Interview with Mark Casady: Chairman & CEO of LPL Financial Services Talks About the Challenges and Opportunities that Come with Being Number One; Highlights Technology, Culture and Continuing Efforts to Improve Economics and Business Processes for Financial Advisors

Over the course of two lengthy conversations with <strongMark Casady I came to understand more than a few things about the man who leads the nation’s largest independent broker-dealer. Many business leaders have a genuine passion for their work. Casady’s passion is palpable, and it is, in part, reflected in his efforts to maintain the tradition of innovation, technology-leadership and meritocracy introduced by LPL’s founder, Todd Robinson.

“Balanced” and “humble” are two additional adjectives I would say appropriately describe Casady. I came away from our conversations feeling that he is a man who, in a quiet, confident manner, clearly recognizes his strengths and talents, but is equally aware of his limits.

I also came away with the impressions that no one in LPL’s management structure takes success for granted, that there is a continuing process of re-invention in place, and that the best interests of the firm’s customers is always priority one.

m-casady_cropMacchia: Mark, I appreciate you sharing your time with me. Although you are a very well known figure in financial services, I’d like to start by asking you to explain your title, role and responsibilities at LPL?

Casady: Absolutely. I’m the Chairman and CEO of LPL and have been since the end of ’05, when I assumed the chairman’s title. I was CEO, I believe a year before that, and came in as COO about five and a half years ago. So that’s the title and a little bit of the timeline. And responsibilities are sort of typical for a chairman and CEO; setting the strategy for the firm, and determining a whole range of what I would think of as operating principles and goals for the company, even in conjunction with the Board of Directors and the shareholders. And then execution against the plan that we set forth.

Macchia: In terms of questions I don’t quite know where to begin, I’ve been so much looking forward to this conversation. But I’ve got some down-and-dirty sort of issues that I want to ask you about, and let me just sort of peel them off if I can. Number one is this: with the frequency of compliance sweeps and the severity of the fines that we’ve seen levied, and how each has been increasing, has this caused LPL to change or adapt its business model in any way?

Casady: Our founder, Todd Robinson, was always very innovative. And so he built a culture here that we very, very much try to make sure is alive and well and growing. And part of that culture is about flexibility and trying new things. So he just built a very open place for dialogue, a very open place for trying new things.

The other thing that he did was really build a meritocracy, and really kept, for his 20-year tenure here, what I would describe as a real significant pruning shear. Meaning he looked at the tree and said, “I feel a little deadwood going up there; I’m going to trim that.” Or, “I don’t see a branch quite as strong as I’d like it be, I’m going to reinforce it or change it in some way.” And those are legacies that allow us, I think, to be quite flexible and innovative when it comes to changes in the industry or changes in our business, and thoughtful about how to approach them. This really comes from that core culture.

Macchia: This culture that you talk about emanated originally from the leadership of Todd, a mantle that you’ve inherited, obviously. You’re acknowledged to be an exceptional leader and CEO.

Casady: And who said that? My mother? You talked to my mom?

Macchia: Yes, I have. But what I want to know is, what you define as the component parts of a great leader.

Casady: That’s a good question. I think that the first part is to not confuse brains with a bull market, to be blunt. And that everything in life has a rhythm to it. Whether it’s sports or whether it’s a business situation or whether it’s a relationship, there’s a rhythm to these things. There’s a rhythm to business. And I think success in part is about understanding that rhythm, that’s a natural part of the business, and understanding the way to know when you’re in the right vein of that rhythm and when you’re not.

It doesn’t mean that you should just be set to the forces of the wind. You can definitely change a rhythm to a business; you can change a rhythm to a cycle. But there are certain cycles you can’t change. We here at LPL cannot affect the American economy much. Inasmuch as I expect we could, we really can’t. We can’t make the stock market go up and we can’t make it go down much. It is important for a leader is to understand when they’re in the right rhythm with the forces that are beyond their control.

Macchia: And that implies, as you said, a recognition of one’s limits.

Casady: Yes, exactly. I think the second thing that’s really important in a great leader is humility. And I will say that I try every day to make sure that as a leader I guide with humility. There was a time when I thought that with enough muscle and brain power or just sheer nerve and raw will you could change anything. But as I mentioned earlier as you mature as leader it really is about being aware of the rhythm of the business and the opportunities that presents.

