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Robert Brunswick:
Welcome. I’m Robert Brunswick and I’m chairman of Buchanan Street Partners, and I’d like to welcome you today to our Counting Capital Podcast where we bring knowledge to our clients, their families, registered investment advisors, and lifelong learners, teaching them a little bit about real estate investing, investing more broadly, and then some topical individual businesses that we might select for you. I’m very excited about today’s guest. First of all, a good friend of mine. I’m on the company’s advisory board and just a great firm, so I’m pleased to introduce to you Ben Durrant, one of the founders and principals of Provenio. It’s great to see you. Glad to have you on board here today. We’re going to have some fun.
Ben Durrant:
Great to see you as always.
Robert Brunswick:
Yeah. I think the way we like to start our podcast off, is to have the folks get to know you a little bit about your background. How did you get to where you are today? Maybe some career path, if you will. So I think it would be great if you could share a little bit about that education, where you’re from originally, your business acumen, those good things.
Ben Durrant:
Sure. So grew up in Putney in southwest London and grew up in a family where my father, for as long as I can remember, was an investment banker. So I knew I never wanted to be an investment banker because I didn’t see a whole lot of him when we were younger, even though we have a very close relationship. But he worked for the old merchant bank, S. G. Warburgs, that you may remember.
Robert Brunswick:
Sure.
Ben Durrant:
But always was curious as a young fellow and never really knew what I wanted to do candidly. And my dad always said, “Don’t worry about that. You got plenty of time to work out your path.” My folks actually moved to the United States in, I believe it was the late 80s, 89, 90, and I decided to go to college. Having gone to boarding school in England, I decided to go to college in the United States. Ended up going to Tufts University in Boston, which I loved. Loved Boston as a city, loved being at college in the States, thoroughly enjoyed myself. Again, even during college, wasn’t completely clear what I wanted to end up doing with my life. And other than my father in terms of people that I hold up on a pedestal, my grandfather Jack, was someone I held with really high regard, and he had been an entrepreneur his whole life.
And so both my parents actually grew up in Kenya in East Africa, and my grandfather Jack and his brother Danny built their business from the ground up to become one of the largest automobile and aviation companies in Kenya. At the time I was graduating college, my grandparents had decided to move back to the UK after 50 years in Africa, and my grandfather approached me and said, “Hey, what do you want to do after college?” And I said, “I’m not sure. What advice do you have?” He said, “Well, why don’t you and I go into business together?”
And so I joined my grandfather in a business called Conrico International, that was one of the exclusive export distributors for Land Rover Group that at the time was owned by BMW. And what was fun for me during that time, apart from learning from my grandpa, was I got to take on a lot of responsibility in a pretty interesting industry. And I ran the Eastern European business, and so went and set up Land Rover dealerships in places like Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Romania, and got to travel, of course, to all these places. And it was at the time when Eastern Europe was coming out of the communist era and were becoming capitalist economies. And so it was a wild west.
So that was amazing experience for me and taught me a lot about life and about business. But I’d always had this interest in financial markets probably through my dad. And I remember meeting with a really good friend of my father’s called Merrill Alpen who had run a firm called Charter House Group in New York. And I remember going into Merrill’s office and it was this huge palatial office with this big jade sculpture on his coffee table. And he sat me down and he said, “Well, my advice to you is if you can get into a top 10 business school, go get an MBA, and if you don’t get into a top 10 school, then go work.” So I was lucky enough to get into Columbia Business School in New York, and of course New York being one of the centers of financial services, that seemed like a great place for me to be.
And I really spent my time at Columbia apart from obviously going to my classes and making sure I got the right grades, but I spent all my time on Wall Street. So I would just take off down to the Wall Street firms and I would bug people and say, “Hey, can I shadow you for the day?” And I’d spend a lot of time on the trading desks. And so by the time the interviews came around, I already knew all these guys. And so even though I went through the interview process, I ended up getting offered a position by Morgan Stanley in their sales and trading summer internship program. And at the end of that program, they hired me full time. And without having to go into too much detail, I spent the first half of my career in sales and trading, and that was with Morgan Stanley and with Deutsche Bank.
