Top Producer Read Online Free PDF

in London, Paris, Singapore, and Hong Kong. There is talk about opening a branch in Rio.
     
SKC was born in 1991. We are a young organization. But the company name creates images of greatness from America’s financial past. The allusion is by design. Percy Phillips, the founder and CEO, wove the surnames of economic legends into a corporate identity. In the process he also ignored the facts. Samuel Sachs and Henry Kidder were never business partners. They competed against each other in the late 1800s. Andrew Carnegie made more money in railroads, coal, and steel than he ever made selling bonds in Europe. No matter. The coined name rings of Wall Street’s triumph.
     
Competitors say, “SKC is nimble and ferocious, a force to fear.” I regard my firm as the ultimate meritocracy. We produce. Or we pack up and go elsewhere. Nobody coasts and survives at SKC. Our corporate culture prizes aggressiveness and rewards those who go for it. Damn the consequences.
     
Sometimes I wonder how SKC ever became my professional home. Itdiffers vastly from the genteel place where I grew up. Change tilled suspicion in South Carolina. And ancestry, rather than performance, conferred opportunity. My dad once quipped, “Charleston is a city distinguished by three hundred years of history uninterrupted by progress.” He was right back then. People tell me things are different now, but it is impossible for me to comment. I have not been back to Charleston for some time.
     
Eight years ago I graduated from Harvard Business School and started as a broker in the Private Client Services division of SKC, “PCS” for short. I manage $2 billion for sixty-five families today, a business that easily nets me seven figures every year. It is an amount I never fathomed while chasing fiddler crabs and scratching mosquito bites as a kid.
     
It is also axiom number three in action: Wall Street firms pay ridiculous money to top producers.
     
I love the feverish energy of PCS. At any given moment we scream into our phones. Or we scream at each other, jabbering and gesticulating with two or three people on hold. Almost everybody chews hangnails or fidgets with Hacky Sacks, our nervous tics sweeping through low-rise cubicles like bacterial plagues on the march. The commotion, the consequence of financial greed and highs from coffee, Cokes, and candy bars, can be downright scary to the untrained eye. But to me it is a shot of pure adrenaline.
     
There’s nothing like Wall Street’s constant flow of ideas, some good, some bad, and some so toxic they must originate in Chernobyl. Clients pay me to be vigilant. My guys know all the dirt: the public doughnut company that spent as much time cooking the books as it spent frying the batter; the CEO who threw a party with ice sculptures that pissed vodka; and the analysts who publicly extolled companies while privately bashing the same piece-of-shit stocks. My guys hire me to watch their backs. Sure, they grumble about the fees. But I keep their money safe, and they know it.
     
There’s no telling what’s out there.
     
PCS has been especially important on a personal level. During the past eighteen months, the daily regime of sensory overload monopolized all my waking moments. I dissected thousands of investment pitches, wrangled with other advisers trying to poach my clients, and steered great fortunes through the mud and muck of money management. The action, Wall Street’s spider-web of greed and conflict, obscured my wretched memories from that black night in New Haven.
     
SKC gave me the capacity to cope. This world of ambition, the overlay of lunacy, administered a potent painkiller over the last eighteen months. When my best friend died last Friday, I knew just what to do. I was a veteran patient in the care of PCS.
     
     
 
     
At 7:15 A.M. on Monday I hurried through the “boardroom,” our tongue-in-cheek nickname for the open-plan workstations. I passed Scully, the world’s loudest stock jockey,