Leslie Lenzo has left the Hershey Trust Company to launch her own independent consulting practice.
After leading the Pennsylvania-based charitable organization’s investment program for three and a half years, the veteran allocator is looking to offer her investment expertise to other mission-driven institutional investors. Her new firm, L-Squared Investment Solutions, offers fractional senior-level expertise, non-discretionary investment advice and coaching, program diagnostics, and other ad hoc investment advisory services.
Lenzo told Institutional Investor that her target client base will be healthcare systems, foundations, and endowments with “large portfolios but small investment teams that don’t have the bandwidth to do everything that they need to do.”
Those services, which can be one-time or ongoing, include portfolio construction, manager due diligence and monitoring, overlay optimization, coordinating secondary sales, annuitizing or freezing a pension, as well as conducting defined contribution recordkeeper and OCIO searches and transitions.
Lenzo explained that L-Squared will not manage assets on a discretionary basis, and the firm's work will be designed to complement, rather than replace, clients’ existing consultants and advisors. Plus, as the firm’s sole practitioner, clients will work directly with her. “They're hiring me, not a junior person,” she said.
Lenzo brings more than two decades of institutional investment experience to the venture. Before joining Hershey Trust in January 2023, Lenzo was CIO of Advocate Aurora Health for nine years, where she built and transformed the health system's investment program. Prior to Advocate Aurora, she was an investments manager at Northwestern Memorial HealthCare beginning in 2006.
At Hershey, Lenzo and her team repositioned the portfolio, expanding private market exposure and building out the trust's investment operations capabilities. Now, the team has been nominated for this year’s Allocators’ Choice Award for team of the year. (The Hershey Trust Company’s role is to serve as a trustee for the Milton Hershey School Trust, The M.S. Hershey Foundation and the Hershey Cemetery Perpetual Care Maintenance Trust.)
The fractional executive model, in which a CIO joins the organization as a senior leader on a part-time or contract basis, is gaining popularity among allocators: Allocator rising star Sohel Hussain recently launched his own non-discretionary investment advisory for mission-aligned institutions after more than five years at philanthropic foundation Meyer Memorial Trust.
