Lauren Messmore, From Banks to Boards

 

92-167 Lauren Messmore

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Lauren Messmore,

 

Will Bachman  02:58

Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Lauren Messmore, Lauren, welcome to the show.

 

Lauren Messmore  03:30

Thank you so much, Will. Thank you for having me

 

Will Bachman  03:33

So Lauren, tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Lauren Messmore  03:38

Okay, it’s interesting. You frame it in terms of a journey, because I feel like I have had a journey. I seem to recall once you mentioned you hiked Hadrian’s Wall.

 

Will Bachman  03:52

Yes, that’s right,

 

Lauren Messmore  03:52

in England. And I did that as well in five days with my husband a few years back, and think that’s one of the highlights of international travels.

 

Will Bachman  04:06

That’s very cool. How did you decide to walk Adrian’s wall?

 

Lauren Messmore  04:13

It was my husband’s idea. I believe he got rave reviews from a colleague, and he is an anglophile, and I enjoy travel. I lived in England for three years in the 90s, and so of course, I’m going to say yes, and he’s both like that. Fortunately, he gave me enough time to train for it, because I don’t think I could have done it without training.

 

Will Bachman  04:45

How did you train for

 

Speaker 1  04:46

it,

 

Lauren Messmore  04:47

walking?

 

Will Bachman  04:49

I mean, like, how much walking did you do and where and

 

Lauren Messmore  04:54

fan of walking is just that I brought. Added up a notch. So I, I would do say, six or seven miles two or three times a week,

 

Will Bachman  05:08

okay,

 

Lauren Messmore  05:09

probably more than my typical two or three or four miles a day. And at the time, I lived outside of Boston. I lived in Wellesley, which is a lovely place to hike. One of my favorite places was at Wellesley College, in fact, because it was picturesque. But I just walked around a lot, and also started walking with hiking sticks.

 

Will Bachman  05:37

Okay? And what made the what made that walk such a highlight for you, one of the best trips you’ve taken. Why do you say that what was,

 

Lauren Messmore  05:47

just had a we had a blast. There’s something kind of Zen about walking and or hiking itself. And, you know, the scenery was amazing. Just the whole experience was fun.

 

Will Bachman  06:04

And how did you guys do it? Did you? Did you go and book all of your hotels yourself and organize luggage transport? Or did you use a service for it, or

 

Lauren Messmore  06:12

cheated we use the service? Which

 

Speaker 1  06:15

one

 

Speaker 2  06:16

for the listeners? I think it’s Mac adventure.

 

Will Bachman  06:19

Yes. All right,

 

Speaker 3  06:21

yes,

 

Speaker 1  06:21

yeah.

 

Speaker 4  06:22

Did you use them?

 

Will Bachman  06:23

I should have, but I didn’t, but I just used Max adventure for a week. That a walk that I got back from, just on Sunday. I walked, yeah, I walked 75 miles along the Rhine River. I think they call it their like romantic Rhine Castle walk or something. And, yeah, that’s, that’s one to consider for your list, along the Roman theme, because that was the, yeah,

 

Lauren Messmore  06:53

it was the the Roman theme. And looking at the ruins on along the way. We also did a second max adventure around the southwest corner of Mont Blanc.

 

Will Bachman  07:08

Oh, you did that one too. Okay,

 

Lauren Messmore  07:09

yeah, that. That was fabulous, but in a different way, and there was more elevation there. And maybe ironically, I I liked the elevation because I felt like it used more muscles. I found just walking on a flat surface was more challenging than the elevation. My husband would say the opposite,

 

Will Bachman  07:37

yeah, I mean

 

Lauren Messmore  07:38

especially heading down, yeah, steep and rocky terrain. So

 

Will Bachman  07:44

that was steeper than the than the Hadrian’s Wall,

 

Speaker 1  07:47

absolutely.

