Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming to our first Investor Day. I'm gonna turn over the opening to Laurie Simpson, our General Counsel, to give a couple of legal comments, and then we'll get rolling.
Thanks, Eric. Before we begin today, I would like to remind you that comments made during today's presentation, including responses to questions, may include forward-looking statements. These are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, the factors set forth in the Notes section of today's presentation and detailed in our SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the statements, and we assume no obligation to update or revise any of these statements following the presentation. In addition, some of our remarks today will include references to non-GAAP financial measures. You can find reconciliations of those measures to the most comparable GAAP measures in the Notes section of today's presentation, which is posted to our website. With that, I'd like to turn it back to Eric.
Perfect. I'm just gonna use this mic here. Now, today we're gonna talk about the power of quality compounding. We use the title Power of Quality Compounding for a couple of reasons. We like to spend a lot of time about time. You've heard over and over on the earnings calls that we think time is a critical asset for a people business, and the more time we can give our investment teams and the more time we can get focused, we think we'll outperform our competition. So these are two elements of playing on time. Obviously, compounding is putting time on your side. It's, you know, sometimes called the eighth wonder of the world. It's an amazing outcome if you allow an investment manager that time to compound and build results, and we're gonna show that.
The second concept is quality is basically earning extra time. If you can provide a quality investment strategy, a quality characteristics for our clients, we typically earn extra time. And if you can use that time to then outperform against indexes and peer groups, you can extend the assets and extend the revenue power. And we're gonna talk about what that means to us when we think that back through to present value. If you put the two together, it's a phenomenal combination. It's the power of quality compounding. So it this wasn't just a made-up title. It was actually something that we thought about and actually how we operate. Going through the agenda today, we're gonna go through the investment strategies in quite a bit of detail. That you, Chip?
Yes.
All right. So, we got the investment strategies from distribution and financials, and then we'll get into Q&A. With regards to the people presenting, I think most of us are in the room has met myself and C.J. Daley. C.J., we brought on in 2010 from Legg Mason. At the time, we were transitioning from a private company to a public company. We were in search of a steady hand that knew the public asset management well, and also understood different asset managers and Legg Mason's affiliate model, and C.J.'s interaction with the affiliates, and also overseeing a public company was a phenomenal addition in 2010. And C.J. and I went on the road and did an IPO, and we felt after 10 years, it's probably a good time to start introducing other people.
So this event here is really about bringing more people into play. With us on the investment side is Jason Gottlieb. Jason is our President. He joined a little over seven years ago, but Jason and I have interacted for 15 years plus, about the industry, about asset managers. Early on, when Artisan was launching new strategies, he was a great sounding board. Begged him, pleaded to have him come over multiple times. Goldman got in the way, made him a partner, and then we finally convinced Jason to come on board. He then did the same act and found two other individuals he's worked with, with Keegan and Chris, who Jason will introduce a little bit later, but both came over about five years ago.
Both have roots back to Goldman, and Jason will go back through the details there. Chris Krein's in the room as well. Chris did a little entrepreneurial run, startup deal with WisdomTree. We love that he took that on and got to see a way to build something up from scratch, as well as to see a variety of channels and different buyers. And Chris was very attractive to us when we were launching our Developing World strategy with Lewis Kaufman, and Chris joined us with the launch of Lewis' strategy. Been here about eight years and then got pulled into the middle of the firm. It's a hard distribution model. It's a hybrid model.
And we have dedicated business leaders inside of the investment team and central resources. So finding someone from the outside to recruit in, and then go from a hierarchical distribution model to our hybrid model is actually a very difficult hire. So it was wonderful to convince Chris to come out of one of the teams and then into the middle of the firm. And then finally, Eileen Kwei will be hosting the Q&A. Eileen's our Chief Administrative Officer. I've known Eileen for years in the investment consulting business.
She spent about 12, 13 years in investment consulting, and then has been with us the last 10 years, coming through distribution into this role, where our CAO looks at human capital, it looks at global communication, it also looks at how people work with regards to IT and facilities. So it looks at the whole 360 view of how to work with people. And so she's with us today. Also from the executive team, you met Laurie Simpson, General Counsel, and we also have Sam Sellers in the room, our COO, who we promoted last year. Sam, we stole away during the IPO pricing process at Sullivan & Cromwell, and brought him into league, and then he's expanded out to the operations and really focuses on our investment operations across the organization.
