Mister Multitasker Brian Smith (Questrom’96)

“I’m 42, but I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up,” says Questrom alum Brian Smith. Photo by Conor Doherty

The next time you need some advice on handling credit default swaps, battling an apartment house fire, joining a Secret Service security detail, reviewing the budget for sidewalk maintenance, or producing a Broadway show, call Brian Smith. Or text him. He never misses a text message.

Smith (Questrom’96) is a man of impressive talents and boundless energy. He is head trader at Blue Ridge Capital, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund, the mayor of Irvington, N.Y., an affluent village 20 miles north of Manhattan, and a producer for the Broadway show Spring Awakening, nominated for a 2016 Tony Award for best musical revival. Smith has also served as a volunteer firefighter, a member of the Irvington volunteer ambulance corps, and a Westchester County deputy sheriff.

“I’m 42, but I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up,” he jokes.

Longtime friend and coworker Michael Cairo, Blue Ridge Capital chief compliance officer, sees Smith’s diverse activities another way. “He’s not afraid to try new things,” Cairo says. “Nothing stops him, and I think that’s pretty amazing.”

Smith isn’t just a guy who does many things, Cairo adds, he’s a guy who does many things well. He is well respected in his industry and in 2016 was voted hedge fund trader of the year by The Trade magazine readers. In 2015, Republican Smith, a ran unopposed for a third two-year term as mayor in a heavily Democratic town. “I take it as a compliment,” he says, that Irvington’s Democrats have yet to run a mayoral candidate against him.

The son of an Army Reserve colonel, Smith was raised to appreciate the value of public service, and his outgoing personality and knack for problem-solving make him a natural leader. While juggling a demanding career, public office, and a busy family life (his children are 11 and 14) leaves him little downtime, it’s apparent he couldn’t live any other way.

After being senior class president at Irvington High School, Smith came to BU to study business. He chose to concentrate in accounting after a friend told him it was the best path to a job at the FBI. He eventually discovered that his nearsightedness made him ineligible for the agency, but he has no regrets.

“I had a professor who said if you have an accounting degree, you can do anything in business,” he says. “When you understand the numbers, a lot of the other stuff becomes easy.”

His first job after college was as an auditor with the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, where his notable clients included Tiger Management, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. Soon after joining the accounting firm, Smith began the rigorous training he’d need to become a firefighter and an emergency medical technician. “It was a way to do something completely different—something physical, as well as a completely different skill set from checking a group of numbers to a different group of numbers,” he says.

It also fulfilled his passion for public service and introduced him to a variety of like-minded people. As in many small towns, the fire department and ambulance corps in Irvington (population 6,420) are made up entirely of volunteers. Those with day jobs in the village respond to their pagers and the sound of the village fire horn during the day, and those with jobs in Manhattan and elsewhere respond at night. The fire department comprises about 50 men and women from all walks of life: custodians for the local school district, an insurance salesman, a PhD student, a paramedic with the New York City Fire Department.

“When you were around accountants and lawyers all day,” Smith says, “it was refreshing to be around guys who had a whole bunch of different careers.”

Responding to car accidents and 3 a.m. fire alarms apparently wasn’t enough to fill Smith’s leisure time, so he also began volunteering as a part-time deputy sheriff. The job mostly entailed directing traffic at parades, but he also joined presidential security details and was assigned to two Secret Service agents the day Hillary Clinton announced her US Senate candidacy. Just hours after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, he was sent to help secure a nuclear power plant, and in the following days he helped provide security at Westchester County Airport.

Contributing to his community had never felt so good, he says. “It was like therapy after 9/11.”

By 2001, Smith had left Pricewaterhouse for Blue Ridge Capital, a global hedge fund run by well-known investor John Griffin. The company’s 12th employee, he began as Blue Ridge controller, a jack-of-all-trades role that allowed him to work in many aspects of the business. “But I knew quickly that I liked the trading side of it,” he says, “so I tried to position myself toward trading.”