 

Will Bachman  07:48

Okay, alright. So yeah, I do recommend anybody who’s thinking about doing one of these walks, I do recommend, like what you did is starting to train up for it, maybe even get up to some 10 or 12 or 14 mile hikes on the occasional weekend. Because even if you’re a runner, what I learned was that like walking exercises different muscles than running. So you could be someone who goes out and runs five, six miles or whatever, but walking 10 miles like it, it sort of different muscles. And if you go out and try to bust out a, you know, 1214, mile hike per day for five or six days, you’re going to hurt yourself if you haven’t worked your way up to it. So, but we got off track, so you so like, alright.

 

Lauren Messmore  08:37

So since then, I think my husband and I have dialed it back a little bit and tried a little bit less arduous, um, adventures, and so now we’re doing river cruises.

 

Will Bachman  08:51

Oh, which, which river cruises HAVE YOU DONE?

 

Speaker 4  08:54

Did one on the Danube.

 

Speaker 1  08:57

Okay.

 

Lauren Messmore  08:58

Absolutely fabulous ending in Budapest, which is a wonderful city, kind of just a position of East and West, and we are due this fall to go to France, to Paris and Normandy.

 

Speaker 1  09:19

So

 

Lauren Messmore  09:20

really looking forward to that. Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  09:21

what was the experience of the river cruise like?

 

Lauren Messmore  09:24

Awesome, so much more relaxed than rigorous hiking, sort of like a floating Marriott on the river every day, stopping in picturesque locations, and there is an option to either do organized activities or kind of go your own way.

 

Will Bachman  09:49

All right. All right. I suppose as you’re traveling along, do you feel, do you feel like you got a lot of good view of the scenery of the Danube so you gotta sense. Of that part of the world’s landscape.

 

Lauren Messmore  10:05

We lucked out weather wise. And, you know, sitting on the deck and floating by picturesque areas is so very chill.

 

Will Bachman  10:17

All right. So, okay, so that’s been some travels. Tell us a bit about your life journey since graduation, about you know what happened after the graduation ceremony back there and whatever June or May or June of 1992 Where did you go and what happened to you?

 

Lauren Messmore  10:38

It’s fortunate in that I had a job lined up.

 

Speaker 1  10:41

Okay,

 

Lauren Messmore  10:42

so obviously the first thing I did was a backpacking tour in Europe, so that kind of got me, gave me the travel book, but I had a job lined up on Wall Street after that. So I started as an investment banking analyst and a major bracket under writer, and the first day at my real career job turned into an all nighter the very first night,

 

Will Bachman  11:18

wait, they

 

Will Bachman  11:20

didn’t waste any time your very first first day like they give you the bad they give you the computer and say, No, we’re gonna put you to work. You’re gonna be up all night

 

Lauren Messmore  11:30

Exactly. And I think I had only moved into my apartment either the day, probably the day before. I don’t even think I had a mattress yet. I had to dial one 800 mattress like I had nothing. But, you know, that’s, it’s very liberating. So I, I actually enjoyed the investment banking experience. It was challenging, but also extremely interesting, and sort of the opposite of academic. I think, I think it was interesting because at Harvard, one of my takeaways was like, plagiarism is just horrible, and it is, but in the investment banking world, a lot of transactions go off of boiler plates, so it’s almost as if creativity is verboten and you have to follow the rules by the book a lot. So I guess it was a different culture than academia. And I really liked business. I liked the production aspect and creating things and doing deals. So

 

Will Bachman  12:55

what? What’s a deal from that period of your life that you are proud of or that was particularly cool or exciting or or stands out in some way.

 

Speaker 3  13:09

So

 

Lauren Messmore  13:13

memorable, my memorable deals came a little bit later, perhaps because they had more responsibility for them, maybe perhaps because they might have been more complex. During the tenure at Wall Street, it tended to do about half and half mergers and acquisitions and capital markets. So there were some IPOs, there are some deals I did, a couple deals and financial services. But maybe what was a little bit unique about my experience versus many people’s experience in Wall Street was it was not specialized by sector, so I think it gave really good training, and it been entree into the workings of many different industries. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be seconded to London with the same firm and did that. That was interesting. There was, there was a unique situation being an American woman. I was sort of the quant in I say quant in quotation marks because I don’t consider myself a true quant. But in terms of the London bankers, it was probably and so there was it was interesting, living in London, the early 90s, again, having exposure to international deals, searching my archival memory of transaction. Plans and yet again, I don’t think the most memorable transactions really happened until I moved again to Spain with the same bank.

