“ALOT was a medal play, handicapped tournament. We did it for about 12 years. Everybody that went on the trip felt like our golf games became better because of the medal play event. We noted in our local tournaments that the guys that went on the trip would do very well, and we started referring to everybody that went on the trip as an ‘Alotian,’ which basically meant they love golf and love to have a good time.” The idea of building a golf course had long been in Warren’s mind, and not surprisingly more than a little inspiration was found in familiar stomping grounds. “Long before I was ever thinking about doing a golf course,” Warren says, “I spent a lot of time at Augusta with dad. I was fortunate enough to do that. He once asked me, ‘Do you know what the secret is to Augusta? Every one of our members thinks they have a chance to par every hole out there. There’s not a hole they’re playing where they’re thinking, There’s no way I can make par.’” Warren took that basic tenet to Tom Fazio and told him to keep it in mind when designing Alotian. As far as the financier is concerned, mission accomplished. “He did a masterful job of that,” Warren said. “It’s a serious golf course; if you want to play it from the back tees, there are lots of things that come into play but that don’t come into playability. That was the goal.”
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As a family business, Stephens Inc is quite a story. Consistency of purpose and adherence to founding principles are often challenges for family firms, but in Stephens’ case they are the reasons for its success. The firm handles wealth management strategies for high-net-worth individuals and families; its Stephens Capital Management group supervises discretionary and non-discretionary portfolios of equity and fixed income assets of nearly $4 billion; and its Stephens Institutional Sales & Trading Departments work with investors across the U.S., Canada and Europe. In addition to that, it offers private equity management, deals in public finance, a range of insurance services, and more. Stephens Inc is also fully independent, following Warren’s acquisition of 100 percent of the company’s outstanding stock in 2006. The CEO says this independence—part of Stephens Inc’s spirit since the beginning—allows the firm to focus on long-term relationships and long-term results. That those results have been so successful is due, in part, to lessons Warren says he learned from Witt and Jack. “It’s hard to overstate the impact that both of them had on me,” he says. “I was fortunate enough to be around my uncle in a work environment for 10 years and with dad a lot longer. They thought things through and were always alert to the downside, what could go wrong. ‘If it does go wrong, what does it do to us?’ That’s a lesson a lot of people have forgotten in the turmoil of the last couple of years: You can’t take risks and leverage yourself to the point where if things start going wrong you might not survive. If there’s one thing I took away from them over the years, that’s probably it.”
Warren Stephens at Alotian
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