Business with us for any selling and buying in any time and anywhere. You don’t have to work on Wall Street to work in finance. Heck, you don’t even have to work in New York City. Just ask Morgan Vandagriff. The 2002 Wharton grad is a Wealth Manager at SEI Investments outside of Philadelphia. “Philadelphia was my first choice,” he says, “and my second choice was anywhere but New York.” Having grown up in a town of 6,000 people, Morgan appreciated his time in Philly and Penn so much that he is making a life for himself in the City of Brotherly Love, handling the finances of big-name executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes—some of whom have an easier time controlling the court than their cash flow. But don’t think he’ll divulge who’s dropping their Benjamins on too much bling. That’s top secret. But if you ask nicely, he might drop a little financial advice. How did you become interested in business? At what age? Around the time I was a freshman in high school, my grandfather, who was an attorney in the securities industry—which I knew nothing about as a 15-year-old—basically set up a stock market simulation for me to play. He gave me a bucket of pretend money and told me to invest it, and of course, I had to keep track of what I was doing and keep good records. For every pretend dollar that I made in my portfolio, he would give me a pretend penny. And it was a big enough portfolio that there was significant money for a freshman in high school. You know, I think one time he paid me $400. I felt like I was fabulously wealthy. That’s what first got me interested, one thing led to another, and before long I was subscribing to the Wall Street Journal in high school. A little later in my high school career, I had become so interested in business that I started an investment newsletter. Seriously? Yeah, it was called the Vandagriff Report. Who were your subscribers? Mainly my grandfather and his friends [laughs] and a few people at school. I used to tell people that I had a nationwide subscriber base—because my grandfather lived in California. It was nothing big—but not long ago I went back and looked at an old copy of it, and it looked fairly professional. I sent in a copy with my application to Wharton, and I like to think that it helped. Did you put the entire thing together? Yes I did. I was the editor, I was the salesman, I was the proofreader. Did you sell ads? No I didn’t. No. [laughs] I sold very expensive subscriptions. It was $5 for three months. I didn’t want to sell long subscriptions because I didn’t know how long I’d be doing it for. So how long did it last? I did it all the way until graduation from high school. Once I got to Penn, I didn’t have the time anymore. It was a good experience. It was about three years. That’s actually more successful than most magazines. Yeah, well, I didn’t have much overhead and I didn’t try to live off the proceeds. [laughs] Why did you pick Wharton? I grew up in an extremely small town in the southwest corner of Missouri, really in the middle of nowhere. My high school at the time didn’t even have any AP courses, or anything like that, and they had never sent anyone to Penn before, let alone Wharton. They hadn’t even sent anyone to the Ivy League for years. So it was a dream of mine to attend Wharton, but I wasn’t sure it would ever come to pass. I submitted my application; I was hopeful. In answer to your question, Why Wharton, my response at the time would have been Why me. If they were going to let me in, of course I was going to go. How was the transition from a small community to an urban, Ivy League university? Actually, it was great. I kept pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Although I had my childhood in a small town, we weren’t completely country bumpkins. My parents had been married in Chicago and lived in LA for a while, and they instilled in me a desire to move to a large city. So coming to Philadelphia and being surrounded by so many smart kids, that was great. The transition was really enjoyable, rather than being stressful. The class work was far harder than I was used to, but I just double-downed and made it through. How did you get to SEI Investments? I have been with SEI Investments since the beginning. I’ve done a couple of different things for them. They recruited on campus at Wharton through the same career services process through which most Wharton students get their jobs. What about them stood out? From a practical perspective they were in Philadelphia, and I not only wanted to stay in Philadelphia, but I was actively trying not to be in New York. Once I got to know the company, I saw that they are very entrepreneurial. What type of responsibilities did you have? I started out helping to design investment portfolios for our clients, and now I’ve moved to a position where I’m overseeing all of our banking credit services, but most of my focus is on wealth management. What is an average day like for you? The days vary dramatically. Although I think they are all interesting, some of them would probably bore you. [laughs] Some interesting things that could potentially happen on a given day… I work to generate financial advice for a prominent athlete in the NBA or a prominent executive who lives across the country. We have a nationwide client base and a professional athlete practice. Really the only thing that our clients have in common is that they are very wealthy. Do you ever get to meet them? Well…the world of wealth management is a lot different than other industries. You know when you call your cell phone company, the person that works with you, the customer, is one of the lowest-paid people around. It’s quite the reverse in wealth management. Those people that deal directly with the client are our highest-paid, most experienced employees. Someone on my level would not be doing that. I’ve met some of our clients, but I would say it’s just by coincidence. What are some of the specific things that you do for clients? Getting an athlete a mortgage, helping them figure out what their priorities are. Athletes are not always good money managers. We had to float one of our clients an emergency $20,000 loan after he completely ran out of cash. He had nothing left, his credit cards were maxed out. We scrambled, and, with notice of a day or so, were able to get him a $20,000 advance, which is really nothing to these people, but it was enough to tide him over. Athletes are just one of the interesting groups of people that we work with. You name it, if a certain group of people has money, we probably work with them. I’m assuming you can’t say who your clients are. Unfortunately, no. They pay us a whole lot of money to keep that confidential. Do you ever get star-struck or want to brag to your friends that you work with XYZ player? Not really. I promise I’m not being jaded. Two things were exciting at the beginning: First was the amount of money that I was dealing with. We are talking vast sums. The second was the identity of some of these folks. It’s neat; obviously it’s something I bring up first in conversations. But in terms of day-to-day work, I’m surrounded with people that are not really that impressed with it because they are also knee-deep in it. From a financial standpoint, it’s just like our other clients who earn a lot of money and need to prepare for the future. They’re not so incredibly distinctive when you really get involved. Since you’re helping people with their money all the time, do your friends hit you up for financial advice? Yeah. [laughs] Yes, all the time. Do you willingly give it or are you like, ‘no more money talk’? No, no. I do enjoy my job, and I feel like I have an extremely good work/life balance. Because of that, I don’t feel this tremendous urge to put my work behind me when I leave the office, and I am more than happy to discuss things like that with anyone who wants to have that discussion with me. So would you say you have a cool job? I think my job is very cool, but maybe for a different reason than I would have thought coming in. It’s interesting to work with really wealthy families, but that’s not what gets me out of bed in the morning. The coolness factor is helping these people with very complex lives get things in order. Some of the executives that we work with or the successful entrepreneurs—they have really inspiring stories, and it’s neat to rub shoulders with those people and see how they think and see how they react to things. Do you see yourself heading down the entrepreneurial path? My perfect plan would be to stay at SEI for a good long time until I have a lot of capital saved that I could then use to start my own business. Or, an alternative would be to be given a lot of stock options at SEI. Then it would be like owning a part of SEI, and I could get the benefits of being a business owner that way as well. Any advice for aspiring business people? My advice to students would be to understand that there are a lot of things you don’t know yet—a lot of things you don’t know about yourself that you’ll learn in college. You’ll need to learn about the real world before you can make an absolute decision on what you want to do. And that’s not to stress them out. That’s meant to let them relax. Most of these important life decisions don’t need to be made any time soon. Calm down. Take a breath. Enjoy campus. Enjoy college. And cross those bridges when you get to them.
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