And then in 2003, my wife Jen was pregnant with our first boy Matthew, and we have four wonderful sons. And before Matthew was born, we decided that we either wanted to be near my parents in the UK or near her parents in Southern California. So we decided to move to Southern California. And I was lucky enough to get a job with a hedge fund manager called Vantis Capital to run trading. And we originally lived in Pasadena at the time, and then moved to Los Angeles, spent about six years in LA and had a wonderful time, learned a great deal, probably got a little burnt out trading, it was pretty hair-raising. We were running a couple of billion dollars and traded aggressively.
And so I decided that it was time to do something else. And so after a brief stint back in New York with Deutsche Bank, we came back to California and I started working with a firm called ICG Advisors in Los Angeles. And ICG was and is run by a wonderful guy called Jeff Assaf. And Jeff had run the Best Stearns Investment Consulting Group for 26 years before rolling out and starting ICG after the global financial crisis. And I told Jeff I was ready to do something a bit more entrepreneurial and didn’t really want to be in a big firm environment anymore. And so at the end of 08, they decided to roll out of what had become JP Morgan and start ICG advisors. And I got hired by them and was with them day one of the new firm.
And over the next several years worked with the ICG team focusing on sourcing and underwriting primarily alternative investments, which I know we’re going to get into, and working with some of the larger clients at the firm. In 2010, I was lucky enough to be introduced to a fellow called Bill Powers, and Bill had been at PIMCO for over 20 years, was one of the most respected people on Wall Street. And Bill had retired after a 20 plus year career. I got introduced to him via a business school friend of mine, and he decided to hire us at ICG. And after about a year or so, Bill came to me and said, “Hey, instead of working at ICG and me being one of your clients, why don’t you leave ICG and come become the chief investment officer of my single family office?”
And I’d always been fascinated by the family office ecosystem. It was always a bit mysterious, and many of these families, as we will probably get into later as well, tend to fly under the radar. They don’t really want people to know who they are or get access to them. But the family office label, the family office ecosystem had been getting talked about more and more at the time, even much more so today obviously. But that was attractive to me and I had a lot of respect for Bill and Bill’s a great guy and a fun guy to work with. And for the next almost five years, I ran Bill’s family offices as his CIO. And during that time, I spent a good deal of time networking with other family office investors. And this could be the family themselves running their capital, or it could be someone like myself that was an internal hire tasked with running the capital and we would get together and exchange investment ideas.
And I really started to see a very clear trend in talking to these families in terms of what they were looking for. And it wasn’t equities and bonds. They were looking to get access to areas like credit and real estate and venture capital and private equity. And more specifically not the Apollos and the KKRs and the big household names. Really, they were looking for these small and niche capacity constrained alternative strategies. And when I looked at the advisory landscape, the advisory landscape is dominated primarily by firms that have a heavy emphasis on equities and bonds. And if they do alternatives, it does tend to be the larger asset gathering firms that are great firms, but not in my opinion what these families were looking for. And so I spoke to Kevin Murphy, who is my partner and started the business with me. We started talking about this in 2015, and we talked about this idea of building an advisory business that focused exclusively on these niche alternative asset classes.
Robert Brunswick:
So that’s a great pause there because I think this will lead us into some of the other questions about Provenio today, what it is, how it’s evolved. But Morgan, Deutsche, Vantis, ICG, Powers family office, and then Entrepreneur Land and starting Provenio with your partner.
So great foundation. You saw a lot, you learned a lot, you did it on other people’s watch. If you were to just self-reflect for a second, Ben, about what you learned about your strengths, your expertise, your passions, your acumen in that journey that you then have brought forward at Provenio, what would you describe those core competencies as?
Ben Durrant:
I think I’ve always had a good way with people. As you know, I’m not a big fan of sales and marketing.
Robert Brunswick:
Sure.