 

Speaker 1  15:10

Oh

 

Speaker 3  15:11

yeah. Well,

 

Will Bachman  15:11

tell us about that. Tell us about moving to Spain.

 

Lauren Messmore  15:14

It’s a continuation. So I worked in London for about three years, and then moved to Madrid. And at the time, the office in Madrid was sort of a startup situation. And I really, I really took to living in Madrid and and once again, there was a mix of mergers and acquisitions and capital markets transactions. So interesting Spanish clients. And right around now, exactly at the turn of the millennium was a millennium bug. The the British firm was acquired by Citigroup.

 

Speaker 1  16:11

Oh,

 

Lauren Messmore  16:12

yeah. So it felt like once they had done their due diligence and determined that the millennium bug was not problematically announced the acquisition. So it must have been January of the year 2000

 

Will Bachman  16:30

now tell us about, tell us about moving to Spain. Did you were you already fluent in Spanish, or did you become fluent in Spanish? What was it like in that culture?

 

Lauren Messmore  16:39

Well, it’s interesting you asked the question, because I had taken high school Spanish, and I had also taken a Spanish class at Harvard to fulfill the language requirement. But Spanish was not my forte, I would say, or even something I really liked. But nevertheless, it gave me the opportunity, since I have the foundation of Spanish, but most people probably know taking high school Spanish is very academic, and it’s not really street language, and so I felt I had to relearn it, sort of the hard way. And once again, I had sort of a mattress encounter in Spain. That was one of the first things I had to buy. And I did not know the word from mattress when I went to IKEA, so I had to explain to Spanish. You know, what’s that thing that you sleep on instead of bed? No,

 

Will Bachman  17:45

no, no,

 

Lauren Messmore  17:52

no, kind of bumbling along. So I quickly learned the Spanish word for naturalness

 

Will Bachman  18:02

shown, I think

 

Lauren Messmore  18:03

exactly, and kind of had to learn the hard way.

 

Will Bachman  18:11

Wow. Okay. I mean, it’s one thing to take, you know, Spanish a at Harvard and, you know, okay, megosteria la paella portfolio, but you know, to actually to do a deal in an investment bank requires it’s sort of a different quantitative level, where of professionals, was the work being done in English there? Or did you really have to get up to speed in Spanish pretty quick.

 

Speaker 1  18:33

So

 

Lauren Messmore  18:34

most of our Spanish clients prefer to speak in Spanish. Younger people tended and are highly educated. Tended to speak English, but, but most meetings were run in Spanish,

 

Speaker 1  18:52

yeah,

 

Lauren Messmore  18:52

but I tell you, a great way to learn absolutely every document I had to produce was in both languages. Oh,

 

Speaker 1  19:01

wow,

 

Lauren Messmore  19:01

because Spain is still relatively small, so every transaction had some sort of international component, which was kind of where I came, where that’s what that was my niche. So, as the fluent person in English. So, you know, a transaction would involve a foreign bank or a foreign buyer or a foreign seller or a foreign investor, and the international language of business is English. Every single document had two versions, and you really get to know your stuff when you have to write everything twice. Oh, wow.

 

Will Bachman  19:46

Okay, and tell us about any deals that stand out to you from that period.