The CEOs that you and I might have grown up knowing, the Jack Welches and others — were known as very dynamic leaders who were very strong willed and really commanded, even in the military sense. I think today we manage companies in very different ways. I think we have to ask people to serve and we have to think about ourselves as leading a fairly massive effort towards specific goals and you’ve got to help people see the goal, envision it and want to be part of it.

Macchia: I think that’s a great insight. Notwithstanding the importance of humility and the coordination of a massive effort, that massive effort at LPL has led to it being the number one firm. And it occurs to me there must be many advantages with being number one. But I’m wondering, what are some of the disadvantages?

Casady: That’s a good question. One disadvantage is that you can believe that you’re number one, for some reason, beyond the day to day work you do. We’ve been number one for, I think, 12 years now. When I arrived five years ago, what I said to the management team was, “Hey, you’ve been number one for seven years. Pat yourself on the back and forget about it.” Because if you let yourself fall into the belief that that somehow gives you a privilege in the marketplace, you somehow fall into the belief that you don’t have to work as hard because you’re number one, you are sadly mistaken.

And so the downside is that it tends to foster a lack of humility and it tends to foster a comfort that really masks the reality of it, which is being number one attracts a lot of attention and it attracts, therefore, a lot of imitators. And it demands a need to really be very constant and innovating and staying ahead of those people who are very close behind you. So you have to, I think, really be proud of the fact that you’re number one, but you’ve got to realize that it also makes you an easier target.

Macchia: After setting a record price multiple in your recent private equity buyout, do you feel that more firms are strategic takeover targets for LPL?

Casady: Well, I don’t think it really has to do with our price. I think our price is quite appropriate by any measure. I’ve done probably 22 or 23 transactions corporately, taking companies public. I’ve bought and sold them. I didn’t set out to do that 26 years ago in my career, I sort of happened into it. And so I’ve gotten some deal experience.
I think what really happened was that people realized that it was a moment in time. 2005 was a moment in time, we’re past the bubble, we’re in a different phase, and there must be something about LPL that’s different.

So conversations that we’ve been having for years with organizations about acquiring their B/Ds or how they were thinking about their business, I think really changed after that. Because they said there’s something different at LPL because TBG, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, and Hellman and Friedman, another one of the world’s largest private equity firms, paid this level of money which was quite different than what we all expected the company to be worth, and therefore they must be something different there.
And then when we explained to them, well, we’ve spent $525 million in technology in the last eight years, they go, “Oh, we’ve spent ten.” And so you can see that they start to get to the fundamentals, but then make them realize that unless they’re willing to make an investment in their technology and in their service and in their capabilities for their advisors, they’re fighting a losing battle.

Macchia: The idea of this duality of corporate personality seems to provide an enormous financial advantage in the sense that if you can acquire a firm at 1X GDC and make them worth 2X GDC, that’s a pretty good business strategy. You don’t disagree, I presume.

Casady: Actually, I do disagree. If your business strategy is to buy a business at 1X because your company gets a 2X multiple from the market, that’s not a good strategy at all because that’s just a rollup strategy. You’ve got no value by that. What you have to do is you have to be able to say, I can take a property that’s for sale at one time, I can do something to it that changes its characteristics to look like the rest of my business that’s worth 2X. It’s a completely different way of saying it. And I’m rather sensitive about it because I see a lot of companies that have rollup strategies. I’ve seen a lot of announcements in our business about people who are doing rollup purchases of RIA practices or rollup purchases of securities license professionals, and I think those strategies are ultimately doomed to strategic failure because they don’t change the value equation. They merely rely on inaccurate pricing from one level of the market to another.

Now, that’s not a strategy, that’s an arbitrage. And so when you look at the specific broker-dealers, we purchase them using this metaphor of 1X, whatever. And they will be worth 2X, whatever, they’re not worth that today because they need a significant investment in their technology and a significant investment in their capabilities for them to get to that point. And we think it’ll probably take us a good three years, maybe two years, to get them to the point in which we say, hey, we’ve done the blood, sweat, and tears work to get them to have an environment in which their advisors can grow their businesses and be even more successful.

Macchia: Mark, what was it about LPL that created the realization that technology was going to be so important in the future?

Casady: I think we had a seminal vision by our founder and by his president, Dave Butterfield. Todd and Dave put every nickel back in this company up until they sold it in 2005. So they never took, what I’ve discovered, any kind of significant money out of the business until they did the transaction. And that’s why we’ve invested literally hundreds of millions of dollars in technology. And the logic that Todd and Dave used was that it would make the profits just that much more efficient, so that he would sometimes joke about it by saying, “Well, I’m just too cheap. I don’t want to hire 100 people to have to do the work that, with technology, we could do with 10 people.” And if you have 100 people, as good as they are, they’re going to have an error rate, whereas a straight-through process for processing a trade is going to be 100% accurate if it was entered accurately in the first place.

