CEO SWITCHES TO X’S AND O’S
Former Ameritrade boss Moglia swaps finance for football coaching
The Tuesday morning meeting has begun at Coastal Carolina, and Joe Moglia has a few points to make. This has always been his element, whether he was selling bonds he didn’t know much about, building one of the world’s biggest online brokerage firms or now, at 63, coaching a football team.
It’s a rare gift, the ability to get people in a room and command their attention the way Moglia does, to distill the most important parts of his message into catch phrases that become familiar, to make an audience see exactly what he wants them to see.
But it comes naturally to him, and with each bullet point, whether it’s recruiting strategy (“Remember on those scholarships, they’re precious, precious, precious gold”) or imploring his assistants to get more rest (“It’s going to make a difference in terms of the adjustments we make, how we call games, our patience, how we handle the kids”), the arc of his remarkable life story comes into focus.
How did a self-described street kid born to immigrant parents go from coaching at Dartmouth, where he was living in a storage room above the football offices, to a Wall Street job at 34 for which he had almost no traditional qualifications? How did he then rise to upper-level management at
“If we’re not able to compete at the national level over the next few years, I’m going to get fired. But I’m doing what I want to do.”
Coastal Carolina football coach Joe Moglia, former CEO at TD Ameritrade
Merrill Lynch and later become CEO at Ameritrade (now TD Ameritrade), where he took a company from the brink of extinction to record profits in 2008 when many financial firms were in the midst of a meltdown?
All of this happened, Moglia says, because of football. He’ll tell you his 16 years of coaching in high schools and colleges forged the leadership, organization and ability to make decisions under pressure needed to be successful in another field he had just as much passion about. For nearly 30 years in business, every time a major news organization came to do a story on him, the narrative was always framed by his background in football.
But the biggest weapons in Moglia’s playbook are self-confidence and charisma. When he talks, it is almost like an orchestra, his hands moving to the rhythm of his words, which flow without interruption or pause. He organizes his thoughts and tries to get through them in 15 minutes or less, with minimal discussion. He is encouraging but direct, funny but stern.
Even if he has no clue what he’s doing, it would be impossible to tell.
“Every area I ever ran on Wall Street,” he said, “I knew less about the product than anyone else who grew up in that industry.”
‘OUT-OF-THE-BOX HIRE’
Which brings us back to Coastal Carolina, where last winter the school president decided to fire the football coach, a well-liked man named David Bennett who built the program from scratch and twice took it to the Football Championship Subdivision national playoffs.
Less than two weeks later, he hired Moglia. His football résumé stopped in 1984, when he decided he couldn’t support four kids and an ex-wife on an assistant coach’s salary of $33,000, and picked back up in 2008 when he stepped down from a CEO job that paid him $21 million and brought $6.9 million in stock options he exercised (according to TD Ameritrade’s 2009 proxy) to become an unpaid intern at Nebraska and then head coach (for five games) of a United Football League franchise that first wanted him as an investor, not a coach.
At his introductory news conference, Moglia spoke for 28 minutes straight, laying out his life story and decision to again pursue a coaching career much the way it is told in Monte Burke’s new biography, 4th & Goal: One Man’s Quest to Recapture His Dream. It’s an inspiring tale with a happy ending, as he realizes his lifelong quest to become a head coach, with the UFL’s Omaha Nighthawks.
But this being a college campus, and Moglia being an unorthodox hire, cynical questions surrounded his arrival. Was this a public relations stunt? Why would someone whose net worth has been conservatively estimated at $150 million take a $175,000 a year job to coach in a 9,000-seat stadium? How hard would he work? Did he, for lack of a better term, buy his way into the job? (Moglia still gets a $400,000 annual retainer as TD Ameritrade’s chairman, according to the company’s latest proxy.)
Athletics director Hunter Yurachek scoffed at the suggestion Moglia was hired for reasons other than his qualifications: “There wasn’t one time we discussed the PR that may occur from hiring Coach Moglia. It was an out-of-the-box hire, but in the interview process and the time we spent together, he put my mind at ease. If you follow his career, there isn’t anything Joe has done that hasn’t been very, very successful.”
Moglia admits being somewhat offended, but mostly bemused, by the criticism Coastal Carolina and President David DeCenzo received, mostly from inside the coaching world. If Moglia had wanted to be an athletics director, or perhaps take DeCenzo’s job, the school would have been praised for hiring a man of his business accomplishments.