 

Will Bachman  19:51

So from that period, probably

 

Lauren Messmore  19:56

the the longest deal that I worked on in fall. Of the National Gas Company, gas natural, which had to divest of the gas infrastructure operator, the pipeline and LNG plants. And at first it wasn’t clear how that divestment was going to take place. It wasn’t clear what the economics were for this new sort of government mandated entity. And the operation took almost three years. I think I had a total of seven or eight different associates working with me on the deal, but ultimately it went public through an initial public offering,

 

Will Bachman  20:57

and then tell us about You know what happened as you stayed in Spain,

 

Speaker 5  21:04

so Spain,

 

Lauren Messmore  21:09

city group that, I mean, from a professional standpoint, Spain, was almost viewed as too small For city group. So they would say things like, you know, we insist on having a minimum fee of a million dollars. And at the time, you know, a million dollar fee, that’s, that’s a lot of money, especially for Spanish company. And so they kind of didn’t want to do the bread and butter deals that we had been doing, and so the the general trend was to retrench and try to service the Spanish clients from a base in London and New York and Do a style of banking that I called helicopter banking, and at the time, their origins were Solomon brothers. That group is very bond focused, but the European market just doesn’t really have a developed bond market at all. So there was just kind of a total culture clash where good deals were frowned upon, and so I kind of made a personal decision that I didn’t want to move back to London or New York because I was very happy in Spain, but I couldn’t continue to sort of turn down business because it wasn’t big enough, or it just wasn’t big enough for Citigroup, so I decided to leave. This was in the year 2002 and in leaving you kind of really find out who your friends are. And you know people would say you’re throwing your career away. Who are you? Can’t get any business without a prestigious bank on your business card. And it just kind of made me think, well, don’t project your own insecurity

 

Speaker 1  23:35

to me.

 

Lauren Messmore  23:36

And then, you know, even Citigroup threatened to to sue. And I was thinking seriously, like, you’re going to sue Lauren messmore, the, you know, the supposedly biggest bank on the planet, is going to sue Lauren messmore, and you didn’t for stealing clients that you didn’t want because they’re too small. So the threats of suing didn’t really go anywhere. But I was just, I was almost shocked. Just, you know, let me go. So I left with a couple of colleagues who were like minded, and we started our own investment thinking boutique. And I guess again, I was sort of the quant slash international angle on on the small team. And I think we’re kind of lucky, because this was 2002 Spain had entered a period of reasonable interest rates and high growth, as well as a lot of investor interest from different countries. And we found this niche of being an independent advisor to private equity firms, basically. So we would operate on any side private equity firms are going to invest in Spain. Or divest of their portfolio companies in Spain, we’d also do other work. Three quarters of our revenues came from private equity clients, and once we show them that we could get deals done for them, I think they found it. They liked that we were independent and we did a lot of business.

 

Will Bachman  25:20

Wow, that’s amazing.

 

Speaker 1  25:22

Yeah, congrats.

 

Lauren Messmore  25:23

It was fun. That’s probably my what I’m most proud of,

 

Will Bachman  25:30

yeah,

 

Will Bachman  25:31

kind of but honestly it

 

Lauren Messmore  25:37

looking back, I guess it could be deemed to be gutsy, but I kind of viewed it as my MBA at that age where a lot of people get MBAs, and I just thought, Oh, I’ll give it two years and $200,000 and, you know, if it doesn’t work, I would have happened it had an experience of trying To get business up and running. But what if it does work? You know, save two years and $200,000 I was just my way of looking at things.

 

Will Bachman  26:15

Now you are no longer living in Spain. I think you’re in Boston. Tell us what happened next you you came back to the US. So tell us about that, that part of your journey,

 

