I've been thinking about the investment office playbook and what managers don't see when they meet with allocators.

It happens hundreds of times a day. A money manager walks into the office of a prospective investor.

They've never been more confident. A long track record

of success, stellar short-term results, an ideal strategy for the times, and a first-rate

team to execute. But they never see it coming. Five dreaded words go unstated as the manager

wonders why the check never comes. It's not you,

it's me. New investment relationships start when the manager fits into the allocator's playbook,

not the other way around. Managers often only see the game from their perspective. What happens on

the other side of the field

significantly influences the likelihood of a new allocation. The Investment Office Playbook

takes place over four seasons, governance, deployment, optimization, and maturity. The seasons repeat

each time a new CIO takes the helm. Other rules influencing

investment activity include fund flows to the investment office and the CIO's tenure in the seat.

A chart mapping out the investment office playbook under a new CIO looks like a bill curve,

with the year on the X-axis and the number of

new investments made on the Y-axis, with each stage summarized as follows.

1. Governance. A CIO comes into a new pool of capital and spends the first year or two

creating the playbook for how they will

operate and invest. Two, deployment. The investment office selects its roster of managers

and puts money to work. Three, optimization. The team fine-tunes the portfolio,

correcting mistakes, and upgrading the roster of managers.

And four, maturity.

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