Kim Stafford regularly deals with some of the smartest people on Wall Street at Pimco, one of the world’s largest asset managers.
“I love it,” Stafford told the Business Journal. “My learning curve is so steep, and I’m very intellectually curious.
“I learn from our colleagues every day, and I think having the A Team makes you better.”
Stafford has risen to the rank of managing director and is one of only 12 people on the Executive Committee at Newport Beach-based Pimco, which manages $2.27 trillion in assets.
During her 26-year career, she’s held a variety of positions, including global head of consultant relations, head of U.S. institutional sales and alternatives marketing teams, global head of human resources and talent management and head of Asia Pacific.
Currently, she is the global head of product strategy, overseeing traditional and alternative strategies, including hedge funds.
“Our team is entrusted with overseeing how we build any product fund that we would offer to a client: how we price it, how we market it,” Stafford said. “We are sort of like the CEOs of the strategy from A to Z.”
For these reasons, she is on the Business Journal’s first-ever list of the 50 Most Prominent Businesswomen in Orange County.
Creating Her Own Internship
Born and raised in Escondido, she was inspired by her father, an entrepreneur in the home-building business.
“I always worked with him, whether it was accounting or invoicing,” she recalled. “It was all part of the family business, and so we got sort of the bird’s-eye view of what it took to run a company.”
When she attended the University of Redlands, she said she created her own internship by volunteering at a local Merrill Lynch office, where she researched stocks and learned the role of an investment advisor. She first heard about Pimco when a Merrill Lynch advisor showed her his portfolio.
“He said, ‘This company is really first-rate and here’s why I like them,’” she recalled. “So, I got in my head, ‘I’m going to work at Pimco’.”
Her uncle, who worked on Wall Street and knew about Pimco’s reputation, also encouraged her, saying, “It doesn’t matter what job it is. Pimco is a phenomenal firm. Just take the job, and it probably won’t be your last stop, and you’ll just learn a lot.”
She applied online at Pimco, where she started in 2000.
“I literally knew no one,” she said. “I was very lucky.”
Her first job was in trade compliance, and then she moved to account management. She eventually earned the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and decided to pursue an MBA at USC on a part-time basis.
“The funny part was one of my first classes was on derivatives, and not that I’m an expert on derivatives, but when you work at Pimco, you know derivatives. And I thought, maybe I need to redirect how I’m thinking about my MBA.
“So instead of taking all the finance courses, because I had my CFA by then, I said, ‘I’m going to complement that, and I’m going to take softer business skills.’
“So that’s where I did strategy and leadership and negotiation and communication to complement a lot of the quantitative that I was already learning.
“Today, as a manager and a leader of people, I probably lean on those skills more than I do the hard quantitative skills.”
Wall Street Inspirations
Many people inspired her, particularly Margaret Isberg, a female partner at Pimco.
“She was building this group to cover consultants, and she hired me as her first associate; she was a very inspiring person and leader, and at the time, a woman when there weren’t so many women in senior levels.”
Wall Street, of course, has been notorious for its male alpha reputation and its treatment of women.
“I’ve managed it fine,” she said. “People are people. I always joke that I think my superpower is my EQ, not my IQ; I think that that’s really helpful with men generally, but also in our industry, where you have a lot of people who are incredibly smart and talented.”
What made Pimco internationally famous was its performance during the 2007-08 financial crisis. In 2008, Pimco’s flagship Total Return Fund rose 4.8% while its benchmark dropped 3.9% and the S&P 500 plunged 37%.
After the crisis, she spent 15 months on the road pitching clients on the Pimco methods.
“One of the times that I had the most fun was after the financial crisis, which sounds a little funny, but we had really done the right thing,” she recalled. “We had looked at everything that was going on in subprime and felt that it was going to spill over, and so we had avoided it. Our portfolios looked really strong for clients.”
The 2008 performance marked a significant increase in Pimco’s assets, which doubled to $1.2 trillion by 2011.
“It was a really fun time to be there because we were winning a lot of business.”
The Asia Move
In 2017, Pimco asked her to manage its operations in Asia. She moved to Hong Kong with her husband and two children, ages 2 and 4.
“It was a big leap of faith for us to move our young family 8,000 miles away from most of our family, who are in the Southern California area. The grandparents were not terribly happy with us for relocating their young granddaughters, but it was so personally gratifying.
“We went to 15 different countries over that period of time, and the girls saw so many different cultures. To this day, they’re very comfortable in most settings with most types of people. I just think that’s the greatest gift that you can give your kids.”
She oversaw the building of offices in Taiwan and a trading floor in Shanghai. Asia went from 10% of Pimco’s assets to almost 15% by the time she left.
After Stafford witnessed the pandemic explode in Wuhan, she closed the Hong Kong offices and advised Pimco’s top management that it was a serious issue that would last a lot longer than people initially thought.
“We were ground zero in COVID,” she said. “I remember sitting in our executive committee and they said, ‘Oh, it’s probably going to be like two weeks, right? And then everyone’s back.’ And I said, “No, I think it’s going to be worse than that.”
After four years in Asia, she moved back to the Newport Beach office.
The View from the Investment Committee
Nowadays, Stafford starts her day at 4:30 a.m. so she can talk with colleagues in Europe. The company often highlights Stafford in videos called “View from the Investment Committee.” She holds discussions with Pimco Chief Investment Officer Dan Ivascyn, who is so well known in the bond world that, in 2019, he was inducted into the Fixed Income Analysts Society Hall of Fame.
“I’m just the sidekick for him,” Stafford laughed. “The biggest thing is that our clients really want to know how we’re thinking about the world.”
Two Pieces of Advice
Kim Stafford has two pieces of advice for anyone who wants to work on Wall Street.
“I don’t think that women or men also fully appreciate all of the diverse roles that are available in investment management and finance more generally,” she told the Business Journal. “I think that there’s a sense that it’s just managing money.”
The industry is far more diverse, offering roles in marketing, legal, and media, she said.
“There are just so many areas that you can contribute. It’s a dynamic area that’s constantly changing; it’s a really exciting place to work.
“The second thing I would tell people is don’t presuppose your career path. I could never have architected mine. If you’d told me about all the twists and turns it would have taken, I wouldn’t have believed it.
“If I were predetermined on where I’m going, I wouldn’t have been open-minded to say yes to all the things that I got to do, which I think have been really additive in terms of my skillset and my experience.”
