2008 Minnesota Business Hall of Fame

Gene Sit likes a good sports analogy. “We’re not the Yankees under Casey Stengel, but we’ve been winning the pennant every five years or so. Put them all together, and we’ve made a lot of money for people!” He adds, “We’re three yards and a cloud of dust, as Vince Lombardi would say!”

Sit founded Sit Investment Associates (SIA) in 1981 and has quietly grown it into Minnesota’s 10th-largest asset-management firm.

“Our firm has kept it very simple—we’re money managers,” he says. “We’re not going into the brokerage business; we’re not going to do underwriting; we’re not going to give financial advice and charge a fee. Some say, ‘Hey, why don’t you do a hedge fund? You could make a lot more money.’ I say, ‘That’s not who we are.’”

Eugene Sit was born in China in 1938. His parents were Chinese, but his father was born in California, where Gene’s grandparents had immigrated to work as railroad laborers for $1 a day. American by birth, he could run a successful import-export business in St. Louis and send money back to his wife in China, where they bought valuable land in the Pearl River Delta. Sit’s mother remained in China to watch over the family holdings—but also because America would not have welcomed her.

Sit’s father could no longer visit his wife and boys when the Japanese invaded China and World War II began. They were refugees, on the run. “I can still remember the Japanese planes bombing the villages and the cities,” Sit says. “You would be at school in the village hall, then leave quickly when you heard the Japanese patrol coming by, because they would capture the kids and make them slave laborers.”

China was still in turmoil after the war. Chinese gangsters kidnapped Gene and his relatives in 1946. They were on the move for nine months, the adults in chains, before Sit’s father came up with the ransom of $250,000. At one point, the kidnappers offered to reduce the amount if they could keep Gene. The kid, they thought, had “potential.”

Sit joined his father in the U.S at age nine. His father was ill by then, the family fortune gone. Sit knew no English when he arrived, but completed 12 years of school in 8, and earned a scholarship to DePaul University, where he majored in accounting and graduated in 1960. He went to school days and worked nights in his sister’s restaurant. He also married Gail, his wife of 50 years, who worked in a bank in Chicago and, strangely enough, had attended the same school he did in Guangzhou.

Sit says his “break” came in a training program at Commonwealth Edison in Chicago. He made monthly earnings forecasts, which were compared to actual earnings before they were announced. One month, Sit’s estimate was way off. He didn’t believe it. He spent nights and weekends tracking every number that went into the actuals—and discovered a computer error. His forecast had been correct; he was not surprised.

“It was partly arrogance,” he says. “At age 23, you can do no wrong! But it also was just self-confidence and determination and having the drive to follow through.”

From then on, Sit was on the fast track: “In three years, we [Comm Ed’s corporate finance and investment group] established one of the best records in the industry. We looked for growth opportunity relating to change. We became the largest shareholder in a company called Baxter Laboratories in 1967—that became a nine-bagger! We saw the government putting money into education, so we bought Scott Foresman and Prentice Hall—five-baggers!”