Lauren Messmore  26:31

going back to the US was the financial crisis. So one of the most important transactions that my independent firm did was build a solar farm and also acquire a couple of solar farms in Spain. So the one we built was 18 megawatts, and we bought a couple other smaller solar farms. And obviously, you know, and Spain had sort of a bubble in renewable energies, and it’s sunny, so solar farms made a lot of sense, but to get that been running, we needed to have an institutional sponsor. So we went around and we found credible institutional sponsor in the form of AIG Financial Products. Yeah, so what happened was the financial crisis happens and started in 22,007 and was fully blew up in 2008 and our financial partner AIG Financial Products had to divest from the silver harms where and they were co investing with us. So that was kind of a liquidity event. And at the time, I was kind of in an A at an age where I could kind of double down or cash out. And so with this liquidity event, I just decided, Okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna cash out. A couple of my partners doubled down and a couple of us cashed out, and that was kind of that was just an inflection point, so that helped kind of come up with money to cash out of the business. And I came back to the United States because I felt like I was still kind of young enough to reinvent myself. And originally, I had worked abroad with the idea of, you know, going for a couple years, and somehow that morphed into 15. I love staying. I mean, I still think I but you know, my family is here, so I relocated outside of Boston,

 

Will Bachman  29:05

yeah, and then tell us about kind of that trajectory once you got back to Boston,

 

Lauren Messmore  29:14

sure, so I was around 40, and the easy thing to do would be to get back into investment banking, but I decided I wanted to do something different. So I took, I took a year off. First of all, I would recommend to listeners, if they can, if they can wing it, to take some time off, to recharge and kind of plot out a new course. If, if you have that luxury, and I was fortunate to have that luxury, I told myself, no one’s going to miss more. And this more in the year 2009 um.

 

Lauren Messmore  30:00

Okay,

 

Lauren Messmore  30:01

so I did take some some time off. I bought a house, kind of fixed it up, reconnected with family, took a took a breather, and then I decided to spend some real time to find a new situation. So I did some networking, and I found, I reconnected with somebody that I knew from Wall Street, and found what I deemed to be a fully funded startup community bank situation where I could come in and act as like a strategic consultant. And to his credit, the guy that I knew from Wall Street, he gave me an opportunity, and that blossomed and to kind of a buy and build community banking project, or ultimately, I became CFO of this bank did a big acquisition and took it public. So that was, that was a bit of a shift to career wise, from, you know, strictly an advisor to an operator at a community bank. Technically, it’s a bank. It’s a very different type of animal, yeah, but I really like that, because instead of being kind of a small cog and a giant machine the senior leader, and actually leave fingerprints or have have a big impact on the actual company. I enjoyed that a lot.

 

Will Bachman  32:01

So what? What do you have going on in your life right now?

 

Lauren Messmore  32:05

So I did the same thing at the Community Bank. You know, the first community bank I worked at was kind of a buy and build. The second one was a turnaround situation, and in both banks were acquired by bigger partners, and as part of the acquisition, you know, the senior management myself included or let go. So my last Community Bank was sold three years ago, and I decided that I had enough of the day job and wanted to pivot again, so I set out on a Path to create a portfolio of Board of Directors positions. And I would say, now I have, it took about three years, but now I have created this kind of portfolio of Board of Directors positions, which is enough to keep me busy, but don’t have the day to day operating responsibilities anymore.

 

Will Bachman  33:29

I want to turn to the so we’re doing something new before we jump to the kind of the final couple questions. We’re introducing just a couple fun questions here, or just offbeat, what is a compliment that you have never forgotten?

 

Lauren Messmore  34:00

One time, someone said to me, you’re a leader, and I just didn’t know it at the time, and so I felt that was, that was a compliment, and I guess I was as silent as I am right now. I was kind of shocked to hear someone else say that you’re a leader. And then I think, I guess, I felt like I should start acting like one. And

 

Will Bachman  34:38

when was that in your trajectory? What? Time period was that?

 

Lauren Messmore  34:44

I am not really I don’t recall.

 

Will Bachman  34:52

Okay, like was that in Spain?

 

Speaker 1  34:55

Okay? Well. Remember who yeah

 

Lauren Messmore  35:02

at it,

 

Will Bachman  35:03

huh? Was it like in Spain, or before Spain or after in Spain? Alright, well, so, and that helped change your own self perception. It sounds like,

 

Lauren Messmore  35:15

Yeah, interesting.

