MutualFundWire.com: This Alts CEO Doesn't Worry About Fund Platforms
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Wednesday, September 17, 2014

This Alts CEO Doesn't Worry About Fund Platforms


For many mutual fund CEOs, the the in's and out's of fund supermarket platforms are a daily obsession. Not so for this executive.

Jim Dilworth, chief executive of Simple Alternatives, devotes all of his distribution efforts to institutional allocators, consultants and very high net worth advisor shops to promote the firm's $100 million S1Fund .

"We are solely focused on the fiduciary. We are doing no business with broker-dealers or wirehouses. Our target are institutional allocators who want access to the purest form of hedge fund strategies," Dilworth recently told MFWire.

The S1 Fund is not on any fund supermarket platforms, and likely won't be for the foreseeable future.

Dilworth is slowly, carefully building up the firm's sales organization with the help of former PowerShares chief executive Bruce Bond, who joined Simple Alternatives in December 2013 as a senior partner and head of strategic development and is a minority investor in the firm. The firm currently has seven employees.

"We don't need a ton of people because instead of a taking a shotgun approach to sales, we are targeting our sales efforts like a rifle. When you look at the traditional buyers of mutual funds in the institutional space, there are probably dozen consultants that control a lot of the assets," Dilworth said.

Dilworth's target audience includes large institutional accounts who like to take their time researching assets and have a taste for alt managers who eat their own cooking. The sales process is slow, he says, but the firm is gaining access to incrementally bigger accounts.

"It is a longer sales cycle, but we like spending more time out front to partner with these clients," he said.


Printed from: MFWire.com/story.asp?s=49611

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