Ben Durrant:
But as you well know, really good salesmen don’t have to sell, they just have to be passionate about what they do. I think that as I look back on my career, my biggest skillset would be, I think my ability to rally people, to get people to buy into an idea, to get people excited about things and to be empathetic to what their needs are. I would say that as a weakness, I think I’ve always been pretty risk averse when it comes to my career. I’ve always worked for other people until seven years ago. And not that that’s a bad thing, I think most people work for other people, but I always knew that I needed to support my family and I felt comfort in having a regular job. Even though I learned a great deal from my grandfather early on, that was a business he had built, not myself. And so the leap into becoming an entrepreneur was not one I took lightly and one that was candidly terrifying.
Robert Brunswick:
Well, you think about often your greatest strength can be your greatest weakness. So you talked about your weakness being aversion to risk, but I think from a client’s perspective or look at your customers that might be listening in to have you have that healthy aversion to risk and now mitigating risk and managing risk and assessing it is probably a strength of yours as you think about your attributes. So that’s helpful. I think that frame of your core competencies, your background is great to set up our conversation as we move this forward. You just got into why did you decide to become an entrepreneur and start Provenio.
Ben Durrant:
Yeah.
Robert Brunswick:
So let’s go there now. It’s 2015, you and Kevin talking. Knowing Kevin, he’s been an entrepreneur, he was the guy to probably help you push you out of the nest given your thesis of opportunity within the alt space. So talk about the formation of Provenio and when that happened and what the base mission statement was and vision as you built it.
Ben Durrant:
Yeah, it started with this concept that I’ve already described, which is if we went out and we just launched an RIA business, which was just sort of a generalist investment advisory firm, it would’ve been really difficult, I think, to differentiate ourselves. The idea for launching a firm that focused on alternatives came from the fact that that was relatively unique. And it also came from the fact that Kevin, during my time with Bill, because I was subletting office space from him down here because Bill’s office was based in LA and the drive was not going to happen. So I think Kevin started to see some of the investments that we were doing at Bill’s family office, and he was like, man, you’re doing this in credit and you’re doing this in real estate and you’re doing this in venture capital in this direct deal. This is fascinating.
But at the same time, starting a business from scratch was pretty scary to me. Four kids and a wife to support. If my wife was still working, she’d probably be supporting all of us. She was on the fast track until she decided that she wanted to stay at home and raise the boys, I was obviously supportive for whatever she wanted to do. But she was really actually the one that pushed me in the end, I sat down and I said, “Hey, this is the business opportunity, this is the idea.” And she basically just sat me down and said, “It’s time to bet on yourself.” And so that was what gave me really the impetus to go for it.
Robert Brunswick:
Did you have a first customer? Were there multiple customers?
Ben Durrant:
So yeah, that’s important. One of our clients and friends who allows us to use his name is Scott Mather, and Scott-
Robert Brunswick:
The Scott Mather.
Ben Durrant:
The Scott Mather, who was the CO CIO at Provenio, recently left. But look, I knew Scott pretty well, got to know him pretty well during my time with Bill and one of the smartest guys I’d come across, also one of the hardest guys I’d come across. And I knew no one managed his money. And so I said, “Listen Scott, I want you to come out for two dinners with me and I’m going to tell you about this business concept and I just want you to rip it to pieces.” And he did. On the first dinner, we went out and then by the end of the second dinner, he said, “You know what? I love your model and I’ll be your first client.”
And that was a huge deal because Scott’s a highly respected individual in the investment community, not just here but globally. And to have someone with that level of credibility buy into the model. And of course Kevin had some important clients too that were part of the first round of our clients, including your good self and guys that really lent credibility to what we were doing. But Scott was sort of the real, to me-
Robert Brunswick:
Bell cow.
Ben Durrant:
It was a big deal. When he signed on, that was when I really said to myself, “Man, we could have something pretty interesting here.” So that was the first big one.
Robert Brunswick:
So today you manage about a billion and a half dollars AUM?
Ben Durrant:
About a billion and seven.
Robert Brunswick:
Billion and seven. Okay. And how many clients is that?
Ben Durrant:
Just under 50.