Over the last 10 years, we've spent a lot of time of bringing in the right people into this organization. So we've always talked about our business lines. We're in the business of investments, we're in the business of people, and we're in the business of trust. And to earn that trust, to bring talent in, and to work and interact with the talent we have in different autonomous groups, very few people really go out to each of the autonomous teams, and it's important to have this management team that's cohesive and that can operate within each of the autonomous teams, and then also scale it.
I think for the really outside of marking 10 years, we wanna showcase this team and the ability that we have to scale now into other asset classes, investment strategies. The takeaways really are, we have delivered for clients, and what that really means as shareholders, we've compounded capital, and that's generated the bulk of our revenue. We'll go through that model, but when you have a satisfied client, you do extend duration, and we look for those high quality institutional-oriented clients that expand more time. And if you give us the time, we've delivered.
With regards to the franchise development, we're always looking for sources of new growth, and over the last 10 years, since we went public, we've expanded the footprint into other asset classes and other teams, and we'll demonstrate that we've delivered on broader and more diverse sources of growth. We've also continued to attract and meet new teams. There was some discussion early on when we were doing the IPO. Do you think you'll still be able to attract and bring new teams to bear? Right away, I mean, we met multiple teams. We brought a team in in 2014, our Credit Team, and from there, we've built on that. So that change in ownership hasn't affected the attractiveness and the talent coming to us.
We found that we can really take this model into various asset classes in various regions around the world. So, we've delivered on the revenue growth through capital appreciation. We've diversified the revenue through various teams, and we continue to attract high quality talent to keep going forward. So, those are the main takeaways today. Just going forward, we're gonna go. I'm gonna finish up with the next 6 slides, talking about the outcome that we've delivered for clients, the outcome we've delivered for growth and for shareholders. You know, first, from a client standpoint, these 10 strategies are the 10 strategies that have greater than a 10-year track record at the firm, matching or, you know, the 10-year anniversary of the IPO. We looked at a time frame, in our mind, that covers various performance cycles.
I mean, some people, you know, say 5 years, some 7. We used 10 years to look at the various cycles. You can see our 10 strategies here with more than 10 years' track record have delivered 238 basis points of alpha net of fees. On top of that, if you average just the absolute return, it's 9%. So what's important is we don't even look. We look for areas that we can differentiate and take advantage of inefficiencies in the marketplace. What we also spend a lot of time on is what categories do we want to invest in? And Jason and Chris, and Keegan will go through how we think about that, because that's just as important to us. Are we delivering a solid, absolute return?
Met with a team the other day that produced a 3% return, but was delivering 100 basis points of alpha. It's great, you know, only got 100 basis point, but on 3%, that that's not gonna move the needle for us. You're gonna have to have a massive distribution firm. It's gonna be a little bit more of a commodity-oriented product that fits a certain role. Given that we wanna compete on performance and the quality of our investment product and not compete on scale and fees, we're always gonna be looking at where can we have that absolute return, as well as where can we add value? And that 9% will drive a lot of our revenue growth.
We've also showcased on rolling five years just to, if someone wants to debate the different cycles of performance. Many of these strategies have delivered consistently on a rolling five-year basis, which is on the bottom of the chart, and if you add it up on the next slide here, 71% of rolling five-year periods have outperformed. When you look at the ones that didn't, you can see that the performance was compressed or the space became narrow, and the dispersion of returns inside of the universe was difficult to add value. But if you extend the time, you can repeat that over. What's important in my mind on these quality outcomes or that ten-year performance is that we look at Artisan from a valuation perspective, from a present value.
So we look at that and say: How can we have repeatable revenue, repeatable cash flows? How can we do it over a long period of time, and how can we reduce the risk to optimize the value of this firm? If you look at that long return pattern of 10+ years, and you find clients that stick with you for those 10-year periods, you extend the duration of those revenue streams. In our mind, revenue is AUM times fees. Everybody wants to quickly go down to net flows as the indicator, are you a healthy company? AUM is the beta, the new fundings, the terminations, and the rebalancing. The last three are obviously the components of net flows, and the other two are your total return.
