Profiles in Business
In Business and Life, He’s Faced Peaks and Valleys
Michael Matty, president of St. Germain Investment Management
“So you’re more likely to run into an astronaut than you are someone who’s done this,” said Matty, who will attempt to join a very exclusive club in May, when he takes on the highest peak in the world, Mount Everest.
He leaves for Nepal in late March, and is training hard for this latest assignment (much more on that later), which is the culmination of a quest that started rather informally and innocuously only about five years ago, when he ventured to central Africa to take on Mount Kilimanjaro, or ‘Kili,’ as those who have scaled it — or tried to — are given to calling it.
“I met a guy on that trip who started talking about these seven summits and how he was going to try and do it,” said Matty, president of Springfield-based St. Germain Investment Management. “But he never did — he climbed Kili, and that was it — his first and last. But I became interested with the prospect of doing it, and now I’m just one big step away.”
Indeed, over the course of the three and a half years or so after Kili, Matty climbed, in succession, Elbrus (Europe); Vinson (Antarctica); McKinley, or Denali, as it’s often called (North America); Kosciuszko/Carstensz (Australia); and Asconcagua (South America), the highest peak not in the Himalayas, which he scaled roughly a year ago.
Each of these mountains was challenging in some, and often several, ways, he said, listing everything from the extreme cold and remoteness of Antarctica to the long travel times to Australia, to the high and unpredictable winds in Alaska — and seemingly every other stop.
The six climbs, and the myriad others at far-less-celebrated peaks, including Mount Washington in New Hampshire, provide Matty with extremely stern tests of his strength, endurance, and patience, which he enjoys. But they also provide something else — much-needed breaks from his day job, or, to be more specific, from the intense attention to national and world events that is needed to do it properly.
“The funny thing about the investment world is that almost everything has a potential impact,” he explained. “So you say, ‘I’m tired of thinking about the news and what’s going on in Egypt and things like that — the heck with this, I’m going to turn on the Weather Channel.’ Well, the Weather Channel’s talking about a hurricane moving into the Gulf, so you start thinking about oil rigs and what’s going to happen there.
“Your mind never gets away from it if you’ve done this forever,” he continued. “That’s one of the nice things about mountain climbing — it gives you a break to get away from it; you don’t know what’s going on anymore. Everything you’re doing is physical as opposed to what I do on the job, which is all mental.”
For this, the latest installment of its Profiles in Business series, BusinessWest talks with Matty about his work, but mostly what he does away from it, and especially that seventh summit. He still has some rigorous training to do, but believes he’s ready, physically and mentally. And while he has plenty of inspiration, he’s bringing along a little more — a decades-old picture of his brother, Billy, who passed away unexpectedly last year at the age of 48, which he intends to leave at the roof of the world.
“It‘s a shot of him when he was a little kid; it was sitting on my father’s dresser for decades,” he continued. “I asked him if I could have it … I said, ‘if I need one little extra push on summit day, that might be it — I need to get his picture up there.’”
On a Grand Scale
As he talked with BusinessWest on a Friday in mid-February, a somewhat casually dressed Matty was prepping for a weekend trip to Mount Washington. This peak in the Presidential Range of the White Mountains is, at 6,288 feet, just over one-fifth the height of Mount Everest.
But scaling it, something Matty’s done more than 50 times by his estimation, is effective training for May’s climb, especially in the nasty weather that was predicted for that weekend.
There is no shortage of weather on Mount Washington, Matty continued, adding that temperatures in mid-winter are just above or, quite often, well below freezing. And that’s without wind, which is almost always howling. In fact, until very recently, Mount Washington proudly held the record for highest wind gust directly measured at the earth’s surface (231 mph), and it regularly hits three digits at the summit.
Matty says it’s all but impossible to climb when the winds get above 60 mph, and that it gets dicey when the gusts get to even half that level, considering that one is on a mountain — and sometimes on a ledge only a few feet wide — with up to 100 pounds on his or her back.
“It’s much more difficult than most can fathom even with a 20- or 40-mph wind,” he said. “I say to people, ‘imagine trying to stand on the roof of a car going down the highway at 65 miles an hour — that’s what a 65 mile-per-hour breeze is. Except on the highway, it’s a steady breeze going in one direction; up there, what you’re getting is wild gusts that are changing direction potentially every second or two as it’s bouncing off of something or shifting. You’re bracing in one direction, and all of the sudden the wind is pushing from that direction. That’s one of the reasons why Mount Washington is such a great training ground.