Robert Brunswick:
Okay. So few clients, sophisticated clients, you like clients that understand alternatives, and we’re going to get into that, that align with your goals. It’s not just-
Ben Durrant:
Open to alternatives open. They don’t have to completely understand alternatives.
Robert Brunswick:
Yes.
Ben Durrant:
But it’s a good fit when a family understands that alternatives have a place in their portfolio.
Robert Brunswick:
So a good launch for, so what does Provenio do for their clients specifically?
Ben Durrant:
So the easiest way to think about our business is that a family essentially hires us on a non-discretionary basis to source, to underwrite and due diligence, investment managers across what we think of the alternatives landscape, which is basically everything outside of stocks, bonds, and cash. And we can go into the underlying asset classes later, but that’s essentially the way to think about it. And we will then build them a customized investment portfolio across that alternatives landscape that we will then monitor and oversee for them. And so each client has their own custom portfolio. Each client invests into each of those portfolio investments through their own entities. So we’re not taking discretion with capital. And then we monitor those investments and report on them and of course come back to the table when we find interesting opportunities that we think fit their goals and objectives.
Robert Brunswick:
So I think this is the right time to couch for us. So give me three, four examples of an asset class with an alternatives, and then an example of an investment within that-
Ben Durrant:
Without giving you the names.
Robert Brunswick:
Without giving us the names, sure.
Ben Durrant:
So let me go through the various asset classes as we think of them. And it is probably best to set this up in terms of, we approach building investment portfolios. If you visualize a barbell, the left side of the barbell is what we think of as sleep at night capital. So these are generally strategies that are focused on generating cashflow, tend to be privately negotiated, contracted cash flows, and tend to be in sectors that don’t have exposure to or correlation to the market. So think of areas like private credit, like opportunistic real estate, like real asset leasing strategies, owning portfolios of barges, owning portfolios of rail cars where you’re getting a healthy tax efficient distributed yield. And obviously in a world where interest rates were not paying much for owning fixed income, generating an eight to 12% yield in strategies like that is pretty attractive.
The right side of the barbell is really a reflection of our structural belief and innovation, and that’s within areas like technology, healthcare, biotech, where we’re taking a structural 10-year view that the acceleration of innovation within those sectors is going to continue. And so there should be representation of those sectors within client portfolios. And those are usually represented within early stage venture capital through to call it series C, series D, growth equity, but generally private vehicles.
Robert Brunswick:
And with that, an associated higher degree of risk or is it more of a tech-
Ben Durrant:
Sorry to interrupt, but the left side of the barbell tends to be bigger than the right side of the barbell.
Robert Brunswick:
In terms of the investment allocation.
Ben Durrant:
In terms of the dollars at work. At the end of the day, if you think about it, most of the families we work with, pretty much all the families we work with have exposure to equities and bonds somewhere else. They run it themselves, they have it with one of the big brokerage firms. When they look at their alternatives portfolio, what they come to understand is that’s actually the ballast. We’ve seen volatility in the equity markets last year. We really haven’t seen any volatility for a long time before that, other than pockets here and there. We were in a 40-year bull market for bonds, the biggest bull market in equities ever. And when they think about their alternatives exposure, it’s about predictability, it’s about cashflow, and then it’s about taking these longer term, as you say, riskier bets on innovation in technology, healthcare, and biotech within their alternatives makeup.
Robert Brunswick:
There’s a number of things you talked about. You talked about finding these investments. So how do you find these investments? How do you underwrite an investment manager?
Ben Durrant:
Well, there’s finding them and there’s underwriting them. So sourcing is a big part of what we do. So the interesting part about investing in non-household name, meaning these small in niche initial strategies, is you have to have been doing it for a period of time to understand what to look for, to understand where to look for it. So it’s my family office network, it’s conferences, it’s third party marketing firms that go out and are raising money for some of these smaller strategies that aren’t big household name funds. It’s other consulting and advisory firms that we know and respect, that we exchange idea flow with. In some-
Robert Brunswick:
Probably your clients.
