Sticking with It

Justin R. Hales has always wanted to be a finisher. Long before he began working on Wall Street, he encountered a poem in President Thomas S. Monson’s talk “Finishers Wanted” that stayed with Justin for years: “Stick to your task ’til it sticks to you; / Beginners are many, but enders are few.” ¹

Persistence has been a recurring theme throughout Justin’s life. “When I set my sights on something, I see it through,” he says. Justin reapplied to BYU after initially being rejected, patiently waited for the woman of his dreams, and bypassed campus recruiters to pitch himself directly to Wall Street firms. This same persistence applies every day in his work at Goldman Sachs in Chicago, where he leads consumer services investment banking.

“Reaching Justin’s level of success in investment banking just requires a tremendous amount of grit,” says Crawford Gates, whom Justin mentored at Goldman Sachs. “It’s a demanding profession that requires a lot of tenacity at every stage. When I first met Justin, he had recently joined Goldman as an associate, and he was proving himself at that level, finding where he could lean in and succeed. I was impressed by how he managed that whole process.”

In a field that may seem to be all about cold, hard numbers, Justin sees the humanity. “It’s very personal, very human work,” says Justin, who was part of the first official cohort of finance majors at BYU Marriott. “At the end of the day, I’m a connector—a facilitator matching people with different needs and objectives. I’ve always loved people.”

Justin has worked hard to get to where he is, often against the odds. But he is quick to credit the opportunities, faith, family, and mentors who have helped guide him: “I’ve been blessed to have people take chances on me,” he says.

Raised by “goodly parents who supported me in everything I ever did or tried,” Justin describes his childhood as idyllic. “My family has been in Las Vegas for three generations,” he says. He loved growing up there, surrounded by extended family and a big group of friends. As the youngest of three children, Justin admits he often got away with more than his siblings. Still, his family joked that he was like Switzerland: “I tended to get along with everyone,” he says—a trait his parents say carried beyond their family.

His dad, Robert Hales, says Justin has always had a way of making people feel seen. “That is one of his greatest qualities. He was always kind to everyone, from the popular kid to the kid hardly anyone talked to.”

Robert was a real estate investor, and Justin’s mom, Gaylynn, worked as an elementary school teacher. She and her mother-in-law (Justin’s grandmother) cotaught a second-grade class together. “We called ourselves the Hales Angels,” Gaylynn recalls with a laugh. When Justin joined their class, she remembers a newspaper reporter asking him his favorite part about having his mom and his grandma for teachers. His answer: the snacks.

Being physically smaller than other kids his age “was a constant source of worry and concern for me,” remembers Justin. He loved sports, especially basketball, but he was cut from the junior high team three times. “I laugh about it now, but it was a huge deal to me then,” he says. “I wished I was taller and bigger. I think that shaped my personality in that I was more aware that people had attributes they didn’t like about themselves. That awareness led me to make more friends and help people see the best in themselves and just be interested in them, which has served me well professionally.”

As college approached, BYU felt like a natural choice for Justin, whose older brother and sister had both attended. But he didn’t get in. “It stung,” Justin says. “I wanted to give up on my plans to go to BYU.” In the meantime, he served a mission in Peru.

“His first assignment was a mining town near Cuzco called Espinar,” says his mission president Stephen Tyler, a retired judge and BYU Marriott accounting alum. At an elevation of 13,000 feet, “it’s one of the highest places in the world where the Church has missionaries,” Tyler explains. “It’s cold all year because of the elevation, and the missionaries slept in down sleeping bags in a room so cold that water would freeze.”

Tyler became an important mentor to Justin. “President Tyler really believed in me,” Justin says. “He saw a lot of potential that I hadn’t recognized, and for the first time, I felt empowered to set big goals and go achieve them.” Noting Justin’s interest in business, Tyler encouraged him to reapply to BYU. A second rejection arrived. Still, Justin wasn’t ready to give up. “He’s very driven,” says Tyler. “You can tell by the way he sticks to things.”

With his sights still set on BYU after his mission, Justin moved to Provo and enrolled in classes as a visiting student. Those classes, along with Spanish credits he tested out of, allowed him to apply again as a transfer student. Justin remembers receiving the acceptance email on his BlackBerry while standing outside Brick Oven. “It was such a happy moment. At that point in my life, it meant so much to me to get in,”
he says.

