William F. McCalpin
William F. McCalpin
Title: Managing Partner, Impact Investments, Athena Capital Advisors
Age: 59
Experience: 32, with 25 in impact investing specifically
William McCalpin dove into the world of impact investing when he joined the Rockefeller Brother Fund after law school. He enjoyed the intellectual challenge of aligning a foundation’s social impact goals with its long-term investments. In the years since, McCalpin has also worked for the MacArthur Foundation and lead the San Francisco-based Imprint Capital until it was acquired by Goldman Sachs Asset Management in 2015. Recently, he joined Athena Capital Advisors in Lincoln, where he’s charged with leading its impact investments team. When he’s not busy growing the firm’s impact investing business, McCalpin enjoys biking, hiking and the occasional triathlon.
Q: What does your typical impact investor look like here, if there even is such a thing?
A: Well, each investor is different. Your impact interests might be different from mine, which might be different from the next person’s. It’s very idiosyncratic, which is why a high degree of customization is necessary and that’s why I like this firm because that’s what they practice. We’re not a product shop. We don’t have products that we try to sell. We meet each client where he or she or it is and try to develop a portfolio that meets their interests.
Athena is a 23 year-old wealth management firm, about $6 billion in assets under management, of which about $550 million is in some form of social investing. It could be negative screening, it could be more positive [environmental, social and governance] type investing, and impact investing, which would be primarily private investments. My role is to work with those clients who have those interests and to try to see what more we can be doing for them, but also to grow the business, to attract new clients, to build on the experience that we’ve gained to date, to reach out to new clients and offer this service to them.
The firm has a mix of private clients and institutional investors. The mix is tilted toward private clients. There are more of those and in the impact area, it’s the same mix. The goal is to maintain that balance, that mix of private and institutional, and to grow the business.
Q: What are you doing to grow the impact investing side of the business?
A: I think one part of that is to be a thought leader. We need to have more conversations about how to do this well, and I think the practitioner’s perspective is important in this conversation. The advocate’s perspective is there, but the people who are the advocates are generally not the people who are getting their hands dirty on a day to day basis, building and managing portfolios. The cheerleading and the advocacy is great, but I think it needs to be complemented by a stronger voice of those who are the practitioners.
An important part of what we’re going to do here is kind of mining the experience that we’ve had to date over the last 10-plus years with our clients. What have we learned? How do we reflect on those learnings? And we want to contribute those learnings to a broader conversation through white papers and through other kinds of thought leadership pieces and I think it’s an important contribution this firm can make.
There are certain segments where we have deeper experience. For example, we have several faith-based clients who have asked us to construct portfolios in alignment with their religious values. That’s an area where we’d like to contribute to a broader conversation with other faith-based investors, whether they’re Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or Muslim. What has been our experience to date in building multi-asset class portfolios for clients? And we think there’s more business opportunity there.
Another area that’s pretty interesting to us and to me in particular is the donor advised fund. Donor advised funds are the fastest growing charitable vehicle in the United States. That’s an area where there’s a real opportunity to expand impact investing, social investing, and there’s real potential there that’s unexplored. There are significant dollars in these donor advised funds, whether it’s the national players like Fidelity or Vanguard or Schwab, or the local players like the Boston Foundation.
I would say a third area would be other financial advisors who have clients who want some kind of impact investing solution, but these advisors are small, and they don’t have the ability to invest in an internal team to do that. They want to provide some kind of solution to their client, so could Athena be a partner with those firms in delivering a solution to their clients? That’s another area that we’re exploring.
Q: Impact investors have a specific goal they want to achieve with their money, so how do you measure the impact of those dollars?
A: That’s an area where we, and other advisors who do this work, are trying to get better and better. What it involves is working with the managers we pick for your portfolio to give us information on how they’re performing. At the beginning of a relationship with a particular manager, we might negotiate an agreement where there are four to six indicators they’re going to use to report to us on some periodic basis – it could be semi-annually, it could be annually – as to how the portfolio that they built addresses the kinds of considerations that are of interest to you.
We then take that information from each of those managers, we roll it up and we give you a report that says, at the aggregate level, here’s what it looks like, and then drill down into each of the managers as to what it looks like. That’s the goal. It’s the Holy Grail. And it’s not only Athena but every advisor out there who does this is constantly trying to get better at that, and it’s an imperfect science, it’s a challenge, but ultimately it’s what the client wants and we’ve got to develop and report that.
McCalpin’s Top Five Experiences Of 2016:
- Broad Museum
- Gettysburg Battlefield
- Hamilton
- Green Gulch Zen Center
- Truman Presidential Library
