The growth of an asset manager

When speaking to Anet Ahern, it quickly becomes clear why she has had such a successful and impressive career in asset management. Sharp, to the point, and with 30-plus years of experience in the industry, the current CEO of PSG Asset Management has pretty much done it all.

After starting as an admin assistant in Allan Gray’s trading office in 1986, she moved on to become a portfolio manager at Syfrets before joining BoE Asset Management. In 2005, Sanlam Multi Manager International approached her, and she spent six years there as CEO. This was the first time she managed a global business, one with R100bn in assets under management.

“I am very fortunate. I learnt a lot,” says Ahern when asked how her journey unfolded. In 2012, after taking a year-long break, Ahern researched the viability of starting her own company. She soon realised that it would be very hard to get critical mass without distribution. 

New opportunities

“It’s relatively easy to get to your first R5bn in assets, but then you are stuck.” Further, she didn’t see a shift in the extreme concentration of the top five fund managers happening quickly, but felt strongly that it was on the cards.

“I thought if you wanted to be anything in this industry, you wanted to be a next-tier incumbent. You wanted to be someone that is up-and-coming and solid.”

Having made the call that it would be smarter to turn an asset manager that already had a foundation, and a track record, into something bigger, Ahern began to look for a good fit.

“I started looking around and couldn’t quite get a cultural and an investment-thinking fit. I am a very client-focused CEO, not as much an operationally focused CEO. I can’t tell a story that I don’t believe in so I had to find a team whose approach I could identify with.”

At the time, PSG Asset Management wasn’t on her radar, but when a headhunter approached her about the CEO position, she went for it. It was two days before her first interview that Ahern says she had her “epiphany” about PSG. After reading And Then They Fired Me, the book on PSG founder Jannie Mouton’s career, and combing through the then unlisted PSG Konsult’s last two annual reports, Ahern wondered why the business was as small as it was, and she realised it had tremendous growth potential. 

Putting her money where her mouth was, she immediately bought shares in PSG Konsult. Even if she didn’t get the job, she wanted to buy into what she believed was a great opportunity. 

Eight interviews later, she landed the job and started focusing on tapping the potential she knew was there.

Growing the business

Ahern explains that in order to realise its potential, things needed to be pulled together strategically at PSG Asset Management.

A lot of the work that Ahern has spearheaded in her four years at the helm has been to build awareness of the business. In her experience, often people don’t make the distinction between the PSG Group and the separate business that is PSG Asset Management.

“It’s a great association, but a large part of our job over the last four years has been to create an awareness of what PSG Asset Management is and does – on all levels,” says Ahern. This has been achieved by working towards more of a media presence, developing a more detailed plan for reaching clients and being more focused, she explains. 

And then there is the long-term view, and the clean-cut nature of the nine products in the PSG Asset Management stable. 

“I don’t think a credible company can rely only on its own distribution. A credible asset manager needs to have a large variety of clients from a lot of sources and that’s been a big push for us over the last four years,” explains Ahern.

Short-term fixes are also a no-go for Ahern: “Very often people fix something for the short term and then there are a lot of longer-term unintended consequences down the road. We spend a lot of time thinking about these unintended consequences in every aspect of the business,” says Ahern. 

She explains that they don’t put out products for the sake of making sales. Doing that often means that products need to be chopped and changed, which is messy, and not in the client’s best interest, she says.  

As for PSG Asset Management’s place within the PSG Group, Ahern explains that the asset manager and PSG Konsult’s top management are very close-knit and that all three divisions have a deep understanding of one another’s businesses. Under the PSG umbrella, each business operates according to its own strategy, with cognisance of the rest of the group.

“As far as the PSG Group itself is concerned, they are an incredibly supportive shareholder” and sees PSG Asset Management as one of its growth businesses, Ahern says. This synergy is perhaps mirrored by how Ahern views her role at PSG Asset Management.

 “I truly believe that PSG Asset Management has been the single best opportunity in this industry for me. It had an established team; it had a shareholder that wasn’t going to drop it; and it already had a track record – it just needed to be taken to the next level.”

And Ahern seems to be doing just that. 

This is a shortened version of an article that originally appeared in the 9 March edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.