Trojans in Business: Jeff Byers

By Jordan Moore on October 23, 2014 10:18 AM | No Comments

Written by Caroline Deisley, USC blog contributor

Name: Jeff Byers

Resume: Financial Advisor at the Drexler Group of Wells Fargo Advisors

Sport at USC: Football

Caroline Deisley (CD): So Jeff, what exactly do you do for Wells Fargo?

Jeff Byers (JB): I work for the Drexler Group of Wells Fargo Advisors. Steve Drexler and I are partners. Our goal is to really simplify, enhance and preserve our clients monetary well-being. That can mean a wide range of things, but what we really take pride in and specialize in is individual portfolio management. We build individual portfolios for our clients, and we manage them to the risk tolerances that our clients have so that their goals and objectives can be met through these portfolios. We really focus on disciplined portfolio risk management. We have defined process-driven results that we go through for how we build portfolios. Everything is based on personalized goals and strategies for our clients. We have clients all over the country, we're national in scope and we take pride in building meaningful and close relationships across the country.

Football and athletics has taught me so much about my job and so much is applicable whether it's discipline, work ethic, planning, strategy, how to deal with relationships, etc. Everybody deals with things in a certain way. Those different personalities? You learn about that on a football team and you learn how to interact with different people who are very different minded than yourself.

CD: Throughout your athletic career, you faced many obstacles. What would you say is your biggest takeaway from learning how to overcome life's challenges?

JB: I guess what I've learned most is that you can only control what you can control in life. The two things that I really believe in is that you can control your attitude and your effort. You can't control these other things in life. You can't control if you get hurt, if you lose your job, whatever it may be. Those things are out of your control - what you can control is what you should worry about. Focusing on your attitude and your effort in life really helps you overcome any obstacle because there's always positives in all these negatives that come up. I got hurt at SC and it gave me an opportunity to get my Master's. It's really easy to look at things very near-sided, short-term wise and it can be very negative. But, I've always found that there's some positive in every situation, some learning opportunity, some way that you can better yourself or grow as a person when the obstacles arise because everybody faces adversity - that's how life is. The really great, successful people that I've been around and have had the opportunity to know are the people that just take adversity in full swing and say, 'This only makes me stronger. I'm going to let this define me in a positive way rather than the negative way.'

CD: For a lot of the athletes that we talk to, it is challenging to be both a student and an athlete. Do you think that you would have gotten the same academic experience if you hadn't gotten hurt or gotten the most out of it like you did?

JB: That's a great question. I got hurt my second and third year. There was definitely a refocus in my mind towards academics. When I was 18, I thought football was top priority and all that. When you get hurt, you realize that life has different goals and life should have different goals. Sports is a small microcosm of life. I'm at USC and I have this tremendous opportunity to get this education and better myself. Maybe in five years I'm still playing football, but I guarantee you in 20 years I'm not. So, SC has given me a future outside of football and for football as well.

CD: Take me through your transition. What really inspired you to retire and enter the business industry? How hard was it to make that switch from being an athlete and now being in the work force?

JB: I've always had some sort of internship or job every single offseason. It's something that my peers in the business school have pushed me to do as well as my father - just to stay relevant. Football is not really a career. Athletics is not really a career unless you go into coaching. Athletics is a head start in life. It gives you an opportunity to have some financial freedoms and to do what you want to do. I've always had some sort of business-related job throughout my NFL and college career, but what led me to the transition was I played four years in the NFL and I was 28 years old and I knew I never wanted football to take more from me than I from it. Just from a health, mind, body standpoint I was getting really close to that line where football was going to take more from me than I could take from it. I have a young son, I'm starting a family so it just makes you realize I want to be there in my 50s with my boy. I'm really passionate about things other than football. I love football but it was just becoming more pain than reward.

CD: Do you think you had an exit strategy planned since your time at SC? A way to get out when it did become too much?

JB: Failure to plan is planning to fail. If you don't have a plan when you're going to get out of what you're going to do, then you are just going to flounder around for a couple of years trying to figure out what you're going to do. I was really blessed to have peers and teachers coach me that I needed to have a plan. The job I'm at now I've been doing for almost three years now in the offseasons because I retired in January. I knew that when I decided to retire in January that this is where I was going. I had this lined up. If I didn't have anything lined up, I would have kept playing.

CD: What was that like your first day in the office after being an athlete for so long? What was it like going to your desk or cubicle or whatever you have set up?

JB: It's still the same for me. I viewed football as work. It was a job to me, and it's a job to everyone who plays it at that level because it's very serious. Every day matters. I come into my office now and say how can I better myself, how can I do my job better. It's still competition. I'm competing with myself every day trying to get better, learn new things and fix the mistakes that I've made in the past. It's a different environment, but I don't look back on football and say I wish I was still playing. I retired because I was ready to be done. I had enough of it. I love what I do now. I'm very passionate about it. I love the strategy. I love the people I work with. So, I'm really fortunate that I transitioned from the NFL to a really amazing job that is something I wanted to do and is something I wake up in the morning and look forward to.

CD: That's great. You briefly mentioned a few of them but what are some of the skills that have branched over between athletics and the business world?

JB: The biggest thing that athletics teaches you is work ethic. You never get to the level that SC is at or to a professional level if you don't have a really really great work ethic. Teaching you how to work and not just to work but how to work smart, how to evaluate yourself. The second thing is how to evaluate yourself. You can take criticism. Athletics teaches you how to self-evaluate and take criticism from clients, employees, employer whoever it may be. Football for me was a huge strategy base. It teaches you how to respond to situations and have a plan - that really relates to what I do right now. We have a very repeatable plan process. We have a game plan for all the different situations that can happen just like football. When you're backed up on your own goal line you have a certain game plan that you go into - just like when we have a certain game plan for when our backs are against the wall what do we do. Same thing. It's very applicable to football strategy in the sense that you always have a plan, a process, you know what you are going to do in certain situations. You know plan A, plan B, plan C.

CD: You're a little closer in age than some of the people we've spoken to. What would you say to players as they're making these decisions trying to get the most out of college both academically and athletically?

JB: I think you can never learn too much from your peers. I think you get caught in this trap in school that you're just here to learn from a textbook or a teacher but really you can learn so much from the peers, your classmates that you can't learn in a classroom. They have ideas that I think are very valuable and why academia is so important. You can't forget that you're a student-athlete. Your first job is to be a student and maybe an athlete will pay dividends for the next few years, but being a student will pay dividends for the next 50.

CD: So, what's next? You're in transition but seem to be doing really well. What's on the horizon?

The horizon is just growing the business I'm currently in. My partner and I have a really successful book of business and my goal is to keep that business running as well as we can and learn as much from my partner as I can. As well as grow our current client relationships and just continue to get better at what we do. Continue to follow a process and redesign our process when it needs to be redesigned. Just continue to be fully immersed in that.

If you want to reach out to Jeff, he can be contacted by email at Jeffrey.Byers@wellsfargoadvisors.com.