Billion Dollar Backstory

Usually, Stacy Havener is the one asking the questions. Not this time. Stuart Alexander of Ascender Fund Partners recently put Stacy in the hot seat, and the conversation was too good not to share with our Billion Dollar Backstory listeners. Because if you've ever wondered why getting that first allocator meeting is so freaking hard (or why a meeting that went great never turned into a second one)...

If you’re pitching an allocator who’s already seen 35 decks that look just like yours, what’s going to make them remember you? Ryan Boothroyd put out a tender for a global equity manager and got 120 responses. Similar AUM, track records, investment teams, fees. According to Ryan, you could’ve shuffled those presentations around and the PMs probably wouldn’t have noticed. Ryan is Head of External M...

“What do I do with a prospect who went cold two years ago and I still think they’re a fit?” Stacy’s first reaction? Two freaking years?! Said with peace and love, of course. She’s not laughing at the person asking, but she does have a few questions about how we got here. Like, Why do you still think they're a fit? And more importantly, do they agree with that notion? In this Story Snack, Stacy get...

Real quick: what’s the meaning of life? Okay, It's not exactly a quick question. And you probably don’t have an answer ready to go. But the good news? You don’t need to book a yoga retreat in Bali to figure it out. Turns out, what makes life feel meaningful might be a whole lot less mysterious than we make it. Dr. Daniel Crosby just turned in a manuscript exploring what makes our lives feel meanin...

“Keep me posted.” Sounds promising. But also... what does that actually mean? In this Story Snack, Stacy Havener breaks down one of the vaguest phrases in fundraising, and why “keep me posted” should be the start of the conversation instead of your cue to sit back and wait. Because if an allocator wants you to keep them posted, your next job is figuring out what they actually want updates on. List...

"The key to business is biting off more than you can chew, then figuring out how to chew it." Manish Khatta has been running that play for a while now. Last time he was on the pod, back in 2023, Potomac had just crossed $1B and he was pretty sure they were only getting started. Three years later? They're past $5B. And the lessons got a whole lot bigger with it. Manish is back for a next-chapter co...

This conversation was too good to leave in the archives. In this encore of our Ask an Allocator series, Stacy sits down with Bill Harding, CIO of Jackson National, who oversees $200B in assets and $29.8B in directly managed fund-of-fund assets. Bill gives us a look inside the mind of an allocator and shares what he’s actually paying attention to when evaluating fund managers, because past performa...

In the world of M&A, deals tend to get reduced to spreadsheets long before anyone asks about the story or the actual people underneath. Emily Blue built her whole career on believing maybe we’ve got that backwards. She started out as a nursing major (until an anatomy syllabus sent her running ), failed the CFA before she passed it, and eventually found herself sitting across the table from som...

Allocators are drowning in manager emails. Kristof Gleich would know. Today, he’s President and CIO of $50B Harbor Capital. Before that, he spent eight years leading manager selection at JPMorgan, fielding pitches from managers trying to break through. So, he's a good person to listen to when it comes to figuring out how to stand out and win over allocators.  In this Encore episode of Kristof and...

You didn't sign up to be a marketer. You signed up to manage money. But the second you start your own boutique? Welp… Marketing, sales, distribution, hiring... they're all your job now too. Sean Peche knows that struggle firsthand.  He's the Founder and Fund Manager at Ranmore Funds, a $650M investment boutique where "that's how it's always been done" isn't really a good enough reason to keep doin...

Ten years ago, Andy Raskin wrote a piece called "The Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen." And Stacy Havener is still thinking about it. Not because you need to build a SaaS deck, but because the structure underneath it works on allocators too. Too many pitch decks start with some version of: "Let me tell you all about us." You go into a long spiel about your fund’s process and performance. Meanwhi...

Most boutiques market the product. Manish Khatta barely mentions his. Roughly 90% of what Potomac Fund Management puts out has nothing to do with the funds. No performance charts. No fact sheets. Their most successful piece of content is a five-minute video series about fintech gossip that never says the word Potomac. It sounds backwards. It's also how Potomac went from around $130 million in 2020...

