Pennsylvania wealth manager took a small detour in building out Advisorport. With the core of the leadership team it had six years ago back in action, Bell Blue, Pa.-based multifamily office Persimmon Capital Management says it's ready to broaden uptake for its hedge funds of funds.

The lynchpin fell into place early this year when Persimmon hired Guy Fragle away from PFPC to lead its sales and marketing efforts. The plan is to take the fund pools -- now at around $200 million in assets under management -- to around $1 billion using a "two-pronged approach to distribution" led by Fragle, says Persimmon's CEO Greg Horn.

Something came up

One of those prongs is a direct-to-high-net-worth-client and family-office approach, which in passive form, has accounted bulk of Persimmon's fund-of-funds assets under management to date. The other strategy calls for a push into the broker-dealer channel as well as to certain "large indie [registered investment advisors (RIAs)]," says Horn.

But then making headway in distribution channels is familiar territory to Horn and Fragle.

In 1998 Horn left Philadelphia-based multifamily office Ashbridge Investment Management, which he helped found about five years earlier, to establish Persimmon. When equities started to unravel in 2000, the firm got into hedge-fund-of-fund management as a means to help safeguard client assets.

The year before that, however, Horn and other Persimmon principals founded Advisorport (originally Persimmon Research Partners), a research and investment-reporting services firm. The success of that venture led to a detour as Persimmon-Advisorport alumni Fragle, research director Todd Dawes, marketing director Steve DeAngelis and a team of operations and technology staffers left to join PFPC after the PNC subsidiary bought Advisorport in 2003.

Controlled growth

Horn straddled two companies, serving as Advisport's CEO under PFPC and continuing to work with his Persimmon clients. By the time he returned to Persimmon full time early in 2005, Advisorport was a $35-billion investment platform, with particular strength in the independent and RIA channels. Now its assets are north of $60 billion -- though this number includes managed account assets administered by PFPC's processing business.

Dawes rejoined Horn and Persimmon's director of alternatives strategies Walter Grant in 2006. Grant came to Persimmon from Philadelphia-based CMS Investment Resources, where Dawes worked before he joined Advisorport in 2000.

With Horn, Dawes and Fragle back at Persimmon, DeAngelis is the only Persimmon-Advisorport pioneer still at PFPC, where he serves as Advisorport's president under PFPC Managed Account Services senior v.p. Thomas Sholes.

Fragle says the $1-billion Persimmon has in mind for its three hedge-fund pools is a function of its desire for controlled growth. "A lot of the bigger funds of funds grow by adding managers, making them overly diversified," says Fragle. "We want a [fund-of-funds] profile of 25 hedge funds -- that's at the outside. And that's a function of [managing] institutional-quality funds of funds."

Horn agrees. "We're not just growing for the sake of growing," he says. "It's a question of capacity and the integrity of what we're doing." -FWR

.