Those first two of how you're compounding those returns at an average of 9% and also doing 238 BPS of alpha is what drives revenue. And if you look over a long period of time, it greatly outweighs the net flow game. And it can be an indicator of, are you a healthy firm if you're getting flows? But if you're actually managing capacity, which is in the middle there of repeatability, of are we you know, managing capacity and managing the team so that we put the odds in our favor to deliver those returns, then the net flow game changes. We are not keeping our strategies open forever, especially if they're in a hot asset class.
In many cases, at seven out of ten, we've closed because we feel like too much money's coming in too fast, and it'll destroy the performance. Or that if a quite a bit of money is coming in, and it's changing the characteristics of the strategy, that may hurt performance. Or you might look at it, just the mix of assets, that you wanna have a broader mix of assets so that you have a more stable revenue base. That's how we think of you know the power of revenue and the power of controlling AUM over time, because it comes back to the return. On top of controlling the return, we look at the process integrity, and we also try to attract and retain our talent.
And, four to 10 strategies that were listed there, the average tenure of the portfolio manager is 21 years. So when you look at evaluating our strategies, you know, the investment teams are stable, at least on the decision-making side. You look at the process integrity, we're controlling capacity. These are the ingredients for a high quality outcome that then generates the long-term revenue. And we can do it consistently, which is demonstrated on the right side, with 99% of our assets outperforming the benchmark after fees, and we've done it on a rolling period. I think this is a solid proof statement over the last 10 years, which helps us looking forward, which, Jason and, team will get into. We've also, over the years, diversified the sources of revenue.
You can see on this chart, like in 2000, we had 3 investment team and 5 strategies. Right before the IPO, we had 5 with 12 strategies, and we've continued that run, diversifying into fixed income and adding alternative strategies. Now we have today as 25 investment strategies with 10 investment teams. The 25 that are here today, we've also closed 3 strategies. A Small Cap Value, a G lobal Small Cap, and then we closed an International Small Cap and rebuilt it with Rezo Kanovich, with our international small. And we did all three of those for various business reasons. If we added those performance back in, you wouldn't see a skewing of the performance or a different outcome. We just wanna maintain a focused list of strategies.
The strategies that we've developed over the years is a proof statement to us on the repeatability of what we've done, looking for investment teams and highlighting the or selecting the right asset classes. We've done it over and over again. We've done it over different time periods. We've done it now in different asset classes. So there's various inception dates. And this is, in my mind, more impressive because we're not working off of a centralized research group or a centralized, you know, CIO, where the overlap of strategies are very heavy. And so sometimes you see investment firms do quite well, and all the strategies are working, but when you actually drill down, there's an analyst or two in the middle of the firm that permeate through all the different strategies, whether it's style or categories.
We've since we do not have a CIO in central research, each of these teams are economists. They have their own decision making, and for each one of them, it's, it's worked over the history of the firm, and more recently, since the IPO, we've done four teams with 15 new strategies. So, you know, in my mind, the IPO or the change in the ownership has not affected, and more importantly, I think it's actually enhanced our ability to see more teams and more talent from being because we're a public firm. And we've done this in a very cost-effective way with regards to lifting out teams and starting from scratch, as opposed to an acquisition, which C.J. will go through in his section.
Finally, on the shareholder outcome over the last 10 years, you know, the one on the right side of the page with regards to our operating margin, has been important to the firm since the inception. We've always talked about creating a home for people's careers, making it a home that people don't have to worry about, "Is this the right firm to go to and build a track record and establish a team over time?" We always wanted to create an environment that made us aware that we operated in uncertainty and operated in market volatility. Early on, and still today, we're still exposed heavily to the equity markets, and we wanted to take that out of the equation.
When you're in a people business, and you're looking at long time frames, you want to create a stable environment that people don't have to second guess, or "If I am the right organization." And we've seen a lot of ups and downs, and we've gone through the TMT bust, we've gone through the great financial crisis, so the gyrations of COVID. This is an important feature for us because we want stability and continuity and trust inside the organization. We also, on a growth side, we're in the revenue business. We just think of revenue differently than a distribution firm. We think of compounding revenue as opposed to the net flow game. And we've delivered over longer periods. We can deliver growth.
