First Ascent Nears $300M Goal; Gets $1.5M in New Funding

In what is music to the ears of advisors, the seven full-time and two part-time employees at the company are all invested in First Ascent. And the company became even more efficient while focusing more on its core competency by outsourcing its back-office operations to Orion, a relationship that MacKillop said has also helped First Ascent reach out directly to RIAs.

MacKillop himself has had a long and interesting career. He's a Stanford grad who interned at the SEC while attending law school at George Washington and then practiced securities, ERISA and venture capital law in DC for 15 years. He then jumped into the investment world where he held leadership positions at, notably, Portfolio Management Consultants (PMC) and Frontier Asset Management before starting First Ascent in 2015, where he serves as CEO and chief evangelist for First Ascent's unique business model. He also gives back to the advisor community through regular writing for the trade press (including ThinkAdvisor and Investment Advisor) and is an ambassador for Knut Rostad's Institute for the Fiduciary Standard.

So what exactly makes First Ascent unique?

MacKillop says it's the $500 flat fee for all its portfolios, which serves as the "lightbulb" that attracts the advisors or 401(k) plan sponsors to the platform. First Ascent can offer such low fees because "we use technology to sell things for less than what people sold them for in the past." After all, as he argues, it doesn't cost any more to manage a $1 million portfolio than it does to manage a $500,000 portfolio, so why should the $1 million investor pay twice as much for that management?

If the flat fee is the lightbulb, what keeps advisors interested in First Ascent is its range of portfolios, MacKillop says. "Advisors say we do things the way they would" in creating portfolios, "but cheaper." Its range of portfolios are built by its in-house team supplemented by four independent members of its investment committee.

The third appeal is First Ascent's service team, which he says is experienced and is steeped in a service-oriented culture which is helped by the fact that the team has, like all its employees, skin in the company.

To win most-favored-asset-management status among advisors, First Ascent's web site makes good use of online demos, 'master classes' on investing issues and social media posts, along with in-house professionally produced videos that serve as "virtual wholesalers" for the company. In another twist on traditional asset-management firm marketing, the staffer who shoots the videos is a former film maker who "helps people see who we are. Most videos aren't emotional," MacKillop says, but if an advisor "watches ours you get to know our people well. Most people we work with have never met us."

One of those videos—this one featuring MacKillop explaining in black-and-white the genesis of the firm and its pricing and portfolio approach—reveals First Ascent's ultimate goal. "We don't expect to change the world," he says, "just a little corner of it."

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