There’s a line in Interlake’s Investment Philosophy Statement about an advisor’s job being similar to that of a good coach. That’s especially true here because I’ve spent parts of 14 years coaching a few different types of basketball teams, from assisting on the varsity staff at my alma mater to serving as the head coach for middle school, freshman, and varsity high school teams of my own.
I proudly claim two coaching inspirations, my beloved and legendary coach at Salinas High, Joe Chappell, and former University of Wisconsin men’s coach Bo Ryan. Both are player development coaches who teach solid team basketball. I’ve always seen life itself as a team game, and that certainly applies to my advisory work at Interlake.
There’s one thing I learned from Coach Ryan that applies in a remarkably powerful way to investment management and financial guidance. This concept became a foundational part of my approach to coaching in the 2013-14 season when I was the head coach of the freshman boys team at Salinas High. Before I share the big idea, a little context…
We had a remarkable group arrive on campus that year. Three members of that freshman class were immediate starters on the Junior Varsity team, my group was deep and talented and cohesive, and we had so many freshmen who wanted to play—and could play—that we took the extraordinary step of creating a “B” team that went 9-6 on the season.
I knew my team was going to be good. There was no mistaking it. We had size, we could shoot it, we were quick, we were balanced, we defended like champs from the first day of practice, and we made each other better every time we stepped into the gym.
Looking at our 24-game schedule, I figured we had a real chance to run the table. The thing I feared most was complacency. My other worry was that we’d win a certain number of games to start the season and start feeling the pressure of being undefeated and thinking ahead to what it would feel like if we were able to finish it off.
In working through some ideas about how I wanted to handle this exceptional group, I reflected on Coach Ryan’s adage that all his teams were trying to do was go 1-0 every time they played. That’s it. Just win the day.
1-0. What a simple, powerful, attainable goal.
Then, either way, they’d get back in the gym the next afternoon with tenacity, determination, and humility. They'd be right back at it, trying to get a little better every chance they got, which is another way of going 1-0.
So...when we rolled to a season-opening win in our gym, the only thing I wrote on the whiteboard after the game was “1-0.”
On that same whiteboard a couple days later, the numbers would reset: “0-0.” That was our record when we got out of bed that morning, and all we could control was the effort and effectiveness we brought to the basketball court on this new day, the most important day of all…today.
To summarize the rest of that astonishing season, I got to write “1-0” on 23 more whiteboards over the next several weeks. We played 24 times and we won 24 times, rolling to an undefeated league championship punctuated by a no-doubter of a season-ending win over our archrivals.
After that last game, I took the “1” in 1-0 and transformed it into a 4, then put a 2 in front of that…and there it was: 24-0, a truly golden season for the purple and gold Cowboys of Salinas High.
Why am I typing a few hundred words about a high school basketball season on my investment firm’s blog? Because all we want to do as a business, and all we ask of our clients, is to go 1-0 every day.
In this business, whether we’re working with retirement plan participants or private clients, we (correctly) think about long-term financial goals, needs, and wants. But just as my 2013-14 hoop team couldn’t go 24-0 in November, the only way investors can achieve their long-term objectives is to stack up a whole bunch of short-term wins one after the other.
We plan for the long run; we live in the short run. We want to win championships, but we can only do that one quality possession and one successful outing at a time.
To be clear, this worldview, the power of “1-0,” applies just as much to a team that isn’t undefeated, or to an investor who’s starting to accumulate wealth later in life than the textbooks would tell you is ideal. All you can control is the next possession, whether it’s on offense or defense or in transition. All you can do is your very best from this point forward. Then try to do it again tomorrow. And the day after that. And pretty soon, often sooner than you ever expected, you’ll be able to celebrate something truly special.
I know our coaching staff taught the guys on that team a few things that helped them in basketball and in life. But I can assure you they taught us a heck of a lot more.
Here’s to going 1-0 every time you get a chance to lace ‘em up.