Beatrice Advisors, a multifamily office created in June by entrepreneur and philanthropist Christina Lewis, the daughter of the trailblazing Black businessman Reginald Lewis, has added two investment team members with experience coveted by family offices.
Mervin Burton, most recently a managing director at Carnegie Corporation, where he oversaw a $4 billion endowment portfolio, has become a senior partner and will oversee research, asset allocation, and manager selection at Beatrice.
Before Carnegie Corporation, Burton was the investment director and interim chief investment officer at Lafayette College. He also worked at the IBM pension funds, where he managed $12 billion in assets in portfolios of long-only equities, hedge funds, commodities, REITs, and currencies.
Peter Lupoff, a former partner and portfolio manager at Marty Whitman’s Third Avenue Management and managing director and portfolio manager at Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management, has also become a senior partner at Beatrice and will join its executive and investment committees.
After Third Avenue and Millennium, Lupoff started his own asset management business and served as the CIO of the $12 billion investment consultant that acquired his company. In 2017, he formed the Lupoff/Stevens Family Office to manage his family’s personal investments, grant-making and other activities. He said he plans to fold most of those operations into Beatrice Advisors.
Burton and Lupoff will work closely with Meredith Bowen, Beatrice's president and chief investment officer. Bowen is also the CIO of Lewis’s single-family office, BFO21.
The number of single-family offices has grown (estimates range from 8,000 to more than 10,000 worldwide) and most have been established within the past 20 years. Some are run more professionally than others and strive to manage their investment portfolios like institutions, especially university endowments. However, it can be difficult for family offices to convince investment staff at institutions to join them. Among other reasons, asset managers can generally offer those professionals better compensation if they no longer want to work at a pension system, endowment or foundation.
Multifamily offices can face the same hiring challenges, but Beatrice’s addition of Burton and Lupoff proves those things can be overcome. Their addition could help attract ultrawealthy families and other clients seeking more sophisticated portfolios tailored to their wants and needs.
"These strategic appointments further solidify our commitment to modernizing and making high-quality wealth management services more accessible, and their extensive experience will significantly enhance our ability to provide tailored, high-quality investment services to our clients," Lewis said.
Burton got to know Lewis over six months while consulting for Beatrice. Like other family offices he worked with, Beatrice was seeking ways to improve its investment management further. However, Burton was drawn by the opportunity to work more with Bowen and Lewis's vision for the office.
“We can create something special that addresses a lot of needs that aren't necessarily being addressed by other wealth management firms. But for me, it all really starts with the people and the culture, and I'm just so delighted to be part of that,” Burton told Modus.
Lupoff — who spent years managing portfolios at two of the most recognized investment firms — said he came to the realization that his family office wasn’t big enough to afford a “formidable” staff beyond a few employees to do all the things he wanted to do well.
“The cost associated with running that money as a family office, with all the other issues that arise around security, compliance, tax, estate planning, intergenerational transfer? I began to think, well, plugging into an organization, a multifamily office, is a solution,” Lupoff said.
In Beatrice, Lupoff found that solution and got to keep investing. “It's like winning on all levels,” the former hedge fund manager said.
Lewis said the plan is to continue growing the investment team and others as it onboards more clients. Like other multifamily offices, Beatrice will help clients with their financial and estate planning and other aspects of achieving their goals.
“Of course, the quality of the investments and strong investment returns are intrinsic to that. If you're just about investments, you're an investment firm, and the family office is thinking about all of the different parts of the family,” Lewis said.
Read more about Burton’s and Lupoff's perspectives on family office investment portfolios in the weekly Modus newsletter tomorrow. If you haven’t already, you can sign up for the newsletter here.