We can do it at a high operating margin, and along the way, we're returning cash flow back to our shareholders, which we've returned since IPO, greater than our initial IPO price. And you can see that relative to other firms in the companies in the index. And finally, when you look at this as a total return over that ten-year period, we've outperformed. So again, across the board, whether it's clients, whether it's from a growth perspective, or for shareholders, over this last ten years, we have a proven time-tested model that works. Do you have to make adjustments? Yes. But the core of the model is in place.
Jason and team's gonna talk about some of the adjustments of pivoting into how we look into other asset classes, and how we operate. And as Chris Krein's gonna talk about how, the model is adjusting for distribution. But as a whole, the model stayed in place. It's been repeated over and over, and it gets back to really the idea of creating a high quality, trusted organization that talent will come join us and stay with us for their career. And when we're out recruiting teams, the success of the firm, the stability of the firm, and the management team instilling that trust is highly important.
When you go out and find a new investment team, and they're looking to leave a great track record, their team, their assets, their revenue, everything that adds up to pay them, that's a big jump. And you really aren't going to go to a group that, that's never done it, or they've done it a few times, but it's a 50%, you know, some worked, some didn't. You know, if you're gonna get that high quality of team, how we run the firm puts us at a very competitive advantage, versus the marketplace. And we've, you know, done it in a manner that is repeatable, that generates profits, and I think has delivered a great return on capital.
With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Jason and have him go much deeper dive with different voices of how we operate. Like I said, you've, you've heard me, you've heard Keegan. Critical to, to meet other members of the team and how we think about recruiting teams, as well as resourcing teams and managing it. Keegan, Chris and Jason do that today. So thank you.
Thanks, Eric. Thanks. I'd like to start off by encouraging everybody to eat their lunch, so please don't... It's okay to chomp while we're talking. You know, I think when, you know, when you heard Eric, it's pretty clear that we delivered on the shareholder outcome. I think, you know, the slides that Eric produced are abundantly clear in that direction. I think what, you know, Keegan, Chris, and I would really like to do is to showcase why we believe that delivering on quality investment outcomes can lead to future growth, and why we think we can deliver on that future opportunity. Throughout the presentation, we're gonna talk about three items that we'd like you to take away from the remarks.
Number one is we have a deep, seasoned, talented, and experienced team that can deliver on that, and it's really been built upon the foundation that Andy Ziegler, our founder, and Eric, with and after him, have developed. We're just continuing to institutionalize that. Our process is extremely rigorous, and it has been institutionalized. And then number three is, we believe that our customized approach to working with teams can continue to work in the future. It's time-tested, and it is repeatable. And so with that, I'll jump into the slides, into the deck. I'll tell you that the only creative input that I had in this entire presentation was that alpha slide in this - or that alpha in the circle. That hopefully shows you why I'm not on the marketing team.
But it really, when I was thinking about my remarks, yesterday morning, I was thinking to myself, really everything that Chris Krein and I and the rest of the Investment Strategy Group does, is centered around making sure that we can deliver on the expectation of producing high quality and repeatable performance. And so I thought that that alpha symbol was really a critical element of just showcasing and sharing with you what we think our ultimate goal is, which is designed around delivering on the alpha expectation. Identifying, empowering, and supporting our talent for that alpha generation is very time intensive. We are customizing our approach. There's no one size fits all, as Eric had mentioned, and that's by design. And the way that we do that is through this Investment Strategy Group.
The team is, has over 20 years of experience in the industry on average. We've seen many things, and we've done many things, but this group is really designed around making sure that we can deliver on the expectation that our investment teams come here, come to ours, you will deliver on that distraction-free investing environment. As Eric mentioned, oftentimes, these teams are leading very successful careers, very successful track records, tend to have very deep teams, all with the expectation and the trust that they're placing on us, that we can actually execute on that promise of distraction-free investing. And so that's, at the end of the day, our goal. When you look at what we have diligenced and spent over thousands of managers over the course of our careers, we have looked at every single asset class in the industry.