“We had some really windy days on Asconcagua,” he recalled. “You’d be lying in the tent, and you’d suddenly hear this sound like a freight train rolling down the mountain, and you knew that in another five or 10 seconds you’d be pummeled by a high, high wind. So you’d try to stretch yourself out to the corners of the tent so the wind can’t get underneath the tent. Meanwhile, the side of the tent is getting bent over, and you’re waiting for the poles to snap and hope you don’t get impaled on one of the poles. It’s a worrisome event when you get in those high winds.
There are many things about mountain climbing — especially summits like the seven — that people who have never done anything like this couldn’t easily comprehend, he continued, citing, as another example, the cold encountered in Antarctica.
When he was climbing there, Matty told BusinessWest, the sun was out 24 hours a day, “and it’s just sort of circling around the horizon. And when the sun drops behind one of the mountains … the temperature gets down to about minus-40, and in a hurry. One minute you’re standing there feeling pretty comfortable in just one layer, and then, you’re eating dinner and the sun creeps behind that mountain, and 10 minutes later, the temperature has dropped 30 or 40 degrees; it’s like being in the desert — there’s nothing to hold the heat in. That’s when it’s time to get in the sleeping bag and try to stay warm until the sun pops out on the other side.”
There’s also the remoteness factor to deal with on that continent, he went on.
“Vinson is really in the middle of nowhere,” he explained. “There’s a Russian cargo plane that drops you off on a natural ice runway; it’s a miles-long patch of rock-hard ice that runs parallel to the mountain range. It’s a big, big, big plane, and when it hits the runway, you can’t brake, so you roll for miles after you hit the ground.
“And when that plane takes off, they can’t land again until the winds off the mountains die down,” he continued. “You might call and say, ‘we’re ready to be picked up on your next flight in — but their next flight in … the winds may not shift for two, three, or four weeks. It’s not so bad if you’re prepared for it, but if you have someone with a medical condition, knowing you may be stuck for several weeks can be a real problem. When you watch that plane take off, you know it’s your last link with anything, anywhere — and the anywhere is a four- or five-hour flight to a remote town in South America.”
Matty has compiled all these memories, and many more, in a fairly short career in mountain climbing. He told BusinessWest that, since his youth, he’s always been a hiker — he thought about trekking across the Appalachian Trail and was told that he should do so when he was young, but didn’t — and kept active with that activity into his 40s.
It was at the invitation of Paul Valickus, CEO at St. Germain, that Matty took on what would become the first of the seven ascents — Kilimanjaro — in 2006. In the end, Valickus didn’t go on that trip, but Matty did, and he recalls those conversations with the fellow climber who introduced him to the concept of the seven summits.
“He never went on to do any of the others, but I was getting intrigued talking to him,” Matty recalled. “I said, tongue-in-cheek, ‘geez, there’s only six more after this.’ But then I started thinking about it, and said, ‘Kili’s doable, Asconcagua, the one in South America, is doable, the one in Australia’s doable — long flight, but it’s doable, the one in Russia’s doable, and McKinley, well, that’s doable, but it’s a tough mountain.”
Taking Stock of the Challenge
While staring down mountains over the past several years, Matty, like all those in the financial-services realm, has coped with peaks and valleys of a different kind.
Indeed, while Matty has stories of enduring wind, cold, frostbite, sunburn in strange places (like the tongue and the roof of the mouth), and snow-bridge-hidden crevasses, he has similarly harrowing tales of trying to calm panicked investors in the fall of 2008, when the Dow plunged below 7,000 and the phrase Great Recession was working its way into the lexicon.
It might be an oversimplification, but Matty seems to take the same approach to investment-consultation work that he does to mountain climbing — intense preparation, knowing his subject matter, and looking at what’s directly ahead as well as the bigger picture.
His career in the financial-services sector began in the mid-’80s with Phoenix Mutual in Hartford. There, he took part in a training program that provided exposure to all aspects of the business, from real estate to fixed-income; from high-yield products to stocks, the facet he liked best.
He became an analyst in the stock department and wound up running one of the mutual funds there. When Phoenix started moving some of the fund managers out of Hartford to other locations (something he wasn’t interested in), Matty left to start a company that wrote investment research for hedge-fund managers, mutual-fund managers, and others handling investments.
