Click this link to listen to the podcast.

Highlights include:

• Great operations can be achieved when you have a collaborative and productive relationship between the operations team and the investment team. Also, the ability to anticipate and plan ahead is a skill and something that is seen in great operations divisions.

• A common misnomer is that your value to the vendor is solely based on your contract size. There are billion-dollar endowment offices that have model relationships with their technology provider because they offer value in different ways such as being early adopters of new features and beta testers on new product functionality.

• What investment operations needs are people who are not just going to identify problems, but also identify solutions and that they use quantitative data to bring forth your arguments.

• The number one trait to look for in an operations hire is problem solving skills. Operations needs to be comfortable with change and needs to be adaptable.

• We’ve seen an enormous evolution in this industry over the past 10 years on tools to improve the accuracy of the data, but it really does still rely on people or ownership as well as the downstream processes to review the data.

• The best thing we can leave our clients with is education. What we are doing at Union Park is changing the trajectory of these clients’ operations. So we’re not just trying to go up on the same line of the graph and get to a higher point. We’re trying to move the entire line graph up a notch.