The founder and CIO of Bay Street Capital Holdings, a wealth management company based in California that invests in the stock market and manages a portfolio of small, minority-owned businesses, is William Huston.
According to the Guardian, Huston began his path to founding Bay Street Capital Holdings while he was a college sophomore and opened a call center in the Philippines.
Huston had his classical piano training as a child while growing up in Harvest, Alabama. His parents were educators who struggled to provide for their family. Unfortunately, Huston’s father got disabled while he was a freshman at Georgia Tech, which put the family in more financial difficulty than while he was employed as a principal.
He was forced to leave Georgia Tech as a result in order to be eligible for in-state tuition. He claims that opening a call center resulted from a crisis.
“It wasn’t as if I had this master plan – it was more like I had a problem. I had a lot of hubris, though, and that was my business idea,” he said. “I’d read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. I figured if I could work four hours a week, then I could also be in school and be making money without working.”
Huston hired one person in the Philippines and later recruited additional staff, making 12. “I was in Georgia, going to financial advisers, saying: ‘Hey, you need clients. I have a call center. We’ll call the clients. They’ll come to you and they’ll use your services,’” he said.
Huston switched from working at contact centers to opening a fund in 2018. He claimed that the change occurred when he began to experience moral crises as a result of the fact that many of his workers, including himself, were frequently absent due to their irregular work schedules.
“A lot of people were having miscarriages,” he said. “I didn’t like this lifestyle that relied on people working hours that were not natural. So I started over, with a smaller call center in El Salvador, and I registered for an LLC.
“The team was working for my own fund, not other people’s companies. We’re not calling thousands of people a day like we were doing before. They’re entirely focused on the investment group.”
