Clients before capacity
We close the book to new relationships whenever service would suffer. A waiting list is better than a stretched investment team.
Ashgrove has three partners, no outside shareholders and no sales targets. That structure is deliberate: the people who make the investment decisions also answer the telephone when a client has a worry.
These three lines were written on a whiteboard in 2009 and survive today in the firm's constitution.
We close the book to new relationships whenever service would suffer. A waiting list is better than a stretched investment team.
Every investment decision is recorded with its reasoning and revisited a year later. Memos that aged badly are shared with clients, too.
Custody, audit and administration are performed by independent firms, so clients never need to trust us to mark our own homework.
A new position travels through the same five stages, whether it is a thousand pounds or fifty million.
An analyst writes two pages on the idea, the evidence against it and the fraction of the portfolio it could occupy.
A partner who did not write the memo argues against it in front of the team while someone records the objections.
The investment committee votes. A dissent is minuted with its reasons and revisited at the next quarterly review.
The decision and its rationale appear in plain English in the next letter, alongside what has happened since.
A team of fourteen supports about a hundred client relationships, so every client is known by name.
Observers are welcome at a quarterly investment committee, with the client's permission and after signing a confidentiality note.