Macchia: Your answer implies the question: Can a small broker-dealer reasonably compete and survive well today?

Casady: Well, I think in business, it doesn’t matter whether it’s broker-dealers or whether it’s steel– steel is probably a bad example– in most businesses, there comes a time in the maturity cycle for that sector in which something happens, and that is that the big get bigger and the small stay very focused in the world, and the middle-sized companies are the ones that get squeezed. And that’s the phase we’re in for broker-dealers today.

We were in that phase that money managers where in probably ten years ago, and that industry really consolidated. People say that the money management industry didn’t consolidate; I argue no, no, it consolidated. It created some mammoth giant players. The difference is it has a very vibrant small firm sector because it’s an easy business to get in to. And I’d argue broker-dealers are probably somewhat the same in that if you follow that logic that any industry is going to have the very large and then the very small, then the small broker-dealers can certainly do fine. And that might be defined as a broker-dealer with like five people in it, or a broker/dealer with 100 advisors in it, because there’s something about that relationship set or their physical location that makes it a unique offering for them, and that’s their distinction.

They won’t be able to distinguish themselves on technology or capabilities, because that will be too expensive. And so for people who say, “Hey, I want that relationship type of feel in that kind of setting,” or, “I’m with my buddies who I used to be an employee with somewhere, and that’s what’s most important to me,” then I’m sure that model will be fine. And particularly with technology and service companies, scale matters a lot. Therefore, scale allows you to do something we call the virtual circle.
The virtual circle is the way we explained it to the private equity firms in ’05. For instance, if we create a technology like iDoc, which basically images all paper in your office as an advisor, then you kind of eliminate the paper. In every office, do you know what the most expensive space user is for them? It’s the paper file cabinets. And this is nerdy stuff, but this is the stuff we saw. Seriously, if you look at their footprint of their businesses, literally, the footprint of their physical space, and you look at their P&Ls, and if you look at dead space, which paper files are about as dead as they can go, it’s actually the biggest use of space in their office. It’s usually bigger than their conference rooms, it almost always equals to the size of an office that could be used for another investment professional or for a planner or whatever they want from there.

So we just simply set out to create a system that would allow them to eliminate that paper, make their life a lot easier because they can look at it online, and then you basically eliminate the need for the use of that space, which they can either take to their bottom line because they shrunk their space footprint, which is a real savings. Or B, they can put someone in that space who actually is productive and they can turn it into revenue. And that’s a simple example of making the investment through technology. The other thing that we do in the virtual circles is we say that by lowering prices, if you’re a believer in supply side economics, your volume goes up. And so the other explicit part of our virtual cycle is to give back to advisors lower prices. That allows them to be more competitive with their clients and with their prospective clients, and lo and behold, their business grows. And when their business grows, because we’ve made it more efficient through something like iDoc or through the lowering of prices, guess what happens to us? Our business grows, because we’re just reflecting of their success, and that new business grows and turns into profits, and therefore, that’s helping shareholders get paid . And then it all starts over again.

As employees, the fun we get to have is thinking about how we’re going to make that virtual circle happen. And really we’re excited by things like iDoc, and we’re excited by thinking about how pricing works and we’re excited by the growth of advisors and their success. So everybody gets a seat at the table there, whether you’re an employee, or a shareholder, or a client.

Macchia: What certainly is not mechanized or technological is something that I get from you in large volumes right now, and that’s passion. How does passion get communicated through an organization?

Casady: I think first of all, you have to start with yourself. I think the first part is you have to ask yourself whether you have a passion about your clients and the business you’re in. And if you have that passion, then you’ve got to want to find a bunch of other passionate people that you can share it with. And that’s what struck me about LPL. I knew LPL as a client from my previous frim, and when you talked to people at LPL, they were very passionate about what they did, they were very passionate about their clients.

In fact, if you come here and you’re not passionate about those things, you tend to stand out, and you’re not very successful. We’re really very zealous leaders, and guard this passionate view of what we’re doing.

Macchia: That’s really interesting to me. Let me shift gears, however. With all the talk we hear about explosive growth in RIAs, do you think there are challenges, going forward, of keeping a traditional BD relevant? And I’m not implying that LPL is a traditional BD. Rather, in general.

