Pugh lands Boeing account
Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) - by Joe Nabbefeld Staff Writer
Pugh Capital Management Inc. will more than double the portfolio it runs thanks to The Boeing Co.'s move this month to put more pension money in the hands of minority firms.
For Mary Pugh, a former Washington Mutual executive, it's a recognition of her track record in an industry long on connections and short on African American women.
Pugh said getting the $200 million in Boeing pension assets culminated years of building a good name for herself -- including earlier approaches to Boeing, where her father had worked as an engineer until his retirement.
"The management business is built on trust," she said, "so part of the hardship, if you will, is it takes awhile to build trust in people. ... That's part of the doors that have to be opened. People like to do business with people they know. The issue is how do you get known."
Boeing announced earlier this month that Pugh Capital and Pittsburgh, Pa.-based MDL Capital Management, also African-American-owned, will each manage $200 million in Boeing pension assets.
Adding the two bond managers increased Boeing's diversity during a year of challenges about the environment for minorities at the company.
The changes were not made solely to expand the company's roster of minority money managers, executives said. Gary Bland, Boeing's vice president for trusts investment, said the hiring of the new firms stems from Boeing's mergers with Rockwell International and McDonnell Douglas Corp. The combined company wound up employing more asset managers than it needed and carried a different mix of investments than it desired.
Among other things, Boeing wanted a higher percentage of its $58 billion in retirement funds placed in bonds, Bland said. It shed three companies that invested in stocks, replacing them with the two bond firms, he said
Bland stressed that Pugh Capital and MDL have strong investment performance records, performing ahead of the Shearson Lehman Aggregate Index.
"My job depends on how well these firms perform, so I'm not going to hire somebody that doesn't make me look good," Bland said.
Women- and minority-owned firms manage more than 12 percent of Boeing's pension assets, Bland said.
After attending Seattle's Lakeside School, Pugh received a bachelor's degree in economics from Yale University. She began working in 1981 as an investment analyst for Washington Mutual Savings. She rose to senior vice president in charge of managing $1.2 billion in trust assets portfolio management before leaving in 1991 to form Pugh Capital.
Latest News |
Most Viewed Stories |
Most Emailed Stories |