The one thing that we have all determined that we agree upon is, number one, is that there's no one size fits all. There's no one way to build a team, there's no one way to execute a process, and there's no one way to generate alpha. And we think that belief system, that belief that you actually embrace differentiation and surround the resources around that differentiation to deliver alpha, is really a hallmark of what we think will continue to stand out for Artisan and stand out in the industry. When you think about what ISG has been able to achieve over the last five years, you've probably heard us talk about the launch of our first hybrid public-private fund.
We did that a few years ago with Tiffany Shao in our China Post- Venture strategy. It's our first foray into private investing. More recently, we were up at the forefront of designing and developing our first Credit Dislocation drawdown vehicle, which we're proud to be out in the market with today. Over the last five years, we have partnered with our existing, as well as our new franchises, on designing 10 new strategies out in the market, some with one year, some with three year, some with five-year records. But we did that in a way that's highly consultative.
We're talking to them about the strategy design, we're talking about the commercial aspect, we're talking about the competitive landscape, just so they understand what the expectations are and how we can help deliver on the goal of long-term, successful investment performance. The team operates in that consultative mindset. You can see the wheel. We provide industry intelligence, opportunity assessments, strategic planning. We talk about ESG, risk management, portfolio construction. Whatever it is, whatever's on their mind, we'll certainly talk about and make sure that we can help them either enhance or support them or take that off their plate, all with an eye towards making sure that we can continue to drive successful performance for our teams.
As the slide states, we act like investors by deploying working capital and seed capital to the teams and the talent, and the strategies that we think will produce alpha and generate returns, and ultimately outcomes for our shareholders. We think commercially about the markets as well as the industry, like an allocator would when they're thinking about making an investment. As we onboard, build, and adapt franchises, we do it no differently than an operator would, thinking about the long-term future and the long-term success of their business as they look to grow in a durable fashion. We believe that our process and our approach is repeatable, it's durable, and will lead to successful outcomes, both on the investment side as well as on the growth side in the future.
When we look at our talent identification process in the development playbook, it's an important, certainly an important element of our growth strategy, but it's really the tip of the spear. It's one thing to pursue an investment team and bring them into the Artisan framework, but we really have to resource them and dedicate the time and effort and attention to making sure that we build the right foundation. The best way that I can explain it is, if you're building a structure, a home, a building, you're laying the foundation, you're pouring the cement. If you have too much mixture and not enough water, too much water and not enough mixture, you create an unstable foundation. If you try to build on top of that foundation before it's ready to be built on, you're gonna create an unstable structure. That's no different in the investment business.
We really wanna make sure that the foundation is extremely strong, so that we can lay the opportunity set for that foundational growth to occur in a really thoughtful and meaningful way. Everybody wants to grow. That's not novel to us, but we do not set sales growth expectations that don't align to the outcome that we are all focused on, which is delivering really strong, successful performance on behalf of our clients. We expect that over time we will see that performance, but we don't have a gun to our head trying to produce sales growth for the benefit of producing growth.
I think when clients come in, and all of us were allocators on the Investment Strategy Group at one point in our lives, we recognize when teams are ready and when they're not ready, and we wanna make sure our teams are game ready for growth, and they're built for success into the future, and they're highly durable. Franchises evolve along this investment arc of a franchise. When they get into that compounding phase, and we're gonna talk a little bit about this, what we find is that they've usually hit an inflection point. It's usually 6, 7, 8, 9 years out into the future, where they're really generating meaningful performance. Their brand is much more prevalent in the industry. They have a culture of success, and they also have an investment record.
And we see that when we get into that compounding phase, it's incumbent upon us to make sure that we can extend the duration of that compounding as long as we possibly can. Inevitably, teams are gonna turn into mature businesses, whether they wind up closing strategies. As Eric mentioned, we've done that quite frequently over time, or they're just, frankly, just out of capacity. And so we need to think about the maturity as well, and how do we reinvigorate growth?
You know, one of the things that PM said to me a few years ago, when I joined Artisan, he said, "You know, Jason, one of the things that I want you to know is you either grow or you die." And, you know, I thought it was a little tongue-in-cheek, but I thought about it for a minute, and he was right. I truly believe... And that's why we don't have this sales orientation or the sales mindset when we bring teams onto our platform. So I'm gonna end my first segment here and turn it over to Keegan and Chris in a minute, but I just wanna talk a little bit about our process at a high level.
