Add in significant key-person risk and the firm merits an Average Parent rating.
Former American Funds manager J. Dale Harvey founded this independent, deep-value boutique firm in 2007, establishing an investment-oriented culture based on his high-conviction, contrarian approach. With Harvey as the driving force, the five-person investment team's stock-picking has proved to be capable more often than not, and marketing director Drew Taylor has made recent progress to improve the firm's ability to attract clients by dedicated client-service personnel and by expanding the distribution team.
These additional resources notwithstanding, the firm is still working to expand its product lineup beyond its flagship Poplar Forest Partners strategy. Poplar Forest's latest launch was a quantitative version of this large- to mid-cap strategy in 2020. Other efforts to expand with small- and SMID-cap value strategies have been unsuccessful, with their November 2021 closure coming just over two years after their initial launch. The departure of the external management duo brought in to champion these strategies does little to alleviate concerns around broadening the talent pool beyond Harvey.