Ben Durrant:
Our clients, our managers. As you well know, every manager we invest with think they’ve got the recipe for Coke. If they have money somewhere else, the hit rate on that’s been pretty high. That means it’s someone they really respect and have usually worked with and spent a lot of time with. The real value, I think, look, sourcing is clearly a value. And just to give you a sense, last year we did 450 manager meetings and we allocated to 12 strategies over the course of 22.
Robert Brunswick:
So it’s a hard interview.
Ben Durrant:
It’s a hard interview. It’s 95 plus percent.
Robert Brunswick:
Thank you.
Ben Durrant:
We’re saying thank you, but no thank you. We always try to give them feedback as to why. But we start with a sort of macro thesis and we then look for strategies that fit that thesis and obviously then fit the goals and objectives for the specific family we’re talking about. And we want to meet everyone in the universe. We want to meet as many of these guys as we can, and then we try to narrow it down to the one or two strategies that we think are the best of breed.
Robert Brunswick:
But two and a half percent of those manager meetings turn out to be an accessible choice for an investor?
Ben Durrant:
And it depends on the year, it depends on the thesis, it depends on how uncertain the environment is, but yes.
Robert Brunswick:
So a lot of those maybe are capable just wrong time for that strategy?
Ben Durrant:
Yeah, exactly. And sometimes there’s a certain opportunity set that plays out and you get out. Because there’s a difference between structural asset allocate, sorry, strategic asset allocation and tactical asset allocation. Not to get too complicated, but most of our asset allocation work for families is strategic. But now, and again, there are dislocations or opportunity sets that create tactical asset allocation decisions.
Robert Brunswick:
So you’ve got me thinking about now you as the entrepreneur. So have you built this out, you went from one client to 60 today. So talk about the infrastructure growth and the job of the entrepreneur and working in the business versus on the business because you strike me as a passionate investor that enjoys the investment side, which I’m going to call, in the business.
Ben Durrant:
Yes.
Robert Brunswick:
So let’s talk for a second about on the business and how important that is to the success for your clients.
Ben Durrant:
I should have mentioned that as one of my weaknesses.
Robert Brunswick:
Very good.
Ben Durrant:
Luckily for my partner, it’s a strength.
Robert Brunswick:
It’s a strength, yes.
Ben Durrant:
It’s a strength. And Kev, because Kev focuses a lot of his time on the business, it allows me to focus my time in the business.
Robert Brunswick:
Excellent.
Ben Durrant:
And look, that’s been just a huge impact for us as a firm. But I’d say our business has gone through transitions. When we started, it was about generating revenue, not that it isn’t today, but it was all about generating revenue. We had to pay people, we had to support our families.
Robert Brunswick:
Survive.
Ben Durrant:
Survive.
Not that there aren’t today, but there were many, many sleepless nights worrying about that. As we got the business to a point where it wasn’t necessarily profitable, but these are generally recurring revenue situations. The business was running and we could pay people and we could turn on the lights and we could pay ourselves. Then it was a question of, okay, how do we go from that to the next level? And so I’d say for the first two to three years, revenue generation was the main focus. And then for the following two to three years, we really focused on institutionalizing the business. And so that was focused on best practices with compliance because candidly to me, the biggest risk to our businesses compliance.
We’re an SEC registered RIA. And I feel pretty good about getting it right most of the time on the investment side. We’re going to get it wrong sometimes, it happens. But the focus on being a compliant organization in the eyes of the SEC is a big risk. And so that was something we really focused on. And so in 2020 we brought Darren Chap in. Darren was really strong in terms of his operational capabilities and his organizational capabilities.
And then we’ve made some other hires around Darren over the last couple of years bringing in Reshma our new chief compliance officer. We have an outsourced compliance firm. We have a really good outsourced IT firm to deal with cybersecurity and disaster recovery and all those other areas. And then thinking about the different verticals we have from an org chart perspective where we need help. And so we have our investment team, we have our, call it business operations and client servicing team. And then in the middle we’ve got this what we think of as client portfolio management, which is really focusing on the portfolios, where they’re underweight, where they’re overweight.
