Chandler Asset Management
“27 Fundamentals? That Seems Like Overkill.” A Decade Later, It’s How Chandler Differentiates
Client Overview
Chandler Asset Management is an employee-owned institutional investment adviser that manages fixed-income portfolios for public agencies: the cities, counties, and special districts whose operating funds keep communities running. For nearly four decades, Chandler has helped these agencies navigate the curve through changing markets, evolving economic conditions, and the unique challenges of managing public funds.
Kay Chandler founded the firm in 1988. By 2001, she had built a team of seven people who managed $1 billion in assets, and as of June 30, 2026, the firm had grown organically to include 55 employee-owners and nearly $50 billion in assets under management.
Nicole Dragoo is Chandler’s CEO, and this December she marks 25 years with the firm. She started in an entry-level operations role, building the systems behind the firm’s growth while enrolled in law school at night. Upon receiving her JD, she built out Chandler’s compliance and legal function and served as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Compliance Officer for 15 years in partnership with former CEO Martin Cassell before succeeding him in 2023.
Why It Matters
Chandler manages public money. Nicole frames the work as stewardship of public assets and the communities tied to them, a standard set by founder Kay Chandler and closely held by each CEO since. Growth can strain this type of culture if it isn’t cultivated intentionally and driven by strong leadership. A small, stable core team can share its standards without writing them down, but shared understanding can start to fragment with a distributed, rapidly expanding team.
Most firms let that drift happen and hope the culture holds. Chandler saw the risk while the culture was still strong and moved to protect it. The goal was never to just put a list of values up on the wall. Every investment adviser has one of those posters.
The Challenge
Chandler did not have a broken culture. To the contrary, it had a strong, small, stable core team aligned behind shared values. But growth changed the execution. As the firm grew from 10 or 15 people to a team of 30-plus, it started to see misfires. Leadership sought to identify Chandler’s “special sauce” and how to distill it in a client-centric way.
No documented baseline. New people had to guess what it looked like to belong to the team and how to show up for clients and for each other.
A skeptical audience. An investment firm runs on highly analytical people, so when you introduce something culture- and behavior-focused and hand them 27 Fundamentals, cynicism is the natural first reaction.
Prior tools stopped short. Chandler had brought in consultants and used instruments like Predictive Index and emotional-intelligence assessments, but from a development angle. Nothing had aimed at preserving and cultivating the culture as the firm scaled.
“If you look at investment advisers, we all probably have the same five values up on the website. How those get applied can be very different. We’re not just saying it. This is how we actually go about doing it.”
Chandler Asset Management
Nicole Dragoo, JD
Chief Executive Officer
The Solution
Nicole first saw CultureWise when founder David Friedman spoke to her Vistage group a decade ago. As the systems-and-process thinker in the room, she left with a clear picture of how to operationalize culture, and she rallied a leadership team that was not all sold at first.
Rob Wolf led the rollout with Chandler’s executive team. The work started from the firm’s existing values and distilled each one into concrete behavior, stated in clear, specific language. The result was 27 Fundamentals. Martin Cassell, CEO from 2008 through 2022, fully backed the adoption of the Fundamentals and launched them with a weekly email to the whole firm, Rob facilitated a formal rollout to the full company, and each leader took a turn walking through them.
What Chandler runs now, on a weekly rhythm:
- Team-written Fundamental of the Week. Each week a team member emails the firm about that week’s Fundamental and where they have seen it in action, whether in their own role, across the firm, or with clients.
- Wednesday quiz. A situational quiz from CultureWise builds awareness. When the team disagrees with the suggested answer, it opens a useful conversation about how Chandler would handle the situation.
- Friday all-hands. The person who wrote the week’s email kicks off the staff meeting, now held virtually for a more distributed team.
- Recognition tied to behavior. A peer-recognition platform, Cooleaf, links to the Fundamentals, so anyone can recognize a colleague for a specific Fundamental and say what doing it well looks like.
The Results
Close to 10 years in, the Fundamentals are simply how Chandler operates.
A shared language that removes ambiguity. People tie moments back to specific behaviors like “practice blame-free problem solving” and “speak straight,” giving the team a common reference for hard conversations. In Nicole’s words: “It’s about consistency and clarity. It becomes that common shared language that people understand, and it removes that ambiguity.”
Ethics reinforced where it counts. Chandler’s number one Fundamental is “do the right thing always.” As fiduciaries, the firm’s employees put clients first, even if that means recommending a client move assets away from a Chandler strategy or losing the client outright.
Culture clients can see. Any adviser can post five values. Chandler’s Fundamentals show clients how the firm applies them. Chandler even names the relevant Fundamentals in its public company announcements, and visitors to the conference room, where the Fundamentals hang on the wall, notice too.
Fit that self-selects. A documented baseline lets the right people add to the culture and the wrong fits opt out, so the firm spends less time and fewer resources on mismatches.
A system built for the next $50 billion. Chandler is approaching $50 billion in AUM and sees an inflection point ahead. Fundamentals like “be curious” and “be relentless about improvement” push the team to build scalable systems for its three- and five-year goals rather than band-aid problems.
Nicole’s bottom line: a vetted system beat building one from scratch. “I didn’t have to recreate the wheel. It gives you a really great foundation to launch from.”
Key Outcomes
- A shared language that removes ambiguity in hard conversations
- Ethics reinforced: "do the right thing always" is Fundamental #1
- Culture clients can see, named in public announcements
- Fit that self-selects, fewer resources spent on mismatches
- 27 Fundamentals in weekly practice for close to 10 years
“To demonstrate that we have a good culture is one thing, but to be able to explain why and how we maintain it is even more meaningful.”
— Nicole Dragoo, JD, CEO, Chandler Asset ManagementThe Culture You Need
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