Casady: The question we ask ourselves is what do we think is going to happen in the world that will make us irrelevant? If you were starting the business today, David, and you were in our space, what would your business look like? Would it look like us, or would it look like something completely different? And we go through that exercise once a year and when we do our budget process, to ask ourselves where are we losing relevancy? Where are we gaining relevancy?
And out of that, we almost always come to some really interesting thoughts, and it’s out of that that led us to think about how we price advisory business. So I’ll give you a real tangible example of your point.

LPL has created the fourth largest mutual fund wrap in the country, and we’re the ninth largest advisory platform in the country, remembering we don’t do any fee-based brokerage. So if you took the fee-based brokerage out of the system, we’d probably be a little further up. But long-story short we’re successful. But if we looked at pricing, an advisor who’s here who would look like a registered investment advisor but isn’t, they’re part of our corporate RIA, they were paying us a premium at high levels that might be as much as $200,000 a year more than they would pay a custodian for the same work. Because we’ve said to ourselves, “Well, that’s not going to last,” right? Because those people are going to maximize their profits by finding ways to do this cheaper.
So we announced in August at our national conference that starting January 1st of ’08, we’re completely changing our pricing for our advisory platform in two ways.

One is we’re reducing our ticket charges for mutual funds so that basically 60% of all mutual fund trades will be free and about 20% will be at $4.50, and then the last 20% will be at $26.50. And it’s an enormous group of funds, something like 7,000 different funds that you can trade there. And then secondly, we’re going to give you an advisory fee rebate, so we charge an administrative fee for an advisory count so that now if you’re that same advisor who was paying us $200,000 more, they’re only going to pay us about $15,000 more than they would a custodian. So we’ve really leveled pricing at that end. And why would they even pay $15,000 more? Well, because we do everything for them. We provide all their client statements, and we provide E&O coverage. We do all the privacy mailings, so they basically outsource their operational activity to us for a very slight cost over and above a custodian.

If they were at the custodian, they would have to do all that work themselves, and it would be much more expensive for them to go to a custodian model. So I think what happened is, our view was that basically there’s a space in the market where these distinctions between a brokerage firm and a custodian firm are really only a result of a historical accident and not a result of economics.

Macchia: These changes that you mentioned are not the kinds that elicit protest from advisors.

Casady: Last year when he did it, the production bonus changed. It went up to 98%. It got 17 rounds of applause. This year it only got 12, so they’re pretty happy.

Macchia: I want to shift to one of two of my favorite topics. The first one is baby boomer retirement. I have been focused in two ways on this since early ’04. First, in my commercial life where Wealth2k develops solutions for advisors to use as compliant frameworks to attract and engage investors in opportunities like retirement income. But also in another part of my life where I’m a co-founder of a non-profit think tank called the Retirement Income Industry Association, which has been very significant in contributing to the industry in bringing together retirement businesses across silos and across industries to have the retirement income conversation in the view of a unified framework if you will. I wonder what you think about when you look at this 30-odd trillion dollar transference, the greatest movement of money we’ll ever see in our lifetimes. How do you see LPL’s role playing into that opportunity?

Casady: And the transference is that money going from retirement–

Macchia: Yeah, from accumulated retirement assets into distributed income.

Casady: It’s interesting, and of course, it’s been going on for a while. I mean, my mother did it 15 years ago when she retired. So I look at it and say what is really happening is a change in volume, not a change in type. And so it’s been happening since time began that people go from accumulation to distribution, and the question is, how do you do that at scale, and what makes you unique in the world?

So I think the first way we think about it is what products will get created by manufacturers that we think are interesting for our advisors to understand or represent sort of a different way of looking at this issue. And we think that there’s a lot of innovation occurring, particularly among the insurance companies around issues that are going to be relevant to people who are going through that change. And the second thing we look at is what should change about the way we think and the kind of service we provide in terms of information to our clients’ advisors that they can use for their clients, the end consumer? So what our statements look like, what kind of information is on statements, and so forth.

And what it’s led us to is to believe in what we describe as a wide spectrum approach, meaning that what you’re seeing is, again, sort of the pig of the pipeline go through, in which there’s still going to be a lot of people accumulating after this generation retires, but the reality is that pig of the pipeline gets a lot of attention, and therefore you have to have a competitive response to it. We actually think it’s probably a little early in the cycle and we’re trying to understand a little bit more of what others are doing. And then we will come along with some innovations that start to recognize, perhaps, a different way of communicating to end clients.and identifying the best products that are being created by manufacturers.So we’re still on the exploration phase of how we think that changes the dialogue and the work.

