By: Martin Cabrera
Founding Partner / Chairman of the Board
QUASSAR CAPITAL
For many people hearing the word balance is very easy to say but it is difficult to apply and it is essential to be calm, aware of our decisions and our actions in order to be fulfilled.
It is a balance in which things are not all black and white, but there are a number of colors that we must balance in order to have fullness as individuals.
Currently we are vulnerable to various demands of society that set standards of personal and professional success, in which we also demand ourselves to meet these superficial requirements and often neglect the balance that will give us satisfaction in the long term and develop us as people.
There are managers who work exhausting hours that come to diminish their quality of life as they often put on their person and often on their health the fulfillment of organizational objectives, students who demand more than the account thinking that a number describes their intelligence and employees who forget about their person to meet the needs of a company; in all these cases it is wrong because there must be a balance both in our person and in our objectives either professional or academic and that harms both our mental health and our person.
“Companies are made by people and the development of the same depends on the achievements of each of the employees who are the reflection of the balance in their life both inside and outside the office.”
The year 2012 when I sat down with my partners who shared the idea of creating a leading hedge fund in the United States we had a very clear objective, which was to be able to create a company that would never lose the perspective that it was going to work thanks to our people and those same people had to share our passion for what we do; that is how Quassar Capital was created.
As time went by, we started to have private investors, later with large companies, then we managed to have transnational companies as investors and later we became advisors in financial matters for different governments. Our people accompanied us and, as I said at the beginning, we evolved. Quassar Capital became a person with its own objectives, but also with its own strengths and weaknesses that demanded greater commitment from each one of the collaborators who functioned as a big family.
The year 2020 arrived and Quassar Capital employed a little more than 150 people in the New York and London offices, we had approximately 57 billions in assets under management and we were considered by Global Finance magazine in London as one of the 25 most influential hedge funds in the United States.
The company demanded more time and commitment on the part of all the collaborators that we considered were remunerated according to their work. It was in May of 2020 when in a meeting with the entire Finance Committee we realized that we were gradually losing the original idea for which Quassar Capital was created because our people, who were among the best in the industry spent more time in the office than at home, at that time was when we approached our compliance coach and decided to measure the satisfaction of each of our employees regardless of position, whether they were interns, managers and management team.
The results were interesting because they were all satisfied as they had a very high sense of belonging and felt part of what Quassar Capital represented, they were completely satisfied regarding their economic remuneration but many of them had families, some of them had planned to do an MBA or additional studies in a University that we had a collaboration agreement, many had stopped attending the gym that was near our office and with which we had an agreement, at that moment was when we launched the initiative “Quassar take a break” #quassartakeabreak.
This initiative was basically going to focus on 3 key points:
1.- Teamwork
2.- The employee as a person
3.- Fulfillment of short term objectives.
Divide the activities of all departments so that they can begin to identify priorities (first what is urgent and second what is important), being a hedge fund that operates in the main stock exchanges in the world, invest in more personnel to reduce workloads in the teams and formalize work schedules for all employees depending on the market they operate in, This is summarized in more free time so that employees can dedicate time to their personal lives and this will be reflected in the satisfaction of all employees, since they will have a balance between their personal and professional lives and better results will be obtained in the short term, since this will avoid employee dissatisfaction.
It worked, by the end of the year 2021 we reduced staff turnover considerably, we currently have $68 billions in assets under management and we appeared in the ranking of the Global Finance magazine of London in the position No. 19 of the 25 most important Hedge Funds in the United States and we have an operating effectiveness of over 93%.
We learned that as a company having a balance is not a choice, it is imperative for us to grow, it is necessary that our people can feel satisfied both in their personal and professional lives because thanks to their dreams, goals and personal objectives we support them to achieve well-being and be complete people.
To have a balance as people is to seek that balance between the ego and our being, both our personal and professional life and in the professional life both the values of the company and our values learned at home.
Finding balance is not easy because it is not rigid or static, it evolves as we live and daily circumstances complicate it and make it dynamic, it keeps us in a constant process of adaptation as it evolves and also requires us to find a balance between our feelings and thoughts.
