To Tell the Truth*
He wanted to do good business and make money. But could he do it the honest way?
Maria Bartiromo
The Importance of Ethics
Trustworthiness can be underestimated when it comes to creating both success and wealth. But it is a critical trait in getting ahead. Just ask Charles Schwab, founder of the discount brokerage fi rm that bears his name.
The idea of never taking advantage of someone is a lesson Schwab learned early on from his fat- her,then the district attorney of Yolo County, near Sacramento, California. “When I was young, my father taught me a lot about how important ethics are, about right and wrong, about doing the right thing and not compromising.”
By his own admission, Schwab was “a hard-working kid”. And for a long time he only dre
amed of making money. “I’ve come out of a generation of parents and grandparents who lived through the Depression① years, and all they talked about was not having money, the lack of money, the lack of resources, so from my earliest memories, I wanted to e if I could break out of that.”
鹌鹑蛋怎么做一转身就是一辈子 Schwab knew that education would be his escape route, but school prented inexplicable complications. “I got good grades in math and science, but in anything related to composition or reading, I was C-minus for sure.”
The mystery would be solved decades later when his youngest son was diagnod with dyslexia. Schwab says, “I realized that all of the difficulties he was going through, I went through too.”
Schwab didn’t consider the learning disability a handicap. “I worked harder to 化学电离overcompensate,” he says. “My SAT② scores were pretty bad, but my enthusiasm, commitment and hard work were impressive. And becau I had to work harder than the other kids, I had lf-confidence.”
That lf-confi dence asrted itlf on the golf cour, where he was a member of his public high school’s golf team. When the school played Stanford University’s freshman squad, Schwab shot 36 in his first nine holes. He won the notice of Stanford’s coach — and eventually landed a college scholarship.
After completing his undergraduate degree in 1959, he stayed on to go to business school. “It cost $335 a quarter. My dad helped, but I had to work. I worked after school, on weekends and during the summers.” Schwab was employed by an insurance company, a bank, a financial-rvices firm. “They were a lot of junk jobs, but I made it a point to really understand the mechanics of the financial-
rvices world.”
He also learned the tricks that unscrupulous brokers ud. “I saw the bribes they gave clients to get the big, fat commissions,” he said. He “could e the nasty underpinnings at the very beginning. There was a great deal of ‘inside information’, most of which wasn’t worth its weight in feathers.” Many followed the “363 banker” formula: They paid custome
rs at a rate of 3 percent, loaned them money at a rate of 6 percent and were out of the office by
Within a year of graduating from business school and getting a job as a financial analyst, Schwab experienced his first stock market crash in 1962. He said to his boss, “All of our大漠穷秋 customers have lost a lot of money in this crash. We ought to be sympathetic to their positions. We ought not to charge the people for this quarter.”
Schwab’s boss was silent for about 30 conds, then said, “You’re fi red.”
Married and with a young child at home, Schwab couldn’t afford to be unemployed. “I came back殚精竭虑的读音 the next day, tail between my 钱湖天地legs, and said, ‘Look, I really need this job.’ ”
Deal Honestly with Customers
His boss rehired him, but Schwab continued to struggle to reconcile the conflict between doing what was good for business and doing what was right for the customer. For him, the ultimate test was whether an offering was something he would have his pare
nts invest in.
毛泽东诗词读后感 Schwab had also come to realize a simple truth: “Clients will pay you money even when things are bad, as long as you tell them the truth.”
That determination to deal honestly with customers became Schwab’s guiding principle when he started his own discount brokerage business in 1974. He had just four employees and $75,000 in loans from family and friends.
Four years later, Schwab made a decision that was critical to the company’s growth: He replaced the firm’s boring, just-the-facts advertiments with tho using his own image. “Putting my picture in the advertising put a face to the business. People felt there was a real person behind the whole thing, someone they could trust.”
Results quintupled, then quintupled again. With each development, from the mass marketing of mutual funds in the 1980s to the Internet boom of the 1990s, Schwab’s company came up with innovations to further empower individual investors. But the basic 黄瓜咸菜的做法
impetus stayed the same: “I just wanted to lower the prices and get better outcomes for investors,” he says.