Justin was initially interested in accounting but ended up applying to join the first class in BYU Marriott’s new finance major. “It was not smooth for me to get into the finance major, but with some persistence and personal advocating, I was fortunate and got in,” he remembers.

In BYU’s finance program, Justin found a mentor in Kim Smith—an adjunct professor who had worked at Goldman Sachs, served as an area seventy, and then moved back to Utah when he got Parkinson’s disease. “He wanted his students to pursue careers that provided them with the chance to bless others,” Justin remembers.

Smith encouraged Justin to look beyond Utah for job opportunities. “The Church needs people in New York City and Chicago and Los Angeles,” Justin says, “and I felt a calling to be one of those people who could be a trailblazer to open doors for other BYU alumni.” When Smith passed away in 2023, Justin and a handful of fellow students created an endowment in his honor. “It was the least we could do, considering what he gave us.”

When Justin landed on investment banking as a career path, he was “100 percent in.” He served as president of BYU’s Investment Banking Association during his senior year. While still a student, he flew himself out to New York City and cold-emailed professionals from skyscraper lobbies to make connections—a tactic that helped earn him an internship.

Justin’s persistence paid off in his personal life too. During his time at BYU, he took the same statistics class as Camille Mabey, a family friend from his home ward in Las Vegas. The large lecture class—a prerequisite for his business major and for her nursing program—was held in the Joseph Smith Building (JSB) auditorium.

“She was very studious and wouldn’t talk to me during class,” Justin says. Camille was focused on doing well in school, not on dating or socializing. Hoping to spend more time with her, Justin often walked Camille to the library after class. “I would actually just turn around and jog back to the JSB because I had a class there right after stats,” Justin says.

During those walks, Camille’s interest in Justin came “organically, because we were hanging out and enjoying each other’s company,” she says. “He showed a lot of interest in getting to know me, not just in a romantic way, but because he likes to get to know people. That’s just his personality.”

They went on a few dates, but Camille wanted to keep it casual while applying to the nursing major. When Camille was ready, she and Justin began dating seriously, and they married in 2013.

When Camille and Justin married, Justin was about to begin a two-year analyst position in the Mergers and Acquisitions Group at Credit Suisse, a Swiss investment bank, in New York City—but Camille had another year left in the nursing program at BYU. Recognizing that persistence often requires difficult short-term trade-offs, they decided to live apart until Camille’s graduation. She flew out to visit him every few weeks for a long weekend, and they spoke on the phone daily.

“Each of us had a goal we wanted to achieve, and this was the path it required,” Camille says. Justin’s analyst program could be considered the financial version of medical residency, with hard work and long hours. “The expectation was that you work around the clock,” says Justin, who put in 80 to 100 hours per week.

“Wall Street didn’t hire often from BYU,” Justin says. “Most people in my analyst class were from Ivy Leagues. I felt like I had to work harder and be even more dedicated.” But that intensity also gave him a crash course in high-stakes deals. “I was working with companies that were being bought, sold, or going public. So in my early 20s, I was in the room with a CEO and the leadership team of a company, working on a transaction and drinking it all in.”

He and Camille, who was loving her rotation at the Primary Children’s NICU, cheered each other on from afar. “Justin has a lot of tenacity—a ‘won’t quit’ personality, which helped a lot during those early years when we just had to get through it,” Camille says. “He can put his head down and get to work, knowing it will be worth it.”

After a year and a half on different sides of the US, Camille graduated and joined Justin in New York City. Though challenging, the time apart taught them important life lessons and brought them closer together as a couple. When the program at Credit Suisse ended, Justin was recruited to BDT Capital Partners (now BDT & MSD Partners) in Chicago.
The firm focuses exclusively on family and founder-owned companies. “A lot of the families that they work with are very well known,” Justin says. “I had the chance to meet Warren Buffett. I had the chance to be in a lot of rooms and situations that I didn’t feel like I belonged in, which has kind of been a theme in my life.”

Neither Camille nor Justin had any prior ties to the Midwest, but they were excited for a fresh start in a new place—this time together from the beginning. They moved downtown and attended their new ward, which was held in an elementary school. “We immediately felt at home,” Justin says.

