Culled from the 2018 Markel Letter to Shareholders.
Right Owners
The first idea is that of the “Right Owners.” As your management team, we want and need a partnership with our owners. We need that partnership to be long term, and not subject to short term whims of market disruptions, or false objectives derived from too short term an orientation. We need our partners to want the same things as we do, namely, the long term creation of one of the world’s great companies. That notion embeds ideas about sustainability, diversity, resilience, durability, and adaptability that have served as the hallmarks of Markel since our inception.
Having the right owners with a suitable long term time horizon provides us with an immense competitive advantage. In today’s world, short term and artificial time pressures permeate too many decisions. Our dual time horizon of, Forever and Right Now, allows us to make necessary, Right Now, decisions on a day by day basis. But, we always get to make those decisions with the Forever mindset guiding us while we do so. That is an incredibly rare advantage in today’s world. It would not happen without you as long term committed owners. For that we are greatly appreciative. Thank you. In order to earn the trust and respect of the right owners, we treat you as full partners. We think about what we would want to receive from management if our roles were reversed. If we were distant shareholders, and away from any contact for a year, we would want to know how is the firm doing. We might wonder what is going well and what is not going well. Is the firm going in new directions or maintaining the direction that you told us about last year? Did we add to the businesses we already owned? Did we buy any new businesses? Were there any major management changes, and what else took place that mattered at Markel last year? These are the sorts of questions we’ll attempt to answer in this letter, and the spirit in which we’ll describe our current circumstances as well as our ongoing hopes and dreams for the future.
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