The Work Ahead

No. In high school, I wanted to be an architect. In college, I found that finance and accounting came naturally to me, and that changed my direction. After graduating, I spent four years working in commercial banking before joining my dad at Schwartz Investment Counsel, Inc. in 1998.

There was no single moment when I decided this was what I would do for the rest of my life. It happened naturally over time. Ave Maria Mutual Funds did not yet exist when I joined the firm, so none of us knew exactly where that decision would lead.

Looking back, the entrepreneurial instinct was there early. When I was ten, my brother Mike and I shared a newspaper route delivering The Ann Arbor News in our neighborhood. I used what I earned to buy baseball and football cards in bulk, then started a small mail-order trading-card business. This was before the internet, so I sold primarily through sports-card publications and to kids in the neighborhood.

My dad and I agree on the important issues, but we have different personalities. Working alongside him has given me a front-row seat to his leadership. I’ve learned a great deal from watching how he thinks, how he makes decisions, and how he keeps the firm’s long-term mission in focus.

All four of my siblings are also long-time employees of the firm. We have different roles and responsibilities, so nobody is stepping on anyone else’s toes. Everyone brings different strengths to the table, and I think that mutual respect has helped us work well together over the years. Being the middle child has probably helped me appreciate the value of listening and bringing people together.

Growing up in Ann Arbor, I always knew who Tom was. Domino’s was becoming an extraordinary success, and the Detroit Tigers were the team everyone was talking about. My earliest specific memory goes back to 1984, when the Tigers won the World Series and I was reading about Tom as the team’s owner.

At that point he was still a public figure to me. My dad and Tom had not yet developed the friendship they have today.

That changed after the Funds began in 2001. Catholic Advisory Board meetings, social events, and other occasions gave me the opportunity to know Tom personally. Despite everything he had accomplished, he was humble, approachable, and remarkably unassuming. The larger-than-life entrepreneur and sports owner was, in person, a regular and grounded man.

My family, especially my mother. She was an amazing mom and the strongest early influence on my Catholic faith.

Like many people, my faith matured after college. It gradually became more personal and intentional rather than through one dramatic moment.

Today, daily prayer keeps me grounded. So do the ordinary interactions with my wife and our twelve-year-old son. I am currently reading Stand Strong: 365 Devotions for Men by Men and Jon Gordon’s The Power of a Positive Team.

People want their money managed in a way that is consistent with their religious and moral beliefs. They do not want one set of principles for Sunday and another for their financial lives.

Relatively few investment companies have offered a compelling way to pursue financial goals while also applying clearly defined Catholic moral screens. Investors should not have to abandon their convictions to invest seriously, or abandon serious investment discipline to honor their convictions. Bringing those responsibilities together has been our mission from the beginning.

The Funds are often misplaced in the broad category of Socially Responsible Investing or ESG. We practice Morally Responsible Investing, with a specific pro-life and pro-family focus.

Some Catholics are surprised that we do not automatically screen out every company associated with alcohol, gambling, environmental controversy, or another concern raised by a pope or Church leader. But Catholic teaching does not treat every issue in exactly the same way. Some actions are intrinsically wrong. Other questions require prudential judgment, and Catholics may reach different conclusions about how those principles apply to a particular company or industry.

The Church calls for temperance but does not teach that alcohol itself is inherently immoral. It warns about the destructive potential of gambling without declaring every game of chance intrinsically wrong. It requires respect for creation while leaving room for judgment about how environmental responsibility should be applied to an individual investment.

Our Catholic Advisory Board establishes and reviews the Funds’ moral criteria. The current process applies four principal screens addressing corporate involvement in abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, financial support for Planned Parenthood, and pornography.

We do not seek to construct our portfolios around every opinion held by every Catholic. Rather, we remain committed to pursuing competitive long-term investment results while adhering to the clearly defined pro-life and pro-family principles upon which the Funds were founded.

We have a fiduciary duty to our shareholders and must always act in their best interests. Investors have entrusted us with hard-earned money intended for their families and their futures. We are responsible for applying disciplined investment judgment while ensuring their money is not invested in companies that violate our moral screens.

Leading a twenty-five-person business also means balancing many responsibilities. What has surprised me is how much I enjoy it – on most days.

One aspect of stewardship is empowering other people to succeed. Two recent accomplishments illustrate that: developing the idea for our eighth mutual fund, the Ave Maria Undiscovered Fund, and proposing our twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. Both required a tremendous amount of work from employees throughout the firm. I will take credit for establishing the ideas, but my colleagues did the heavy lifting and turned the ideas into great successes.

I would say not yet. We’ve grown substantially, but I still think we’re only scratching the surface. We remain a relatively small participant in the investment management industry, and in my opinion, we have a long runway ahead of us.

It would be remarkable to reach $10 billion or more in assets over the next ten years. That is an ambitious goal, but I believe it is achievable. Greater scale would allow us to serve more families and increase the influence morally responsible investors can have on corporate America.

Twenty-five years from now, I hope shareholders will say that investing with us helped them pursue their financial goals and that they felt good knowing their investment dollars were not supporting abortion or pornography.

My wife and son would probably name two things immediately: Number one, dancing. Number two, being patient when I am driving.

I cannot offer much of a defense on either count.