Macchia: Let me ask you this. If you were to accept the fact that most advisors over the past two or three decades have squarely been in the accumulation mindset, and if you further accept that the tax strategies and techniques of placing accumulative assets into a distribution mode require different strategies, and then what’s implied by that is that it requires a level of education for advisors that may not be supplied in the correct amounts right now. Is that something that you think about?

Casady: It’s interesting. Because I don’t see it quite that same way, David. What I see is– I spend a lot of time on our clients. And so I’ve been in the business a long time, and I can tell you that back in the mid-eighties, we worried about how to deal with families that were going through enormous wealth creation or were in the distribution phases, or were in the income generation phases because the work part of their life, or the wealth creation part of their life really had ended. But those obviously are very wealthy families, so it was clearly very upper-end.

But when I talk to advisors here, whether their practice is focused towards the wealthy or whether their practice is focused more towards the middle income American, the issues are the same. And the very best advisors here have dealt with this issue for a long time., And as I said, I think what’s changing is that, there is a bigger market opportunity to help them, because more of their book will be converting to the income payout phase, and therefore they can’t do at scale what they could have done at scale before. Instead of 5% of their book in that phase, it’s going to be 50% or 40%. But that’s what we see is an opportunity for us to help our advisors manage the complexity of having to create information on a larger scale. It’s what led us to put in the system called Wealth Vision, which is our partnership with eMoney. It is a very powerful tool because it is modular and it sets up the issues through financial planning methodology. It helps the clients think about the kind of income they will need in retirement.
So I always come back to people who are very good at this business already doing a reasonable amount of it, they just don’t have to do it at scale yet. And so it’s not a complex problem.

I agree with you that the challenge we face in any part of our business– and we think training is one of the four pillars under which we’re successful, so we say technology, service, investment research, and training are the four pillars that build LPL. And so in our training programs we focus on on providing programs that help advisors with retirement and legacy issues. We also need to help the manufacturers offer more of those educational opportunities and the things they’re doing as they bring advisors into their shops and so forth as a way to help the broader group maybe see some of that and understand how to manage it.

Macchia: You know, Mark, you mentioned pillars, before- which make perfect sense to me. I would argue that there’s another potential pillar to think about, which is communications and communications technology. Whereas so much effort has been applied so successfully in terms of the technology that makes the advisor’s life easier in all the ways that you’ve described, the same technology and demographics implies that we have to do more in terms of the technology that we forward project in the way we communicate with people, improving the experiences we deliver to the web browser, recognizing that people are delivering and learning in different ways, that we’re transitioning as a society less and less readers and more and more watchers. Is this something you think about, the idea of improving the forward projection of communications?

Casady: Yes, I agree. To be honest with you, I’m not sure how to visualize that, because that, to me, sounds like a technique.

Macchia: I guess what I’m saying is that demographics would imply that there aren’t enough advisors to personally interact in the manner that they currently do with all of the prospects who may need guidance in the distribution phase. Will there be web-based strategies that allow advisors to reach people in novel ways?

Casady: Yeah. I have a good friend that uses the word, “modality,” which I always think is a funny word. Because I looked it up once. It’s the definition of different ways people take data, which I never knew until I started to use it. And so if we think about the innovation of the cell phone, what’s A versus B, the land line, that was just a change in modality. And so I fully agree with you that the way that we interact with an advisor today is quite different than how we interacted with them five years ago. And today we use a variety of technologies that are web-based, CD-based, or a whole range of ways to educate and inform that are quite different techniques than we used before. Those haven’t made their way to the end client as much, but they certainly will, I completely agree with that.

Macchia: I’d like to shift to a couple of personal questions, if you don’t mind. The first one is this. If I could somehow convey to you a magic wand, and by waving this magic wand you could effect any two changes at all that you’d wish to make in the world of financial services, what would they be?

Casady: I think the first thing I would do hope for the country to deal with the broader Social Security issues. Let’s call it a retirement security problem. Because you really have three groups of people in the world, or in the U.S. You’ve got folks who, generally speaking, make more than $200,000 a year who are going to be fine no matter what. Then you’ve got people who make $40,000 a year to $200,000 a year that aren’t going to be so fine. But there are corporate processes like 401(k) plans, and there’s tax incentives and things that could be dealt with, and there’s folks who make less than $40,000 a year– just to use rough math here– that are in real trouble if Social Security is insolvent.

