Levi Pettit Says Young Finance Professionals May Be Missing Out on This Key Opportunity

Workforce members have largely embraced the shift away from going into the office every day to instead working remotely — a trend that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and has generally continued at numerous companies.

“COVID changed a lot of things,” says investment professional Levi Pettit. “People coming out of undergrad or college who want to pursue finance may find that attractive. However, it’s important for people who [are in] their entry-level job [to] be looking for opportunities where they can be face-to-face with people every single day — in my experience, that’s where I learned and grew the most.”

Pettit has held a number of positions in the industry since graduating magna cum laude with a double major in finance and economics from the University of Texas at Dallas.

He initially worked at Independent Financial, which operates 90 financial centers in Texas and Colorado, as an enterprise risk management analyst. 

“I was working in enterprise risk management; nothing in my undergrad prepared me for that,” he says. “My first boss said to me, ‘I know that you just graduated, and you think that you have a college degree and you know everything now; but that’s not the case. You need to realize you will need to continue learning for the rest of your career.’ That’s just something that stuck with me, and something that I’ve tried to hold on to.”

Levi Pettit On The Benefit of Personal Interactions 

Following his time at Independent Financial, Pettit worked as a credit analyst at the Texas-based Veritex Bank, which sports branch locations in Houston, Fort Worth and Dallas.

Roughly a year after starting, he had lunch with his former boss from a college internship in the oil and gas industry — who mentioned he was planning to create a family office.

“We were just catching up,” Pettit says. “I explained to him, I’m studying for the CFA; this is what I want do long-term.’ He [said], ‘I want to diversify away from oil and gas; we’re doing some private deals on the side, but I don’t have the time to be CEO of my oil and gas company and manage the deal flow that’s coming to my desk and the investments that I’m making.’” 

In addition to the oil and gas industry, Pettit had also interned in college at a family office — where he fell in love with the tight-knit culture.

“It never felt like I had to talk to a boss, who had to talk to their boss, who had to talk to somebody else’s boss,” he says. “I could be completely open and honest to even the managing partner about what was going on. That was a common theme, not only at the family office that I worked for, but at the family office that I interned for.” 

Pettit told his former boss if he really wanted to launch a family office, he’d love to have an opportunity to help build it out.

In July 2019, he did when he took on an investment associate role at a first-generation, single-family office. Pettit evaluated investment options, performed transaction due diligence and monitored investments during his four years with the organization, helping to manage the associated portfolio of private equity and venture capital investments.

“It was an amazing experience,” he says. “I realized how these high-net worth individuals looked at investment opportunities — not just on the public side between stocks and bonds, but on the private side as well. My role was generally on the private side, dealing more with alternative investments, private equity, venture capital, commercial real estate; we would do direct investing, as well as allocating some investing in funds.”

Pettit, who is currently enrolled in Pepperdine Graziadio Business School’s MBA program, suggests young professionals who are just starting out in the industry seek both networking and mentoring opportunities — and try to find ways to regularly observe a company’s leaders when they’re performing tasks such as making decisions, which he feels can assist with professional development. 

“Unfortunately, I just don’t think remote environments provide that opportunity,” Levi Pettit says. “If I was graduating today, I would try to find something that required me to be in a seat five days a week, and make sure there was some type of team culture.”

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