And while doing that for five years, he said he kept getting phone calls from broker friends about a firm in Springfield (St. Germain) that he should look into.
“I got four or five calls saying I should go talk to those people, and I eventually did, just so when I got calls seven, eight, nine, and 10, I could say, ‘I already talked to them,’” he recalled, adding that his visit led to the kind of opportunity — and lifestyle, away from the congestion and commutes of New York and Boston — that he was looking for.
Matty said St. Germain has a unique (for this industry, anyway) compensation formula, in which people are not paid by commission, a system he supports wholeheartedly.
“People will respond to whatever incentive you pay them, and I’ve seen that in some of the other places I’ve worked,” he explained. “So if you’re going to pay people commissions, you’re going to get people who are going to try to sell product, not people who are going to say, ‘I want to sit down and take care of people the best way I can.’
“That’s a broad overstatement, but there’s a good deal of truth to that,” he continued. “Instead, what I want to compensate people for is taking care of clients, so I say to everyone here who’s talking with clients, ‘every potential client who’s coming in is your potential parent or grandparent — do the right thing for them.”
This approach has succeeded, he said, in helping the company keep clients for the long haul, and properly serve them through the many ups and downs that mark a lifetime of investing and managing money.
“When someone comes in who shouldn’t be in stocks, for example, and the focus should be on ways to pare down debt as this person approaches retirement, we want to send them out with a laundry list of things that they should be doing on the financial-planning side that don’t include a single thing that puts money in our pocket.
“And that’s OK,” he continued. “We’ve been around a long time. We’re not worried about paying the light bills. We don’t need to get every dollar out of every client that comes in the door; what we need to do is treat people well and keep clients for a long time.”
Face Time
Matty knows that people have died trying to climb each of the seven summits — and a good number have lost their lives attempting the challenge now awaiting him.
“Historically, for every 10 people who summit Everest, you’ve had one mortality,” he said, “but it’s much better than that now — you’ve got better gear, people are in better shape … there’s lot of reasons why that number has gone down.”
Still, he has filled out the body-disposal form that is part and parcel to getting a climbing permit for the summit at Everest. It asks him to pick from one of several options with regard to what to do with his body if — and this is a rather large if — it can be recovered should tragedy strike. (He chose cremation in nearby Katmandu.)
“When you climb Everest, you see the bodies,” he said, adding that retrieval is logistically difficult, and people would often have to put their own lives at risk for such recovery exercises, so usually they don’t attempt them.
But Matty — and apparently his colleagues at St. Germain — can maintain a sense of humor about this subject. “They were getting a pool going in the office, so if I came back, they’d be really happy, and if not, there would be a consolation prize,” he joked. “They were going to try to get a few million dollars in insurance on me, but no one would write it.”
Meanwhile, training for the Everest climb is a far more serious matter.
“Right now, I’m working super hard because it’s coming up fast,” he said, adding that he works out with personal trainers four mornings a week at Attain Performance in East Longmeadow, and also uses a so-called versa-climber, what he described as “an endless ladder,” at home.
“The trainers are high-tech in terms of their knowledge of things,” he continued, adding that they’ve worked out with minor-league baseball players and other professional athletes. “When you’re trying to work on a specific muscle group or exercise to mimic something you would do on the mountain, they really know which buttons to push to activate those muscles and build up a lot of strength and endurance, which is what this is all about.”
Many of his workout routines at the gym, from squats to sessions on the treadmill or elliptical machines, are taken on while carrying a pack containing a 50-pound bag of sand, he continued.
When asked if he was worried about a letdown if and when Everest is conquered — feelings of ‘what do I do now?’ — Matty said there will still be plenty of challenges left, both personally and professionally.
“There’s still a lot of interesting stuff out there, like Mount Rainier in Washington State and the Matterhorn in Switzerland,” he said, “And, heck, I’ll be getting too old for this stuff soon anyway.”
Matty told BusinessWest that there isn’t much official recognition that comes with joining those who have scaled the seven summits.
“You get your name on the Web site … and that’s about it,” he said, referring to a list of the members of this exclusive club. “That, and some bragging rights, I guess.”
For scaling Everest, though, he gets to write his name on the wall in the famous Rum Doodle bar and restaurant in Katmandu — and he gets to eat there free for the rest of his life.
All that — and the chance to give his brother’s picture a new home, one with the best view on the planet — is more than enough reward for him.
George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]
