When Steve Booth ’89 MBA and a couple of close friends joined Baird in 1994, the firm was still small — but it had a culture that the friends found very attractive.
“It was built first around clients. There was a client-centricity and focus that we still have today,” says Booth. “And the second cultural focus was on being a great place to work. Part of what I’ve been trying to do for the past 30 years is to build on that foundation.”
Booth moved from Chicago to Baird’s Milwaukee headquarters, where he hoped to help unify the company culture — and where he and his family found a lifelong home. He went on to lead Baird’s industrial and global M&A teams before becoming head of the investment banking group in 2004. In his time there, the group became a global business and the second largest at the firm. And since he first arrived, Baird has expanded from a handful of Midwest locations to 200 locations worldwide.
Now chairman and CEO as well as a member of the board of directors, Booth focuses primarily on continuous innovation — what he calls “strategic change.”
“Change is our friend; complacency is the enemy,” he says. “We have an opportunity to harness and utilize change as a way to gain market share by doing things better, more effectively, for our clients.”
Chris Coetzee ’90 MBA has been close to Booth throughout his journey — they met at Kellogg, worked together at Baird and have become close friends. They even visited each other at the hospital after their first sons were born. Coetzee says Booth’s creativity has had a large impact on the industry.
“He introduced the fireside chat to our M&A business — a more informal approach to positioning companies to would-be buyers,” he says. “The process hadn’t surfaced in our industry prior to that, but it became a competitive edge and then an industry standard.” Coetzee believes that Booth leads Baird by example.
Steve really instills an environment, a culture within our firm of working hard, but having fun along the way. Chris Coetzee ’90 MBA
Baird is one of the largest privately held, employee-owned financial services firms in the United States — which Booth sees as a huge advantage that allows the firm to drive results while staying focused on values. One of those values is giving back.
“We have roughly 2,000 people here in Wisconsin, so we have an ability to make an outsize impact in our communities. And we do, but it’s not the firm,” he says. “It’s the collective effort of all our people, who are passionate about doing it. And they’re all doing it in their own way.”
Booth got much of his early career advice from his father, Frank Booth ’34 BBA, a small-business owner and a Kellogg graduate himself. Steve’s son Greg Booth ’16, ’23 MBA also attended Kellogg. Greg remembers finding his grandfather in the alumni database and sending the entry to Steve.
“It was emotional to see my grandfather’s name in connection with Kellogg,” Greg says. “My grandfather has been gone for a little while, but he was very similar to my father. They’re both very thoughtful, quiet, mild-mannered guys who simply care about everything that they do, to the best of their ability.” Greg now works at Baird at the investment banking group, just as his father once did.
“My dad has brought Kellogg values into the business world by being a relentless advocate of teamwork and community service,” he says. “It doesn’t take long walking through the hallways at Baird to realize that those Kellogg values are perfectly embodied in everything we do here.”