The second one, that’s an interesting one. I would be tempted to probably wave it towards some rationalization of the regulatory world, meaning that– the U.S. market is a very odd market. I spent a lot of time overseas for Scudder Investments, and a little bit of time for Northern Trust, and what I was struck by the sameness of regulation in those countries. So there’s one regulator in the U.K. for financial activities towards retail consumers and towards institutions, and here we have at least three, if not four or five that are involved in that kind of work. So if there were another wand to wave, I think I’d probably wave it towards some form of uniformity approach towards regulatory matters. Because it would clear up a lot of gray areas in the way things are done. And it would, I think, create a better regulatory environment in the sense that it would be more effective. Because our problem in this industry is that people who do bad things are, luckily, fairly rare, but quite difficult to find. And therefore the costs get created to try to find them, but really tax the rest of the 99.9% of the systems that are all fine. And I probably would wave it towards that, because I think that would help consumers and I think it would help the industry with consistency of approach. So those are some things that come to mind.

Macchia: I suspect there’s many who would sign on to both of those. Let me ask you the next question. If you were not the chairman and CEO of LPL, but instead could have any other occupation in any other type of industry, what would you choose to be?

Casady: Excuse this one. Far and away, and if I weren’t here I’d be in the same job somewhere else in the same industry, because I love what I do. If it were more esoteric, meaning that I was just ready to have a different phase in my life, which I’m not, I love music, and I’d do something related to the music industry. I’ve always thought I’d like to have a record label and I’d like to do concert promotions, and I’d like to have a chain of clubs, kind of like the House of Blues. Those are all the sort of fantasy worlds that were there. I’m certainly not ready for that, but just for the normal course of saying if you couldn’t do this, what would you do completely different, that would be the completely different thing I would do.

Macchia: That’s interesting. One of my never-to-be-realized fantasies is to be a great trumpet player.

Casady: Is that right? You have no musical ability?

Macchia: Not enough, certainly. But lastly, on this score. If you were to imagine your own retirement in its most conceivably perfect form, where would you be and what would you be doing?

Casady: That’s a good question. I don’t know what that is. Work would have to be involved in some way, David, because I’ve learned a long time ago that for me, doing something– maybe not as intense as what I do now– but doing something beyond board work is going to be a big part of my life for a long, long time. And so what I try to do is– Bob Pozen is a good example of it–here’s a guy who’s working as the chairman of MFS,-that implies less of an operating role than the CEO. He’s obviously on some boards and he is a big contributor to the industry. He’s done some work in the state government here in Massachusetts. And I look at people like that and think, well, is that a model? And I think, well, I’m not sure I’d really like the government part of it, because that’s not part of who I am. But I sure admire the fact that he’s found interesting ways to be stimulated well beyond the years that one might normally want to do it.

Frank Zarb’s another one I know who’s part of Hellman and Friedman, and Todd is very close to Frank. I don’t know how well you know him, but he took over as chairman of AIG when Hank Greenberg had to step down. And he’s another person who is in government. He was in the Ford administration, and then he went into industry when they ran the NASD when it used to have the NASDAQ market as part of it, and split out NASDAQ and became the head of the NASDAQ, and then retired from that role and then went into Hellman and Friedman as kind of an executive in residence.

I just think those people have interesting lives because they’ve stayed actively involved. And so I’ve always envisioned that my retirement life would be certainly having more time to go to Chatham and more time to go to California and more time to do the things I like to do. I love to travel and go to music festivals and other things. I’d like to have more hours in the week to do that, no doubt about that. But I’d always have to have something to do two or three days a week that’s business related or nonprofit related, because I love that stimulation.

Macchia: Sounds like a pretty nice vision.

Casady: Not quite formed yet.

Macchia: Do your musical tastes include the Friday night band concerts in Chatham?

Casady: They used to. I don’t do those as much anymore because I’ve got four kids and we’re in that complex kid stage.

Macchia: Well, with eight year old twins, I’m still squarely in the blanket-on-the-grass stage.

Casady: You can take them anywhere. Julia and I just got back from Austin City Limits music festival, and it was just great fun. And you get three days to feel like you don’t have a care in the world and just listen to great music and hear a lot of bands that you’ve never heard of before, and a lot of bands that you love. It’s great stuff.

Macchia: Good for you both- and thanks for sharing your time. It was wonderful.
Casady: I enjoyed it, David. Thank you.

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