Dogged Discipline
Many things have changed since Van Den Berg and his wife Eileen started the firm in their Los Angeles studio apartment back in 1974. The firm now has 28 employees and $870 million assets under management. Clients number in the hundreds, and ten years ago the whole operation was moved to Austin.
But one thing that hasn't changed is the way the firm invests-namely, strict adherence to the principals of value and diversification. Whether it be a market of bears or bulls, clients attest to the fact that this is one aspect of Century Management that has never changed.
Berlfein, who has been with Century Management since almost the beginning, says he ran head-on into Van Den Berg's disciplined approach the first time he met him. It was during a meeting at which Van Den Berg was explaining how he was going to place a fifth of Berlfein's $50,000 investment into a company called Diamond Crystal Salt.
"He was talking about all the positive things about the company and how undervalued it was. He just made a really good case," he recalls. "So I asked him, why not invest the whole $50,000 into the company?" The response he got was a lecture by Van Den Berg on diversification and on how his investment would be spread of out among no less than five different companies. "I liked his discipline," Berlfein says. "And it improved as time went on."
It's a trait that may be partly due to the fact that Van Den Berg learned to cope with life's struggles at a very early age. Van Den Berg was born to Jewish parents in Amsterdam during the outbreak of World War II. His family went into hiding soon after he was born, taking refuge in the same neighborhood where Anne Frank hid. Van Den Berg was finally separated from his parents at the age of three, when they arranged to have him and his six-year-old brother smuggled into a Christian orphanage by the Dutch underground.
His parents were sent to Auschwitz, where they were eventually liberated by American troops, while Van Den Berg spent the next three years in Nazi-occupied territory. Children at the orphanage were not mistreated, Van Den Berg says, but they and the rest of the city's populace were left with too little food and water. Some days, he recalls, he and other children wandered the fields looking for plants to eat, or water to drink.
By the time he was six years old and reunited with his parents, Van Den Berg said he was suffering from malnutrition and had a difficult time walking. "My father would say he was afraid to pick me up because it was like picking up a skeleton," Van Den Berg says.
His family moved to Los Angeles soon after being reunited, where his father resumed a career in the garment business and he and his brother enrolled in public school. Still weak from the effects of malnutrition and scurvy, Van Den Berg eventually took up rope-climbing to build up his strength-to the point where he set a school record by climbing a 20-foot rope in 3 1/2 seconds.
"When I graduated high school, I was in as good a shape as any athlete could be," he recalls.
After high school he worked in a gas station, then at a print shop, before becoming an insurance salesman and then a broker selling mutual funds. Along the way he got married and had a couple of kids.