much, Steve.

So, so speaking of future, so we have a lot of my audience is mostly kids in high school that are dreaming of becoming an engineer or early college engineers that are trying to make it through finals right now or people that are just starting in their career of engineering.

What advice would you give to somebody that's considering pursuing an engineering degree?

Steve

Keep pursuing it, you know.

You know, I gave that same advice to my son who didn't then graduate and get both a bachelor's and a master's degree in civil engineering and actually just loves it.

So he is now the traffic engineer for a Southern California city here.

But I run into another engineering major that does, you know, and I went to lunch with him here about a year or two ago and I introduced him to, you know, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett and this type of thing.

And he's been wanting to quit college ever since almost and switch to the business thing.

I say no.  No, no, no, don't do that.  Stay.

Get your engineering major for sure and then then take that wherever it takes you.

You know it'll take you a lot of places, so stay with the engineering major and stay with the education and use that as your foundation to go wherever you want to go.

Host

Yeah.

So it's so funny because my next question was is what would you say to an engineer that has that passion for a career in business or beyond traditional design, engineering you say continue pursuing the engineering degree, a lot of engineers feel like maybe that they'd be wasting their engineering degree by pursuing a field beyond that.

And honestly, that's something that I grappled with for the longest time.

I mostly I work in contracts now most of my time is spent pouring through engineering contracts and engineering rates and negotiating engineering terms.

But there was a period of time when I was like this is the direction I'm going, it's more operational business side not design.  Am I OK with this?

You're a great example of somebody that said, well, yes, I value the engineering degree.

I'm going to apply it.  I'm going to use it and I value it.

And what would you say to somebody that is about to make that leap or they're finding themselves kind of their careers just drifting away from design engineering and they're having trouble kind of releasing that fact that well I spent all this time studying design engineering.

Steve

Well, I think you definitely have to follow your passion in life.

So you're not gonna be really all that great or even all that happy doing something just for a paycheck, if you will.

So if you find yourself in an engineering job that you don't like find another engineering job or find a whole other job all together and again I guess I felt most guilty.  I mean I really have a lot of respect for engineers and I think the world needs for example engineers more than they need money managers.

So I felt kind of guilty taking all the resources that were put into my education with professors and all that and saying I'm kind of pushing that aside to pursue, I think, a less worthy career if you will as a money manager.

So, but you know, I've been always as happy and fascinated and never really felt this was even a job. And so I think if anyone can find that in their profession, that's ultimately the key.

Host

Yeah, that's a beautiful sentiment.

And I'll tell you, as somebody who works in an industry where we build a lot of things and we work with a lot of people that are trying to develop projects.

The people who manage the money and provide the financing are the people that enable a lot of amazing things to get built in our country.

And I think that people that manage money and are how to help make sure that there's good stewardship over money.

Helping people realize their life dreams and that the stability and their goals for their setting up their security in life and the security of the people that they love that come after them.

I think there's a lot of great value in that.

And I hope I know you feel it.

I know that you feel it and you've definitely gotten it at this point.

So I want to say thank you for what you do and thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

I really appreciate you sharing your story.

Did I miss anything in the journey?

Steve

No, I appreciate that wrap-up.

And again, in anything you do, you know, do it the right way for the customer and you'll feel pretty good about what you're doing too.

Host

Thank you so much Steve and thank you so much for this coming on to this episode of the podcast.

Steve

You're welcome.  I'm very happy to have done it.

Host

Well, thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Engineering Success Podcast, the best way you can support the podcast is by liking, commenting, sharing down below mainly commenting down below.