In times of crisis it helps to have a friend. In the case of Middlebury College, a small liberal arts school in western Vermont, that friend would be Alice Handy, the founder of outsourced endowment investment firm, Investure. Handy, with 29 years of investment experience at the University of Virginia, opened her firm in 2004 to provide full endowment investment management services to 10 institutions that now include Middlebury, Smith College, Barnard and Dickinson College. Unlike other endowment-style funds, Investure is alone in offering what it calls a consortium model, managing each of 10 endowments separately, while acting as the CIO of each institution.
Having Handy to help out, “Almost feels like a CIO on campus,” agrees Rick Fritz, chairman of the Middlebury board of trustees and a 1968 alum. Fritz, who ran the private equity and venture capital for BancBoston Capital, a subsidiary of Fleet Group, before retiring in 2003, was chair of the investment committee during part of the two to three years that discussions about outsourcing were held. Back in 2005, with only a volunteer committee that met periodically, a growing allocation to private investments, and a portfolio approaching the billion dollar mark, “the endowment required more of a daily touch than quarterly,” recalls Fritz. “We felt the Investure model was best for us as a $700 million endowment.” The trustees considered hiring their own CIO, but ultimately rejected....