BRANDON HILL
Creator of Bizness Professionals
I grew up in the exciting Las Vegas, Nevada. When I was in high school, I knew I was going to attend college, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.
When I got to the University of Utah, I started as a Chemical Engineering major and tried to force myself to like it for a year and a half. I couldn’t do it. After 3 semesters, I changed to what I wanted to study: Finance within the School of Business.
As soon as I joined the business school, I actually felt a passion for learning in my classes. However, my first 3 semesters in the College of Engineering set me back vs the peers in my class once I transferred into the business school.
In the year and a half I missed out on, my friends had already taken introductory courses, established themselves in clubs and organizations, and even landed internships to begin after their sophomore year.
I was playing catch up the entire time and I was on my own.
I caught up as fast as I could, kept pushing, and landed a few internships, which lead to me receiving my first full-time position, which was at a hedge fund. Between the internships and full-time positions, I applied to hundreds of positions and interviewed for at least 75 of them.
Due to feelings of inadequacy and being behind schedule, I looked at all areas of my professional and personal development and tried to improve upon anything that I could.
“Aggregation of Marginal Gains”
In early 2020, I read the book Atomic Habits, by James Clear. He brought up the story of Dave Brailsford and the professional cycling team of Great Britain. He was hired as the new performance director and implemented a strategy he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the idea of seeking out tiny margins of improvements in everything that was done involving the cycling team.
By improving every little component and detail by 1%, you would see a significant increase when you put them all together.
Like I said, I read this book in 2020 and it was the first time I was exposed to the phrase “aggregation of marginal gains,” but this is exactly what I was doing while I was in school, what I do now, and what the theme of this blog is about.
Career
For myself, improving every little bit across many areas lead to a large overall improvement and I landed offers in for some cool firms and companies.
Areas I have worked in:
- FP&A
- Wealth management
- Hedge fund
- Corporate Finance
- Project Finance and Tax
In all the positions I have worked in, I have been lucky enough to work closely and be mentored by fund managers, high-level corporate executives, project developers, and a variety of other professionals with experienced and diverse backgrounds.
I didn’t land into these positions because I am exceptional at anything in particular.
I simply did everything within my abilities to increase my odds of success.
Here is a short bullet list of how my career started:
- Didn’t attend a “Top 10” university for business, but attended the University of Utah (which I am very proud to rep)
- Started off as a Chemical Engineering major for 3 semesters
Switched to majoring in Finance, but was far behind everyone else due to changing majors - Joined and took leadership positions with several clubs and organizations
- Didn’t get an internship until my 4th year of school
- Went through countless interviews and rejections
- Didn’t graduate at the top of my class
- Graduated in 4.5 years with 2 internships under my belt
- Began my career working for a hedge fund
Now I am years into my career and still focused on growth and getting to the next level.
Through successes and failures, and seeking advice from experienced professionals in these fields, I learned what worked and what didn’t work and systematized it to put myself in a position to succeed.
Now, I want to help share what I have learned to help young professionals on their own paths.
About Bizness Professionals
I created the Bizness Professionals blog because I want to provide the resource I wish I had when I was starting off my career towards the end of college and into my first full-time position.
It is meant to be the one-stop-shop for professional and personal development. Many resources focus on teaching in one niche, such as Excel, resume writing, or accounting topics.
These are all necessities to know, but they are little pieces to the big picture. The way I look at professional and personal development is in a more encompassing way.
Some topics include, but are not limited to:
- Career, business concepts, networking, college, health, fitness, mindset, habits, mental health, strategy, learning, character, communication, presentation
Who you are as a professional is a sum total of the topics above and each of them is interconnected in my opinion. Improvements in one area can also spill over to improve other areas.
I want to offer you all the teachings and resources to improve across the board.
I won’t just teach you what things are but will give you context on how to take knowledge and apply it to real-life situations that can benefit your career.
With the theme of “aggregation of marginal gains,” I’ll try to offer anything I can to give you help with the slightest improvements up to substantially sized improvements.
Sound good?
Let’s get to learning and see you in the blog!