Robert Brunswick:
Reporting well, community weight, getting well.
Ben Durrant:
Correct. And the customer experience, because we don’t have a very scalable business. Everything we do is customized, every portfolio is customized and therefore it would not work with us having 200 families. What’s much more important to me than growth is the experience my existing clients have, our existing clients have as a Provenio capital client. And so having the support, that’s what we’re sort of solving for right now, is how do you build that support network without getting existing clients to feel like they’re not getting access to me and they’re not getting access to Kev.
Robert Brunswick:
To match the business model. So you were touching upon it a little bit, thank you for hitting on the business, but as you’re picking investment management, what’s the credentials? What do you look for? When do you start to check that box to say, this is somebody that we want to do business with and allocate to?
Ben Durrant:
The first consideration is, is this a strategy that we understand? Is this a strategy that has a sustainable and repeatable process? Does the team have the right pedigree in the right asset class for what they’re doing? Is the size of the fund appropriate to the opportunity set that they’re investing in? Are they transparent? One thing I will tell you, there are a few black and white things for us. One of them is, if a manager we are doing diligence on will not give us total transparency, we walk away, period. We don’t invest in black boxes, we don’t invest in quant funds. We don’t invest in stuff that we don’t understand because at the end of the day we have to explain it to our clients.
We’re a non-discretionary advisory business. And so we really stay away from parts of the market that we don’t understand. What I’m trying to get to, what we as a team are trying to get to when we’re underwriting a manager is really to answer this question, which is how do these guys have an unfair advantage over everyone else? That’s really what we’re trying to get to.
Robert Brunswick:
How do they differentiate themselves? What’s their secret sauce?
Ben Durrant:
It’s more than differentiation. It’s like, how is it what these guys do? We have a credit manager in the metals and mining space without mentioning names. The metals and mining space is a highly technical industry, very difficult to understand, very difficult to underwrite. Historically, mining companies have had to raise capital through the equity markets. So there were really no private credit managers that focus on the metals and mining business. These guys came out of Glencore, recognized this opportunity based upon their technical expertise in metals of mining to build a credit fund. So we have technical domain expertise, we have a capacity constrained, difficult esoteric market, and we have lack of really any competition where they were then able to go out on a really attractive risk adjusted basis and generate 12 to 15% type yields on these types of investments.
Robert Brunswick:
So those three things that you just named, do that one more time if you don’t mind, because I think those are the thesis points for really how a investment manager differentiates themselves. The other stuff they report well, they’ve had a performance and a track record, they have a good reputation. Those have to be checked. But it’s those three.
Ben Durrant:
It’s domain expertise.
Robert Brunswick:
Domain expertise.
Ben Durrant:
It’s capacity constrained, inefficient markets, and it’s lack of a lot of competition. You don’t want to invest in markets where there’s a huge amount of competition. It’s why we don’t do a lot in long short equity funds. Now, your world, there’s a lot of competition, but there’s domain expertise in what a real estate operator and a real estate investment does versus their competition.
Robert Brunswick:
Absolutely.
Ben Durrant:
And there are things that differentiate them. It’s the same for a credit manager, it’s the same for real asset leasing strategies. It’s the same for venture capital and private equity.
Robert Brunswick:
So if you don’t mind, without naming names, private credit commodities is what you just talked about-
Ben Durrant:
Not commodities. So quick definitions. So the private credit markets really were born out of the financial crisis because post-financial crisis, banks everywhere basically pulled out of lending outside of the most traditional vanilla practices. And this created a huge amount of demand for capital that the private markets then filled.
Robert Brunswick:
The shadow banking environment, so to speak. Private credit, yeah.
Ben Durrant:
It’s private. It’s essentially private financings of lower middle market companies, for example. But what’s interesting about that space is these are privately negotiated transactions with contracted cash flows that are essentially backed by some form of hard asset collateral at a 30 to 50% loan to value. So you are top of the capital structure, you’re protected by hard asset collateral, and then you’ve got a borrower that’s willing to pay you 12 to 15% because they don’t have any other options.
