As Calgarians knocked the dust off their cowboy boots and tourists flooded the city for 10 days of white hats and rodeo, Michael Mezei was enjoying his first pancake breakfast with his staff as president of Mawer Investment Management Ltd.

Since being approached about the newly created position at the Calgary-based firm, Mezei has spent several mornings sipping coffee with the Mawer staff while integrating himself into the tight-knit group and determining the best way to maintain the firm’s power and growth.

“So many parts of the firm are really strong,” says Mezei, who joined Mawer at the beginning of the summer. “I don’t want to change the investment strategy, the firm’s culture or the people. We absolutely want to grow, but we’re not looking for growth for growth’s sake. We have a very clear goal of maintaining quality and our culture.”

Known for more than 30 years of award-winning portfolio managers, consistent profitability and a disciplined investment process, Mawer has accumulated assets under management of $5.4 billion in its three lines of business: mutual funds, institutional and private clients. And Mawer is gaining momentum in all aspects of its business. Most recently, the firm’s retail mutual fund business got a boost when it was announced that Mawer would be partnering with Manulife Financial Corp. to offer a family of Mawer-subadvised funds to the wider public.

Strategic alliances with companies such as Manulife, which allow Mawer to expand its reach without diluting its power, are indicative of the direction Mawer wants to take.

“We need to focus on our core strengths: institutional and private-client services,” says Mezei. “Forming retail alliances with firms whose core competencies are marketing and putting together products lets Mawer focus on managing money.”

Instead of branching off into new territories, Mawer’s plan is to continue to focus on the area in which the firm has been successful — portfolio management — and make sure its client services and corporate culture are always improving, keeping pace with the firm’s advances.

Putting someone new into a senior position such as president is something of a novel concept for Mawer, which has always been guided by a management committee.

“We’ve never had someone external come into that role,” says past chairman and portfolio manager William MacLachlan. “We’ve had a lot of growth and success, and we’re much bigger than we were even a year ago. We have a lot of strength at Mawer, but we want to keep it where it is, in money managing and client service. So, we looked outside for expertise in growing.”

The search for the right candidate took much the same form as an evaluation of a potential investment: it was structured and thorough. The rigorous process was not complete until Mezei had met with every one of Mawer’s 13 directors, and all 13 were sure of both Mezei’s skill set and his vision for the company.

“I had a lot of questions coming in,” says Mezei. “But it was always absolutely clear our mandate is to grow [as] an independent firm. If we continue to be successful managing money, more people will want us to manage their money.”

Mezei has experience working with a company in the midst of significant growth. Most recently, he was vice president with Calgary-based ATB Investor Services, the wealth-management arm of Edmonton-based ATB Financial. Originally from Toronto, Mezei worked in corporate law until he decided he wanted to work directly in business. He made the shift to the financial services industry, first joining Franklin Templeton Investments Corp. in Toronto and then moving with his family to Calgary in 2002 to join the ATB team, working to establish the securities arm. Since finding his niche in the financial services industry, he has made Calgary his home.

Settling in comfortably to his new job, Mezei is finding the Mawer office, with staff numbering less than 60, to be a closely knit community thoroughly engaged in the firm’s growth. All members of the staff have a say in the direction the firm takes, a situation that might sound like a recipe for chaos at any other firm. But Mawer insists it has thrived over the past three decades by cultivating a collaborative culture among its staff and a strong corporate identity.

“Everyone is encouraged to challenge and discuss; it doesn’t matter who you are or whether you’ve been with us for one year or 15,” says MacLachlan. “We encourage constructive dissent.”

@page_break@Fostering Mawer’s co-operative culture and collegial work environment is a significant part of Mezei’s new role. And it is a duty that will become progressively more difficult as the firm grows. It’s easy enough to remain familiar with a staff of 60, but when the ranks surpass 100, weekly full-staff meetings will be a challenge, as will be the constraints of the physical office space. To understand these challenges, Mezei has spent a lot of time interacting with the Mawer staff and finding out how they feel about the firm.

“It struck me, when I first started and was getting to know everyone, that when I asked them what they thought of the culture, a lot of people said it was like a family,” Mezei says. “People here genuinely care about the people they work with and the clients. The deeper I look, the stronger that is at the core.”

Whatever challenges Mezei faces at Mawer, he has demonstrated that he has the skill and the experience to achieve a great deal there. Having worked at growing companies over the past 15 years, Mezei recognizes the challenges faced by expanding businesses and has learned important lessons along the way.

Common among the three financial services organizations he has worked for, Mezei says, is their executives’ ability to recognize where their firms’ strengths lie and their ability to focus on those strength. For Mawer, that means keeping its people comfortable and their clients happy, as well as maintaining a diligent investment process.

To keep building on Mawer’s momentum, Mezei says, it is necessary to be forward-thinking and to anticipate the need to update operations or prepare for a shift in the corporate culture — before Mawer gets too big. “It’s easy to get so far behind you’re forever playing catch-up,” says Mezei.

His plan is to update operating platforms before it’s too late, ultimately improving client services and contributing to core competencies.

As more people hear about Mawer, whether by word of mouth or through the Manulife partnership, and more talent joins the firm, the pancake breakfasts like the one that welcomed Mezei to the company will get bigger and noisier. The big challenge for Mezei and his staff is to ensure that, although it may become a bigger Mawer, it will be the same Mawer. IE