Phil Taller on Performance

My name is Phil Taller. I am a Senior Vice President, Portfolio Manager at Mackenzie Investments, and the Team Lead for our Growth Team.

The great thing about being part of a high-performance team, we have found a way to celebrate success together and support each other when things aren't going so well. And that builds relationship and a confidence that we can get through things.

Mandates we work on are US Small- and Mid-Cap equities. We tend to run with a pretty short list of names because we believe in having the courage of your convictions. We focus on companies that we believe can grow faster than the economy, and while they are doing that they can generate a lot of free cash flow for shareholders.

Our valuation process is based on cash flows and especially free cash flows. And we do a lot of modelling of those free cash flows over many years to come, discounting those back in models. We do not focus on earnings, because we do not think they're all that useful.

We often get advisors telling us that we've done a great thing for their clients. They tell us how happy they are. It's a wonderful feeling of satisfaction to have delivered that to our clients.