Shashank Shekhar ’11Journal #1
In the first few days of my internship at Altura Capital, I was introduced to the world of marketing money managers for institutional clients — such as pension funds and endowments — and various styles of investment management. Research has shown that small, nimble emerging investment firms tend to perform better than larger ones. At the same time, emerging managers face several challenges before they can be accepted by institutional investors. Institutional investors have little data on an emerging investments firm’s performance, which makes visibility a problem. It is also quite expensive for emerging money managers to build an internal marketing team or have the analytical tools to provide relevant data to investors. This is where Altura comes in.
Altura is committed to helping emerging managers expand their market share in the institutional market. In line with this objective, the firm has created a new offering, striving to provide innovative ways for emerging managers to showcase their talents. I have spent the last week getting up to speed on my primary project for the internship — managing the launch of a new subscription service for emerging and diverse managers.
As the marketing manager for the project, the key challenge I face is conveying the right story to emerging managers in order to get them to try the new service. Part of last week was devoted to hands-on market research, and I called up over 50 emerging and diverse managers to get feedback on their willingness to pay for the new service. I was also involved in creating a pitch book to be mailed to the emerging managers, and conducting research on similar services provided by our competitors.
In addition to working on the pitch book, I have created a project plan, which will summarize all the tasks involved leading up to the launch of the service. Most of the people on the project team are working simultaneously on other projects, and it is my responsibility to coordinate the efforts of these individuals and get them to contribute towards the timely launch of the service. Over the course of this week, I intend to conduct face-to-face meetings with focus groups, and help them realize how our service can immensely increase their exposure to institutional clients. These meetings will help us finalize a price, and subsequently, I will work with the legal team to draft a contract between Altura and the prospective subscribers. I will also draw-up detailed marketing and operational flow charts and work with the team on deciding an aggressive launch date. The new service requires significant changes to Altura’s website, and I need to coordinate with the group’s technocrats to implement these changes in order to facilitate the launch.
I am thrilled at the opportunity to work in close collaboration with Monika Mantilla ‘96, CEO and President of Altura Capital. It is inspiring to work with someone who has a dream to challenge the status quo. She has won many accolades in the emerging manager space and is the latest recipient of the “Entrepreneur of the Year” award in New York City from Latina Style Magazine.
Altura has a distinguished clientele base, consisting of some of the largest and most sophisticated investors in the world, who are committed to finding new talent. I believe that Altura’s mission and business model have the ability to revolutionalize the way institutional investors make capital-allocation decisions. I am excited to be part of a system which has the ability to unleash the economic potential of undiscovered talent.
Journal #2
In the next few weeks at Altura Capital, I engaged with several emerging managers to present Altura’s new service-offering to them, and to gauge their interest. It was extremely challenging to get money managers to participate in a marketing survey, and we decided we will incentivize them once the service is launched. The first step is to identify a representative focus group, and use their feedback to finalize the price and terms of the service.
The focus group meetings entail a brief presentation on the new offering, followed by a Q&A session. At the end of the presentation, we will request that the managers fill out a questionnaire, which is designed to determine their willingness to pay, and their perception of the value of the new service. I have closely interacted with Altura’s marketing representatives and learned a lot from their presentation style.
Based on our initial interactions, the emerging managers seemed skeptical, and misconstrued the service to be a ploy to charge them for a service that they could do on their own. However, I believe that our presentation is packed with enough concrete data to establish that the value added far exceeds the subscription costs.
We will then have to extrapolate the market potential from the focus group data and use it to derive a competitive pricing structure for the new service. I am currently involved in scheduling the presentations.
I have called a sample of Altura’s New York City subscribers to persuade them to meet with us. A large number of managers were not interested in participating in the marketing survey and either hung up or told me to call back. However, there were quite a few managers who felt that Altura had added tremendous value to their marketing efforts and were more than willing to speak with us. There was a third group of managers who were excited to learn about the service but were not willing to participate in a survey. Our new service is targeted at the latter two groups. As part of the new offering, we are offering two categories of tools: The first set is intended to educate the emerging managers about the institutional investor space, and will include proprietary research on institutional investors and their investing patterns. The second set of tools is designed to increase the visibility and access of emerging managers to institutional investors, and will include a video platform for emerging managers where they can record and post video clips highlighting their core competencies. This is a breakthrough service and will substantially increase the exposure of the emerging managers.
Throughout my internship, I have interacted with the senior and middle management at Altura, and at client firms. This has provided me incredible exposure to the emerging-manager, investment-management space, and allowed me to develop confidence in my own ability to apply what I have learned in school. At the same time, I have realized how a simple idea can change so much. When I come across the profiles of various emerging managers, I am amazed by what a difference access to capital from a large investor can make to the way they run their firms. I am proud of being part of this team and look forward to the next steps in launching the new service.
Journal #3
During my last week at Altura, I drafted a request for information to be sent out to vendors — because now we have a basic idea of the services to include in the offering. Our current contractor has significantly delayed the product launch and we are forced to seek out another contractor. This is a minor setback, as this contractor has already worked with us on a number of aspects of the project — including marketing research, reaching out to emerging managers, and developing a project plan. During my time at Altura, I have been able to put together a detailed plan that will enable a new contractor to get up to speed quickly and hit the ground running.
Our research has revealed that there is demand for only two of the four services we had initially planned to launch. However, the willingness to pay for these services exceeds the cost of delivering them, so we have decided to go ahead with launching them. A downside of this delay is that my internship will end before the launch. However, Altura’s CEO feels that the work we have done so far has laid the foundation to significantly drive future revenues and bolster Altura’s position in the emerging manager space.
The services that we have decided to launch will help the emerging managers in two distinct ways — increase their visibility to institutional investors, and help them analyze their performance compared to other managers in the space.
To increase their visibility, they will need to subscribe to our video exposure service. Through the service, emerging managers will be able to present their capabilities to institutional subscribers on the Altura website; in a two minute video, filmed and edited by advertising professionals in consultation with Altura. Altura will schedule an interview with the managers, and the production and the placement will be undertaken by Altura. Subsequently, the video will be sent to the managers for their approval, and will be featured in different locations on the Altura information platform — it will be included in their profile presentation and be placed in rotation on Altura’s platform home page. Managers can also use the video for other marketing purposes, such as presentations and websites.
To help the managers analyze their performance compared to other managers in the space, the new service offering includes universal and benchmark reports for certain asset classes that compare a manger’s performance to his/her Altura database peers, and also to major indices.
As I look back over the summer, I realize that my work with Altura has given me tremendous exposure to the institutional money management industry from the perspective of emerging and diverse managers. I had a first-hand opportunity to look at how business and community development objectives can go hand-in-hand, and may not necessarily be opposed to each other, as is commonly believed. As someone from a developing country, with a fast-growing economy, I am concerned with ensuring that the benefits of economic progress are well-distributed throughout society. Working at Altura has shown me one practical way of achieving this.
