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　　The Fishing Guide Who Hooked Hedge-Fund Titan Bill Ackman

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　　Oliver White is 32 years old, rake-thin and brown eyed, with windblown hair that pokes from his hat as if seeking the sunlight. Thanks to an unlikely meeting with one of the world’s most powerful hedge fund managers, White is a brand in the making in the fishing and travel industry. But the day we meet, at Snake Cay, an expansive flat of knee-deep water on the western shore of Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas, he has gone back to his roots.

　　White stands barefoot on a platform on the back of his skiff, using an 18-foot graphite pole to nudge the shallow-draft boat along. He scans the water for bonefish, the prized fly rod quarry of the Bahamian flats, shadowy in natural silver and black camouflage.

　　Leadership Lessons From Fishing Guides

　　Monte Burke

　　Forbes Staff

　　“There’s one, man. Two o’clock,” he tells me. I spot the fish—a large one—and cast. As my 2-inch-long shrimp fly nestles on the sandy bottom, I give it a few tugs to make it lifelike. The bonefish follows the fly for a few feet, then suddenly flushes, creating a 25-yard-long wake as it flees.

　　“Don’t worry, man. There’ll be others,” White tells me. And he’s right. There are many more shots at great fish—with some actually landed—during my three days at Abaco Lodge, where White is the manager and part-owner, and a very busy man. In a whirlwind 72-hour period White will simultaneously play host to a group of fun-loving Canadian doctors, sign contracts to write a book and host a fishing television show, work on a deal to sell this lodge and buy another, and pinch-hit as a guide.

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　　His BlackBerry is always present, its ring puncturing the serenity of the flats, as incongruous as a chain saw at an opera. But it’s all part of building a business and a brand. “I want to make some money,” White says. “But it’s about the lifestyle, too. I really like not wearing shoes.”

　　One morning in January 2004 two men walked into Kau Tapen, in Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego, a lodge catering to a discriminating, highly skilled subset of the fly-fishing world. It is no place for amateurs.

　　White, then 24, was one of the lodge’s head guides. He had graduated with a degree in philosophy from the University of North Carolina, then taken a job as a flyfishing guide. As it turned out, he was very good at it. He guided, among others, Blackstone’s Tony James; Bob Rich, the owner of Rich Food Products; and Ilya Sherbovich, the Moscow banker. He was entering his third year at Kau Tapen when he spied the two men. They seemed very much out of place.

　　What little gear they had—waders and hats—was brand new. They did not have rods. One man had a shock of gray hair that belied his youthful face. His name was Bill Ackman, the hedge fund impresario who had, that very week, launched Pershing Square Capital Management 6,500 miles away in Manhattan. Ackman had won his fishing trip at a charity auction. “I was told it was the best place in the world to fish,” he says. The only problem: Neither he nor his friend had ever flyfished. It was the equivalent of showing up for a tee time at Augusta National when the extent of your golf experience was a few rounds of putt-putt.

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　　White became Ackman’s guide on the trip and taught him how to fly-fish. “Bill was demanding and very inquisitive,” says White. The two talked about “fishing and life,” says Ackman.

　　By the end of the week Ackman had caught a 24-pound sea-run brown trout on a fly, then returned the favor with an astounding offer: a job. “Oliver was extremely bright,” says Ackman. “I told him I would send him 12 books on investing—by Graham, Greenblatt, Lynch and Buffett—and that when he’d finished them, he should call me.” Says White: “I really didn’t think that much of it. You meet clients who offer you things all the time.”

　　But when White returned to the States for the summer to guide in Jackson Hole, Wyo., he was greeted with the box of books. “I read them all,” says White. “But I still wasn’t sure about all of this. Finance had never intrigued me. But Bill did.”

