An explanation of GCI's Core Values
GCI’s Observations #3
As the Chief Executive Officer of Georgetown Collegiate Investors, I’ve made it one of my main goals to enhance and restructure how the company supports both its employees and its investors by way of strengthening our company culture.
From looking at our website, you may have noticed on our “About” page that our company’s core values are front and center. Identifying and establishing these six specific values over the last few months have been an initiative focused on serving our analysts and our investors to the best of our ability. These core values encapsulate our vision and shape our culture at GCI, establishing both internal and external advantages for the company moving forward. Reflecting on what makes us who we are has been an enlightening process, and it is my belief that GCI is all the better for it. Imbuing our work with these values and recruiting analysts who help us to more deeply exhibit these values are imperative for GCI’s new mission statement: “Invest in yourself, invest in opportunity.” Here are our six core values.
Diversity
At Georgetown Collegiate Investors, we highly value the diversity of our members and of our portfolio. We firmly believe that building a diverse and inclusive class of analysts makes us a stronger company and is critical to maintaining our competitive advantage in the student investment space. We applaud the increasing number of forward-thinking organizations based on Georgetown’s campus that have pledged to support diversity and inclusion. We welcome individuals from many different backgrounds as it not only enriches our community, but it is also proven to drive engagement, innovation, and overall performance. Furthermore, the diversity of our members extends to academic backgrounds and schools of thought. GCI boasts members from all four of Georgetown’s schools across all different kinds of majors. We believe that this diversity of thought contributes highly to our investment strategies. Diversity also extends beyond membership to our portfolio, as GCI is proud of its diverse investment portfolio spread across six sectors to maximize upside potential and downside protection.
Curiosity
We believe that a natural curiosity is paramount to our company culture and investment strategies, as it results in enhanced idea generation and stronger connections for our teams. At GCI, we are always asking questions, aching to learn more, thinking outside the box to come up with creative solutions to the problems we face. To maintain our best-in-class portfolio performance, we have to be able to identify unorthodox investment opportunities and trends that others are not seeing — to do so, we embrace the curiosity of our analysts to research any and every thing that interests them in the investing space. We never settle for what we don’t know; instead, we never stop learning and exploring new ideas. Considering fresh perspectives is how businesses thrive, and it’s how we leverage the best of Georgetown University’s students to keep making strong annual returns.
Integrity
Integrity is fundamental to our culture as we strive to keep honesty and trust at the forefront of the relationships between our analysts, our directors, and our investors. We strive to do our work responsibly and maintain transparency between all members of the company, keeping open lines of communication between employees on all rungs of our ladder. We are proud to earn each other’s trust through the consistency of our actions and modelling the principled behavior set out in each of our six values. As GCI’s employees are all undergraduate students of Georgetown University, we all embody the core Jesuit values of our campus with the highest of integrity and imbue those values into our work and development. It is also through integrity that we can fully examine our own success and failures to extract and identify opportunity for improvement.
Impact
Thanks to the testimony of various alum and current members, Georgetown Collegiate Investors is proud to consistently make an impact on its members. We put the development of our analysts first, by providing them with crucial resources and training them in finance, valuation, and presentation skills to prepare them for the careers that lie ahead of them. We benefit our members, and our members benefit and impact the company as a whole by exhibiting our core values, making strong investment decisions, and contributing to our community by helping each other to excel. Everyone in GCI, from first semester junior analysts to the CEO, has the same ability to contribute new ideas for the improvement of the fund and its strategies. We also impact the world by developing the leaders of tomorrow and by engaging in responsible ESG investing.
Teamwork
We always put the team before individual performance as we believe we can accomplish our greatest feats only by working as a team. Close collaboration is vital to human accomplishment at all levels. It improves our community and our efficiency , as members work together towards common goals and constantly provide each other feedback on the quality of output during all stages of the process. With multiple perspectives involved and taking advantage of everyone’s strength, the result is always more robust. Within our sectors, our analysts are specialized in a variety of components that contribute to the investment process, from financial valuation modelling to strong qualitative idea generation — capitalizing on our analysts’ different strengths and bringing them together enables us to put together exceptional investment pitches and make defensible decisions to continually improve our returns. Our close-knit teams are greater than the sum of their parts.
Performance
At the end of the day, all of our core values contribute to our exceptional performance, which we value as a reflection of our company. Our portfolio performance has been strong since the fund’s inception in the 1990s, and has beaten the S&P index consistently for the last decade. That strong performance of our investments has been thanks to the executional excellence of our analysts’ performance, always striving to put their best foot forward in researching, presenting, and investing in the best investment opportunities in line with our fund’s strategy. We also believe that the performance of our alum, having worked within GCI during their time at Georgetown and now moving on to work in some of the most prestigious companies in the world, is an example of how we continue to promote excellent performance even beyond the Hilltop. GCI is a very meritocratic environment: our analysts know what determines success in their roles and they are rewarded or recognized for their achievements. Our high-performance culture leads our company to achieve superior results by setting clear goals, defining responsibilities, and encouraging ourselves to continually grow and reinvent ourselves.
These values are what make us GCI and we weave these aspects of our culture into our everyday lives as well. At GCI, analysts are getting the chance to invest in themselves by developing crucial skills for their future and having fun doing so alongside a diverse community of smart people. And our investors get the chance to invest in a strong opportunity to capitalize on a strong company culture that contributes to strong investment returns each year.
Continue the conversation with Eman at ceo@georgetowninvest.com or eqr2@georgetown.edu