Should you ever repurpose an old post on LinkedIn? Short answer: yep. Slightly more annoying answer: it depends. Before you copy, paste, and send that post back into the wild, figure out why it flopped the first time. Was it actually a good post the algorithm didn't push out? Or was the post itself a little off? Those are two very different problems. In this Story Snack, Stacy gets into how she de...

What if luck plays a bigger role in fund success than anyone wants to admit?  Simon Evan-Cook isn’t just throwing that idea out there. He’s lived it.  He spent years on the allocator side, vetting fund managers and learning what really sticks (hint: it’s not just your track record).   Now that he’s a fund manager himself, he’s pulling back the curtain on the truth no one wants to say out loud…   ...

Waiting for LinkedIn leads to fall from the sky, land in your DMs, and show up in your funnel? You might be waiting a while. Posting matters. But there's a missing piece between the post and the people who engage with it, and that's where you go from random strangers to actual rapport (and maybe even grabbing coffee IRL).  Stacy Havener has a weekly habit to help you fill the gap, and it's not a h...

Different > better. Especially in an industry that loves to rank, chart, compare, and benchmark errrthing.  Because when everyone is trying to prove they're better, everyone starts sounding pretty much the same. In this Encore episode, Stacy is bringing back one of her favorite conversations about what it actually takes to stand out. She’s covering:  Why leaning into what makes you different me...

You want to post on LinkedIn. Compliance wants to hit the taboo buzzer. Cool. Now what? In this Story Snack, Stacy Havener shares how to stop treating compliance like the department of "no" and start bringing them into the growth conversation. Because yes, we live in a culture of compliance. And yes, we have business goals too. Listen in to hear: How to get compliance out of "department of no" mod...

Most people assume a successful career in finance starts with the "right" degree. Lindsey Stewart's started behind the counter at McDonald's. At 18, he made the decision to skip university, avoid student debt, and learn by doing. Years later, that path led him to Morningstar, where he now helps some of the world's largest institutional investors turn complex data into better decisions. In this epi...

Your company's LinkedIn page is not the main character. It matters. It has a job. But if your LinkedIn strategy is built around the logo doing all the talking, Stacy Havener has thoughts. In this Story Snack, Stacy breaks down the biggest LinkedIn mistake she sees asset managers make: treating the platform like something it was never built to be. And there's a stat behind it that might make you re...

"Ditch the pitch" is easy to say. But it's hard to do when you're staring at a calendar invite and realizing you've been leading with the deck for years.  And you start thinking, “Okay, if I'm not presenting, what am I actually doing in there? Am I just… winging it?” Nope. In this Story Snack, Stacy’s breaking down what your meetings will actually look like once you put the deck aside and why ditc...

Every fund manager wants the story that gets allocators to lean in and say yes every single time they tell it.  So, this is often a hard pill to swallow…A story that actually works doesn't always get you a yes.  A powerful story either gets you a heck yes or a heck no, but never a maybe.  And even though hearing heck no is uncomfortable, getting closure in sales is everything (so you don’t waste y...

The capital-raising memo says: pitch harder, send the long intro email, and voilà, meetings. Stacy Havener never got that memo. She came into this industry as an English lit major who wanted to be a college professor. Finance was a means to an end, not the whole plan. She had no idea there was a "right" way to do capital raising. So she just led with what she knew best, which was storytelling and...

When an allocator says "We only work with established managers," it can feel like a door closing in your face.  And the natural instinct is to pry it back open by explaining yourself, defending your track record, and making a case for your fund.  Stacy Havener's advice: don't go there. Because handling objections to close deals is a thing. It's just not the right thing in this moment. That’s why,...

If you’ve ever thought, “Okay, I have to cover process… but I can literally see their eyes glazing over,” you’re not alone.  Because when you walk through your process like everyone else, allocators don't hear "rigor." They hear "table stakes," and they're already half checked out by the time you get to the good part. In this episode, Stacy Havener breaks down how to fix that without scrapping the...

At 15, Harald Berlinicke got a front-row seat to Black Monday during a bank internship outside Berlin. It was total chaos, with people yelling "SELL!" and a 20% drop in a single day. Most people would have run away from that pressure. But Harald ran toward it. And that's the day he knew he wanted to be in finance. Decades later, he's the guy on the other side of the table as a fund selector and fa...