　　He called Ackman. Ackman flew White to New York in the fall of 2005, put him up in a hotel and gave him $10,000 in spending money. That December Ackman hired him to be one of the five analysts at his hedge fund, which at the time had $1 billion in assets. It is a job for which Ackman says he receives “a zillion résumés a day.” The other four analysts at Pershing Square had M.B.A.s and had gone through all of the proper channels. But, says Ackman, “I thought it was good to have someone out of the mainstream.”

　　Says White: “Only later would I realize that I’d drawn the winning lottery ticket.” (Since then Ackman has hired his tennis pro and a man whom he met in a cab.)

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　　White, starting with a salary of $60,000 (plus a year-end bonus), spent the first six months shadowing Ackman and carrying around a yellow legal pad to write down phrases and concepts he didn’t understand (“which was most things”).

　　But he learned, then started to contribute. He persuaded Ackman to take a position in Legg Mason. When Pershing Square pushed for a director change at Ceridian, White—through his fishing connections—sleuthed out that the director in question had indeed been using the company plane for private fishing trips. (The director was ousted.) The firm’s assets rose to $7 billion while White was there. The former fishing guide “added a ton of value,” says Ackman. “After all, what we do here is really just fishing, too.” Near the end of White’s second year at Pershing Square, Ackman—who was on the board at Harvard Business School—encouraged White to apply there to polish his skills. “For a middle-class southern kid it was a huge opportunity,” White says. But during the application process, as he took a step back to assess his life, White decided that something important was lacking in his life. “I missed the woods and the water. I missed having the time to think,” he says.

　　He decided he wanted to get back into the fishing world and find some balance between making money and his desired lifestyle. Ackman offered to back him in a new venture.

　　White canvassed the fishing world, using the skills he’d learned under Ackman. “I realized I’d gotten my M.B.A. already,” says White. “I knew how to read financial statements, write a contract, negotiate and figure out the exposure.”

　　In early 2008 White found an old, dilapidated day-rate hotel in Abaco situated right on the famous Marls, a 200-square-mile marine wilderness, and just a few miles from some of the most challenging bonefishing in the world on the western shore.

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　　The owners asked for $1.2 million. White created a model, then offered half of that in cash. They bit. He and Ackman started construction on what became Abaco Lodge in October 2008.

　　Then White brought Nervous Waters, the fishing lodge company that owns Kau Tapen, into the deal. Nervous Waters bought a portion of Abaco Lodge in exchange for selling White and Ackman a piece of Bair’s Lodge in Andros, a profitable, premier property. Together, White and Ackman invested more than $2 million. There were a few complications. Some local guides took to bad-mouthing White and the Yankee-dollar-funded lodge. Then, during construction, White was kidnapped and tied up in a car. He eventually escaped after persuading his captor to let him go to an ATM. (The man is in jail without bond. The trial is scheduled for 2014.) White now has a trained 85-pound German shepherd named Bono for constant company.

　　Abaco Lodge opened in May 2009 with a bang, hosting the ESPN fishing show Pirates of the Flats, which featured NBC’s Tom Brokaw and Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. The lodge has been full during the October to June season ever since, says White, and the guest return rate is a healthy 60%. It’s easy to see the allure: White has created a convivial place with extremely capable guides and fishing that is unrivaled in the Bahamas. It’s also already in the black, which has made White’s backer happy. “Not bad for a startup,” says Ackman.

　　And the lodge is only one part of White’s plan. There’s the book and the TV show. He also has endorsements from Costa del Mar (sunglasses), Howler (fishing apparel) and Hatch (reels). He’s currently in talks with Nervous Waters to either sell them Abaco Lodge outright or to buy out their portion. “It’s time for me to either own it or leave it,” White says. And he’s bidding on a property on the east coast of Mexico that offers exquisite fishing for bonefish, tarpon, permit and snook.

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　　自由阅读

　　For now he is putting in 100-hour workweeks and keeping constant company with his BlackBerry. But as he watches the lodge’s boats disappear every morning into the endless Bahamian horizon, he dreams of the barefoot days to come and remembers that good luck is only what you make of it.

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