STEWARDSHIP
Good stewards are more than good managers. They’re more than good leaders. They’re custodians who understand and carry out their responsibilities with integrity and respect for the people who rely on them and on whom they rely, and for the society around them.
Ultimately, good stewards put the interests of others ahead of their own.
Our role as stewards
To us, good stewardship is looking after our clients’ investments as much as we’d look after our own – with good judgment, care and consideration. It’s also understanding our rights and responsibilities in respect of the companies we have a share in. We have a wider role to play in society and a responsibility to allocate capital where it can be used most productively for the future benefit of all. The long-term relationships we have with companies and our ability to influence them on issues of sustainability, investment risks and opportunities allow us to make a real and positive difference.
Stewards of the companies we invest in
We believe our job is to invest our clients’ money in good-quality companies with sound growth prospects and strong management teams, ensuring we pay sensible prices for these investments.
In these companies, good stewardship relates to owners and managers with both the ability and desire to make good long-term decisions on behalf of the businesses they run. They must be more than competent. They should be innovative too and adaptable to the challenges they will no doubt face. Poor governance, a lack of integrity, a willingness to take shortcuts, a failure to take responsibility for social or environmental impacts and a company culture that reflects this are reasons we rule out many companies.
OUR TEAM
We’re a dedicated and ambitious group of long-term investors with a shared set of values and a passion for investing in high quality companies that are well positioned to meet the challenges of sustainable development.
We come from a wide variety of backgrounds and have a broad range of career and educational experience, from economics and civil engineering to international relations and languages.
We’re based in different regions of the world so we have easy access to companies around the world, but thanks to the wonder of technology we are nevertheless a tight-knit group.
We all work as analysts, with a broad remit. None of us are sector or country specialists and we don’t have allocated watch lists of companies. Rather, each of us generates investment ideas according to our own interests and participates in all aspects of the investment process, including research, analysis, engagement, monitoring and voting decisions.
That’s deliberate. We believe that, for our style of long-term, bottom-up investing, it is the art of questioning from diverse perspectives that is most likely to uncover the underappreciated risks and opportunities facing companies. We also recognize that managers of companies will always understand their businesses better than we can, so we focus a significant amount of time building confidence that they have the integrity, competence and humility to do the job well. We need to be able to trust management teams with our clients’ capital.
Team Work
We operate within a flat structure and our team culture is one of openness, transparency and collaboration, both among ourselves and with our clients.
Everyone is free to challenge the views of anyone else – and indeed is encouraged to do so – from day one. We believe this keeps ideas fresh and prevents institutionalized assumptions from taking hold.
We understand that nobody is perfect and act accordingly. We’re ever ready to learn from each other and from our mistakes, and to incorporate that learning into our investing