In 2004, the company’s head trader left, and Smith stepped into the job. “When our analysts give the portfolio manager ideas, the trading desk—which is what I head up—is responsible for implementing them,” he says, through such actions as buying options or currencies or shorting stocks.

He enjoys the variety of work he does. “One day you might be trading in India, and the next day you’re pricing some kind of derivative product you’ve never heard of,” he says. It’s also a social job. “We still talk on the phone a lot. Even the millennials talk on the phone in our business.”

Unlike accounting, where a mistake can be fixed as long as it’s caught before month’s end, trading leaves no room for error. “It can be stressful at times,” says Cairo, “but Brian’s got a laid-back approach, where he doesn’t get tense, as other people might, and he’s able to handle those situations.”

Smith’s unflappability is an asset in his other role: mayor. “If somebody comes at him with a lot of emotion or a lot of anger,” says Keira Smith of her husband, “he doesn’t take it personally.” He’s adept at defusing highly charged situations, helping everyone involved to calmly talk things through, she says.

“The biggest technique is not allowing yourself to get upset—you have to remain calm, even if you feel yourself getting angry,” says Smith. “If you can explain your actions, your views, whatever you are explaining, in a calm and respectful manner, most audiences—from a single person to a room of angry residents—become disarmed and you can switch to having a meaningful discussion. The calmness is not a lack of passion; the calm exudes competence and knowledge of the issue. The key is this has to be sincere, you cannot fake calmness or caring—you have to care about the issue because it is important to the person with the issue.”

Smith ran for a seat on Irvington’s board of trustees in 2009 because he believed the village needed more leaders with financial expertise. He served briefly on the board and ran for mayor in 2011. A paid administrator oversees the village’s daily operations, so the mayor’s responsibilities are broader in scope, Smith says. “You set the agenda and come up with the big themes that everyone is working on.” Although he says he’s delivered “annual budgets that are both low and sustainable,” it’s not his proudest achievement as the village’s elected head.

In 2005, Irvington had a tied vote for mayor. Smith says it sparked fights over ballots and a rift along party lines that took years to heal. More than a decade later, that’s all changed. “I think I am most proud of the level of decorum in our meetings—between board members as well as the general public—and the general feeling in Irvington that we are all pulling the same way, even if we do have disagreements.” He credits his ability to listen to both sides of an argument as a factor in the improved community relations.

“The key is to listen to the counterview more than your own, listen enough to ensure you fully understand the issues from their point of view. It is always very enlightening and often helps shape or soften your own view.”

For now, Smith’s firefighting and sheriff’s work are on hold. “Westchester County doesn’t let you be a part-time sheriff if you’re an elected official,” he says. “And with the firefighting, once I became mayor, it just felt weird—since you’re technically the fire chief’s boss—to show up on scene dragging hose.”

Relinquishing these duties has left him with time to fulfill his mayoral duties and to pick up a few new hobbies, including brewing his own beer and producing Broadway shows. Being a producer requires little more than writing checks, he says, so it doesn’t take much time but has provided an education into the art and the business of theater. He’d gotten involved as a backer of a Godspell revival—the executive producer had encouraged investors to give as little as $1,500 and Smith was a fan of the play—and has since supported two other productions. One was the Tony-nominated revival of Spring Awakening. “I am very happy to have been associated with Deaf West Theatre’s production, which mixed hearing and nonhearing actors,” says Smith. “It was truly a piece of art and made a very powerful statement about being a teenager and not being heard by adults and society. I wish it could have run forever.”

It may seem as though Smith’s juggling act takes up his entire day, but he still makes time to pick up his son from wrestling practice and take long family vacations, thanks in part to a six-minute commute to the office and the beauty of email and electronic calendars (and text messaging). Besides, he didn’t have the patience to wait until retirement to become involved in his community. “When you’re younger,” he says, “you have so much more energy, and you can make the time. You can make it work. You feel like you really belong to somewhere.”