Camille worked in the NICU at Northwestern Memorial Hospital until their first child, Jack, was born in 2018. Now eight years old, Jack is followed by Annie (age 5), Caroline (age 2), and twin baby girls on the way. Parenthood was an adjustment, though. “I was already used to not sleeping, so that was par for the course,” Justin says with a laugh. It was a comfort that Camille had so much experience in caring for newborns, especially when their youngest spent some time in the NICU. “We made a good team as new parents,” Justin says.

When an opportunity to interview at Goldman Sachs came up, Justin jumped at the chance. “Goldman had always been a firm that I admired,” he says. “Working there was like the equivalent of playing for the Yankees.” The timing was right too, as Goldman Sachs was looking to build a team focused on middle-market transactions—an area Justin had spent his career working in.

“I love seeing the companies I get to work with in the wild,” Justin says. “The very first transaction I ever worked on was with Chiquita.” He still makes sure to pass by the banana section every time he’s in a grocery store.

Justin has been at Goldman Sachs since 2019.

The company is an “incredible place to build a career,” he says. He started as an associate, guiding analysts in preparing the financial analysis and marketing materials needed to market or sell a business. His work focused on consumer services, such as residential service providers, auto services companies, and multiunit service providers—for instance, a chain of gyms.

After a year and a half, Justin was promoted to be a vice president where he was “squarely in the middle” of the management hierarchy, “becoming the transaction quarterback and interacting on a day-to-day basis with the client and potential investors or buyers.”

It was around this time that Justin first met Crawford Gates, who had joined Goldman Sachs for a two-year program similar to the one Justin had completed at Credit Suisse. Gates remembers the day Justin first reached out to welcome a fellow BYU alum. “It gave me a lot of confidence and made me feel like I had a support system,” Gates says.

Now a managing director, Justin sits face-to-face with clients making their most consequential business decisions, such as selling or going public. “It’s a really big career and life event for them, and it’s fun to be part of that,” Justin says. The process can be emotional and intense for his clients, who may be at the helm of a multigenerational family business or an organization they grew from the ground up and who must make decisions with lasting impact for themselves and their companies.

Justin has worked on many scenarios like this, such as helping Quick Quack Car Wash (founded by BYU alumni) sell a significant stake to global investment firm KKR or guiding multinational corporation Shell on its divestment of Jiffy Lube. Justin enjoys helping his clients “deliver great outcomes that not only impact the CEO but every employee within the organization.”

Senior-level investment banking is “a people business,” says Gates, who now works in private equity at Northrim Horizon in Arizona. “Justin is just a gifted connector and communicator. I don’t think I know a more natural extrovert, but never in a way that feels rushed or forced. I think that’s part of why he’s really good with people.”

Today, the Hales family is happy and thriving in Winnetka, a suburb of Chicago. Justin coaches his son’s baseball team, the family enjoys watching professional sports and taking walks to the lake after dinner, and neighborhood kids are always knocking on the door to play.

Justin is quick to invite BYU grads to join him: “I’ve been successful in recruiting people to come to Chicago and start their career. It has big-city opportunities with the sustainability of suburban life,” he says.

As a business student, Justin enjoyed visits and lectures from members of BYU Marriott’s National Advisory Council (NAC). “It was fun to learn from others who had gone before and to hear how they navigated things I would eventually face, like how to conduct myself at a firm happy hour and how to navigate being the first in my peer group to get married and have a kid,” he says.

Justin had always considered the NAC members examples and mentors, so when he got the invitation to join last year, “I didn’t even have to think about it,” he says. He enjoys the chance to stand on the other side of the questions he and his classmates once asked. “I’ve tried some things that work, and I’ve tried some things that don’t, and I’m happy to share and be a resource for people.”

For Justin, being a finisher now means helping others keep going too. “Hopefully I can be encouraging and show that even if you have a bunch of setbacks—if you don’t get into BYU right away, or if you don’t get everything right just out of the gate—it’s okay. It’s about being resilient, being optimistic, and sticking with it.”

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Sara Smith Atwood is an associate editor of Y Magazine and lives in Orem, Utah, with her family.

Photography by Bradley Slade

NOTES

1. Thomas S. Monson, “Finishers Wanted,” Ensign, July 1972, 68–70, churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1972/07/finishers-wanted; see also Monson, “Great Expectations,” BYU devotional address, January 11, 2009, speeches.byu.edu/talks/thomas-s-monson/great-expectations-2.