Robert Brunswick:
So just give me five industries because you were talking about metals before, coming out of Glencore. Just give us an example, three or four industries where that space exists. Because I don’t think the broader listenership might understand the different ways private credit can put itself to work with different types of collateral.
Ben Durrant:
Yeah, it exists in the real estate industry.
Robert Brunswick:
Absolutely.
Ben Durrant:
Real estate debt we know is a really attractive space. I’ve mentioned the metals and mining industry. Even though venture debt is not a big area of focus for us, venture debt is an area where there’s been a lot of activity. To be honest, for me, it’s about what part of the market do you transact. So where there’s the least competition is in the lower-middle market where a fund that let’s say has 200 million of assets under management is writing a 10 to $20 million check. They’re never going to come across the Goldman Sachses and the Apollos that are writing $75 to $200 million checks. Very competitive business.
Robert Brunswick:
Ben, one of the things that I’ve enjoyed most about my interactions with your firm and Provenio is just learning about the alternative space. And what I think is somewhat a misunderstood segment of investing in terms of risk reward. I think a lot of people think alternatives are riskier than they might be. How does somebody who doesn’t meet your minimum investment amount access alternatives, or how do they learn about alternatives so that they can further their investment career and ultimately participate?
Ben Durrant:
The first thing I’d say is, alternatives are as complicated as you make them. There are lots of sections of the alternatives landscape that are not complicated at all. But if you are a smaller retail investor where you haven’t had much exposure to the alternatives landscape, what’s interesting today is there are options. There are firms out there that have launched interval funds that are actually accessible for investors that have 25 or $50,000 and could get exposure to a portfolio of private credit investments, or a fund of direct lending funds that are uncorrelated to the markets and can go out and generate an eight to 10% type return. There are real estate investment trusts out there as you well know. Again, which is another way for retail investors to access real estate. I think most unsophisticated investors tend to feel like equities and bonds are their only options, and there are certainly good options out there in the alternatives world.
Robert Brunswick:
I think that’s an important takeaway. As we wind down and this has been great and I appreciate your time. What do you enjoy most about what you’re doing today? So you’ve been through the conventional jobs, you’ve now built a business that’s standing up doing well, been firm with 60 clients, got great AUM, you’re having success. What do you like most about what you’re doing today?
Ben Durrant:
I love going to work every day. I’m fascinated by all the different asset classes that we get to learn about each and every day. And what’s I think, the funnest part about my business in any given day, I can be looking at a real estate opportunity, a venture capital fund, a private credit fund, and some direct co-invest deal all in the same day. So the intellectual stimulation of that is probably the thing I enjoy the most as well as the time we spend with our clients because we have a really fun group of clients.
Robert Brunswick:
Well, you’re well suited for it. And I think as my last question, we got a listenership that’s made up of some younger people that are maybe in the early stages of their career. So it might be valuable for them to hear from you what recommendations you might make for them as they explore their business life, their business career, and the next steps.
Ben Durrant:
Get into a growth industry, I think is number one. And if you can get yourself into a smaller firm where you can be given more responsibility early on. A lot of people say, oh, I got to go do investment banking at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs because that’s the best training. I actually think the best training is going to some small boutique investment bank if you want to be a banker. If you want to go into my world, go get a job at a small middle market private equity business or one of these small private credit funds where you are actually going to be rolling your sleeves up and understanding how to underwrite companies and build a portfolio. So if I was doing this all over again, I would try to find a really good small firm where I can be given more responsibility early on.
Robert Brunswick:
Absolutely. Well, I will tell you, I’m proud to first of all, be one of your investment managers, our firm, that we take that very seriously and we definitely appreciate the process you went through. And it was that process in large part that made me become a client of the firm, and I’m proud to be a client and also on your advisory board. So this has been great time today, and I’m sure there’ll be lots of good feedback from our session. I want to thank you all for listening in. I’m sure you would all agree we had some good learning today with Ben Durrant from Provenio, and we look forward to our next podcast and having you listen in. Thank you for your time.