“I’d probably be able to get one of those jobs pretty quickly,” Moglia said. “But I don’t want to do those things. By the way, I’m qualified to be a head coach, too.” On this point, he will not relent. He touts how at 22 he became the youngest high school head coach in Delaware. He talks about moving up to the college ranks from Lafayette to Dartmouth, where he was defensive coordinator. He recalls then-Miami (Fla.) defensive coordinator Tom Olivadotti offering him a job in 1984, which would have put him on track for a career in big-time football before deciding to try Wall Street so he could stay closer to his children. He describes Nebraska, where for two years he lived in an Embassy Suites at the doorstep of the stadium and worked 80 hours a week in an unspecified role on coach Bo Pelini’s staff, absorb- ing everything he could. And he mentions his 1-4 record in the UFL, where he coached against former NFL coaches Jerry Glanville and Marty Schottenheimer.
But mostly he talks about his “skill sets,” a phrase he repeats more than 100 times in a two-hour interview. In an era when coaches such as Alabama’s Nick Saban and Ohio State’s Urban Meyer are compared to CEOs in their approach, Moglia is putting that theory to the test. And he doesn’t quite understand why, when he first wanted to get back into football, people hesitated. One athletics director, Moglia said, told him he wasn’t a good candidate because he didn’t have recent experience with NCAA rules. He laughed and said he’d spent his life working under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission — the real SEC.
“The vast majority of athletic directors and presidents are good guys, they’re smart guys, they care,” he said. “But do they truly understand riskreward? No. The best decisions I made in my career were decisions on people — what are the skill sets required for success? I think what you’d find is I don’t just have the skill sets, I have tremendous competitive advantages.”
WELL-DEFINED PHILOSOPHIES
How that translates onto the field is unclear. After winning its first two games, Coastal Carolina fell to 2-3 Saturday with a 55-14 loss to perennial Championship Subdivision power Appalachian State, its worst result under Moglia. The week before, however, Coastal was within three points of Toledo — from the top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision — in the fourth quarter before losing 38-28.
In terms of laying the foundation for his program, however, Moglia’s philosophies are well-defined. Ask him about recruiting, he’ll detail an intricate system in which coaches have time built into their day for evaluating and making calls, with each prospect evaluated by three coaches as an “A, B or C” before going from the database to the recruiting board. Ask him about discipline, and he’ll talk about how seven players have been dismissed for failing to live up to his catch phrase, “BAM,” which stands for “Be A Man” and is plastered on the walls of the football offices.
He believes his assistant coaches are better off spending time with their families and getting rest than watching film until 3 a.m. He wants his coordinators to spend the same amount of time teaching 20 plays for an upcoming opponent that most teams would spend teaching 80. He thinks periodic, one-on-one personnel reviews of his coordinators and their staff are important to open lines of communication. He wants his team to “leverage our core competencies” on special teams.
His job, as he sees it, is to set the primary principles, guide his assistant coaches and delegate responsibility. During a 1-hour, 45-minute practice last week, Moglia spent fewer than 10 minutes talking to players. Mostly, he was there to observe, scribbling things in a notebook that he would address with his coaches that night.
“It’s a different environment than a lot of football operations,” said defensive line coach Brandon Noble, a former NFL player. “It’s a refreshing change of pace. Joe really works on time allocation and just doing the things that matter when you’re supposed to do them.”
Said Steve Schnall, a former NFL assistant coach and scout who knew Moglia from his high school coaching days and is retired in nearby Myrtle Beach: “He’s coaching like a CEO. He has a great ability to concentrate and see things.”
And, if nothing else, Moglia is taking this seriously. He could be anywhere in the world, doing anything he wanted. But at 63, he is putting in 80hour weeks, living in a condo while his wife commutes from Omaha for games. This might or might not work, but he is going to give it as much energy as the 34-year-old version who gave up coaching because he needed to survive.
“It’s got nothing to do with money or the fact I could be doing something else,” he said. “Warren Buffett has plenty of money. He still works at 82, and if you ask him what separates him, he’ll say I love what I’m doing. If we’re not able to compete at the national level over the next few years, I’m going to get fired. But I’m doing what I want to do.”