Name: Gary Fencik: From the NFL to private equity
Uploaded: 2014-08-14
Duration: 4 min 55 s
Description: After spending 12 seasons in the NFL, legendary Chicago Bears safety Gary Fencik traded in his jersey for a business suite. Years later, Fencik has proven to not only be a heavy hitter on the field, but in the board room.

[ MUSIC ] If you ask any lifelong Chicago Bears fan who Gary Fencik is, they know right away, he's the hitman. And if you ask a wide receiver from the 80s who he is, he might have to fight the urge to duck. I don't know anyone who goes to the yellow university with aspirations. Of playing professional football. [ LAUGH ] It just doesn't happen. You could say that Fensigs football career was really more of a surprise then his eventual banking career. Cause he graduates from Yale in 1976 and it's a rare thing to go from the Ivy League to the NFL. The conventional wisdom is this is sort of a fun thing to put on a resume before I go to business. [ INAUDIBLE ] I was originally drafted by the Miami Dolphins and ruptured my lung and was on my way to New York to become a baby banker. And instead I got picked up by my home town team, the Chicago Bears. Then played for 12 years. Coming to the Chicago Bears there's one person that I owe my career to, and that's Doug Plank. Doug was the star on the defense when I got here. And he taught me basically how to play safety. And that was to play with absolute abandonment. And and I became a much more physical player. Plank teaches him. How a play with this, this devil [ INAUDIBLE ] He learns the black arts of football. And become this, this absolute assassin. This, this aggressive player who's, who's feared by other teams. And fearless when he goes after receivers. And still to this day he's the all time leader for the bears for interceptions. Pensick suffers an injury in 1979 that puts things in perspective for him. He's able to keep playing after the injury, but it gave him pause and reminded him that football isn't going to last forever, and that he needed to prepare for his second life. I had a mentor at the time, who, was the president of a fortune 500 company, who came in. The day after my surgery and, and said, you know, you know I know this may not be a great time to talk about it, but I think you should really, seriously think about business school and I, [ LAUGH ] I think I asked for some more morphine. As the Bears are headed for an epic Superbowl run, Fencik, who is a pretty big cog in their system and an all pro safety enrolls in the Kellogg School of Business in Northwestern. [ MUSIC ] So here's a guy who is doing business school classes while playing in the NFL on a Super Bowl team. Certainly, 12 years with a great group of guys. I learned a lot about myself. And I think I had a better idea of what I wanted to do when I got out of football. I had worked in real estate, during the, the last few off seasons. Started in that area. And I was recruited into something I'd never heard of called Acid Management. And today, you know, fortunately there was a guy who gave me a call, gave me a chance, and and led me to what I think is a very exciting career. So these days, this all- pro safety exec of ball players is a hit in the business world. He's a partner at a PE firm and he's been doing it for almost 20 years. So, Adams Street Partners is a firm that focuses only private equity. We have roughly 50 people, and we organized a very friendly management buyout of UDS for regulatory reasons in 2001. And we had roughly $ 5. 5 billion under management. Today, we have. About 130 people in, six offices worldwide and we have about 25 billion. We're really broadly a private equity platform that different types of institutional investors can use our strategies to hopefully achieve the success they're looking for in their portfolio. Now that I've been out of football and in a management position, you do look back and realize that there's a lot of commonality between success in professional sports, and with the Chicago Bears, and what I do today. I think I've always been aggressive. I always, you know, have been very competitive. We have different strategies within private equity. Everybody just wants to win. Probably, the biggest thing that I didn't really appreciate when I was playing football that is so true in business is how important the culture of the organization that you're a part of really defines your success. I was honored to play on that great 85 team that wasn't just having Mike **** and Buddy Lion as coaches or Walter Payne and Jim McMahon. But the one thing that Didka and Buddy Ryan I think would all embrace was that when you get on the field, you represent the Chicago Bears and that means something. Fensig demonstrates the exception to the rule, which is that he has succeeded after his sport because of his careful planning. You know you hear about pro athletes who don't plan properly. And because Fencik always had an eye toward that second career, he's been able to establish himself beyond football. When we would've mandate, I don't have 70000 people cheering. [ LAUGH ] That's for sure. Wish we did, but we don't. [ MUSIC ]

After spending 12 seasons in the NFL, legendary Chicago Bears safety Gary Fencik traded in his jersey for a business suite. Years later, Fencik has proven to not only be a heavy hitter on the field, but in the board room.