Institutional clients come to Silvercrest in order to access superior asset management capabilities.
When you look around the facilities, I think it reflects a lot of the care and
focus on the client. It's a very well-run and well-managed organization with a depth
of investment talent and it's an organization with a depth of experience in terms of handling
individual client circumstances.
We hate to lose. We love to win, and we hate to lose. And when you sit across a table from
someone and you get a sense of that passion for what you're doing, an enormous level of trust
builds there. They know it's a difficult job, but they also have very high expectations from us.
They appreciate that we're real people trying to do a really good job for them. What independence
does for us is we can make the best decision for our clients, and we don't have another master to
serve. It's a straightforward commitment that we will try our darndest to put up performance
and returns that they would hope to expect, and they should expect. Here at Silvercrest,
they don't meet just the person who's making the final decision, they meet everyone on the team.
And so having teams that have had very little turnover makes people very comfortable working
with us as an organization. We do what we say we do and I think our institutional investors
appreciate that. There are no surprises with us. We're not trying to be the biggest asset
management firm out there, just the best asset management firm out there. At the end of the day,
clients need to trust that someone is going to do the best they can on their behalf as a fiduciary.
At Silvercrest, the client always comes first. We want to be known for academic excellence,
for being the best investor in the areas where we offer strategies. I think that's
our true competitive advantage: is the quality of our people, their tenure,
and the performance that they've actually been able to deliver on behalf of our clients.