A career in asset management teaches you a great deal about how investment businesses are built. It also teaches you where they tend to get stuck.

I spent close to two decades working across large institutions and boutique managers. Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas gave me the foundation: rigorous, demanding environments where I learned how sophisticated financial businesses operate at scale.

The work that shaped my thinking most was at a boutique manager where I joined early and stayed through a period of significant growth. That kind of trajectory requires building a genuine sales culture within an investment-led firm, integrating marketing and distribution as a single function, and being focused on doing more with less.

Boutiques do not have the luxury of inefficiency. That constraint, over time, becomes an advantage.

What I observed across those years is that the firms with the strongest investment capability are not always the ones that grow. Many boutiques are built almost entirely around the investment process. That is appropriate. It is also limiting. Distribution is frequently informal, dependent on founder relationships, and not well understood as a discipline in its own right. For a lot of firms, that is where growth stalls.

I built The Pinery because I think that gap is worth closing. There are boutique managers running focused, high-conviction strategies with genuine edge, led by people who are passionate about what they do and clear in their point of view. Many of them struggle not because the investment case is weak, but because they have not yet built the commercial infrastructure to take the business further. That is a solvable problem, and it is one I find genuinely interesting to work on.

My approach is to ask a lot of questions before drawing conclusions. I try not to be constrained by how things have always been done, and I am probably more focused on efficiency than most people expect from someone with a marketing background. I also teach corporate finance to university students, which keeps me precise about how I explain things and honest about what I actually know.

I work with a small number of clients at any one time. If you are running a boutique and wondering whether distribution could be working harder for you, I would be glad to have a conversation.