 

Will Bachman  35:18

Sometimes those small things that we say to someone can really impact them. Sounds like it still resonates with you?

 

Lauren Messmore  35:26

Yeah. I mean, I have, I have a,

 

Lauren Messmore  35:30

I guess, a dynamic internal dialog sometimes. So one thing I tell myself over and over again is, you know, to bet on myself. You’ve got to bet on yourself, because if you don’t, then why would anybody else? And I find myself saying that to other people too, you gotta bet on yourself.

 

Will Bachman  35:56

Okay, second random question is, what’s one habit that you have intentionally adopted sometime over the last 10 years that you would recommend to others.

 

Lauren Messmore  36:09

Think I have a bunch.

 

Will Bachman  36:10

Okay, you can share more than

 

Speaker 1  36:12

one.

 

Lauren Messmore  36:12

Yeah, because I have, I have these new year’s resolutions. Okay, when my life felt overwhelming one year, I decided I just needed to have the easiest possible resolution that would actually make a difference.

 

Will Bachman  36:29

Okay?

 

Lauren Messmore  36:29

And the first one I did was floss daily. And I was so pleased with the result of flossing daily that subsequent New Year’s resolutions, I tried to find the easiest possible but high impact habits, and this year I have two of them, actually. One is to start the day drinking two cups of water,

 

Will Bachman  36:59

okay?

 

Lauren Messmore  37:00

And the other is daily stretching.

 

Will Bachman  37:04

Oh, daily stretching. When do you do the daily stretching?

 

Lauren Messmore  37:07

Some sometime before the day is over,

 

Speaker 1  37:10

okay,

 

Lauren Messmore  37:11

typically in the morning.

 

Speaker 1  37:12

All right,

 

Lauren Messmore  37:14

just 10 or 15 minutes. Nothing, nothing too difficult. No equipment required. I try to keep it simple so that I don’t skip it.

 

Will Bachman  37:23

Yeah, water, water. Should it be cold? Is it hot water? Cold water doesn’t

 

Speaker 1  37:30

matter.

 

Will Bachman  37:31

Two cups of water, Okay,

 

Lauren Messmore  37:32

stay hydrated.

 

Will Bachman  37:34

Okay. That’s our transition into back to college. So tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way could be professional. Could be something that was completely non professional.

 

Lauren Messmore  37:49

I think I would have gone wrong. He would have said earlier, taking Spanish was my least favorite class.

 

Lauren Messmore  37:58

Oh,

 

Lauren Messmore  37:58

at Harvard, but it probably turned out to be the most useful, if only because I could put it on my resume, and that created the opportunity to go to Spain that I probably wouldn’t have had if I couldn’t have put it on my resume,

 

Will Bachman  38:17

huh? Well, I’m right there with you taking Spanish a, eventually, I would not have, I would not have married my wife, who’s, who’s.

 

Lauren Messmore  38:28

That’s a much better way to learn the language.

 

Will Bachman  38:31

It helps reinforce it. Okay, so that was the course Spanish A. So, Spanish a, everyone. So take your tell your kids to learn a foreign language and really learn it.

 

Lauren Messmore  38:44

Been learning French on Duolingo. I forget how long my streak is, but it’s probably good two and a half or three years now.

 

Will Bachman  39:00

My gosh, that’s amazing.

 

Lauren Messmore  39:02

Yeah. So I guess small, repetitive routines like that can really accumulate over time,

 

Lauren Messmore  39:12

1% every day.

 

Will Bachman  39:17

And Lauren, for listeners who want to you know, follow up with you. People who knew you but have lost touch, where’s the best place online for them to find out what you’re doing?

 

Lauren Messmore  39:32

LinkedIn,

 

Will Bachman  39:32

okay, all right, we will include your profile link in the show notes.

 

Lauren Messmore  39:38

Okay. Thank you,

 

Will Bachman  39:39

Lauren. Thank you so much for joining us today.

 

Lauren Messmore  39:44

Thank you for having me. It was fun. Bye.