We do many things well here at Artisan, but the one thing that I think we really pride ourselves on is identifying talent, building around that talent, and then growing that franchise. It's in our DNA. We've done it for 30 years. We've done it across multiple asset classes, multiple geographies, multiple personalities, as well as multiple investor types. And we're gonna continue to deliver on that, because the success of our platform is 100% predicated on our ability to deliver on that growth. New franchise opportunities are gonna satisfy all these three vectors: investment, commercial, and platform. We align every talent that we talk to, every investor that we talk to, across those three vectors to make sure that they meet not a relative standard, but an absolute standard.
We have, we have an absolute standard that has to be met across those three because we, we really believe that good enough is honestly not good enough. It has to meet that high standard. And so I wanna introduce Chris and Keegan. These are two people that I've spent, as Eric mentioned, a lot of my career working with, both at my prior life at Goldman Sachs as well as the last 5 years here today. They've been trusted lieutenants. They have amazing, amazing skills. They have very different skills that we can tap into, and it was a continuation of that broadening of the Investment Strategy Group that gave us the confidence that we can continue to grow as a platform because of their skills.
So I'm gonna turn it over to Chris, who's gonna take you through a little bit more of our process, bring it to life, and then Keegan also is gonna bring the process a little bit more to life, but he's gonna talk a little bit more about a few case studies to really sort of share with you why we think that we can continue to repeat the approach that we've taken over the last several years.
Thanks, Jason. I'm gonna reiterate that, I don't hear enough chomping and chewing in here, so please, please have some lunch. As Jason mentioned, our track record of success is really predicated on our identifying the best talent, isolating the most attractive market opportunities, and leveraging the resources of our firm to build the long-term sustainable franchises. Artisan was founded nearly 30 years ago to serve as the optimal home for investment talent who didn't fit neatly into a box, and who recognized the value of distraction-free investing. Fast forward to today, our repeatable process has yielded quality outcomes for our clients across asset classes, regions, and market cycles.
While the talent and competitive landscape has evolved since our inception, our guiding principles remain the same, and we continue to believe that we are the best destination of choice for a high quality talent that is looking to build a long-term career with the flexibility and support that we provide. A successful outcome begins before a team even joins our organization and requires the alignment of all three key pillars that Jason mentioned earlier. I'm gonna dig a little bit deeper into our investment opportunity process. When thinking about investment opportunities, what we're really looking for are opportunities that represent the best allocation of our capital, our time, and our resources.
Critical to this process is unbundling our assessment approach to isolate the merits of the individual from the investment opportunity, as well as the investment implementation independent of each other, because ultimately, what we're trying to do is find the best outcome in each of those pillars and bring them together so that we have a holistic portfolio and franchise that is the best of breed. Our process starts first and foremost with talent. This is an important differentiator for us because our business model provides us the flexibility to be patient and let the quality dictate our decisions and decision making, rather than our top-down decisions to add an asset class or a product. Having that advantage to operate without time or capital deployment pressures helps reduce selection bias and minimize forced errors that often come with manufactured outcomes.
This allows us to constantly partner with who we believe to be the very best, as opposed to the best available option at a point in time. But talent isn't enough. We have to marry the opportunity set with the talent that we have to make sure that we have the best individual to execute on a particular market opportunity as well. Once we have identified a potential candidate matched with an investment opportunity, we overlay an assessment of the character traits that we believe are significant to make a successful franchise. Traits such as grit, entrepreneurial spirit, competitiveness, and internal drive are just a few of the things that we look for through countless interactions with our potential PMs. The last investment criteria that we look at is strategy implementation.
Ultimately, we're looking for differentiated portfolio expressions backed by a well-defined process, a unique approach, and a track record of success. Bring all three of these criteria back together. We only proceed if we have an alignment across the quality of talent, the opportunity, and the implementation. The next pillar of our process is taking a deep dive into the commercial opportunity that a potential strategy offers our platform, and we look at this through the lens of scale, duration, and revenues. We do this in three phases. The first is a universe assessment. We look for pockets of the market where alpha has historically been persistently achieved, as well as where we believe alpha potential exists going forward.
We require large and growing addressable markets which cater to active management, and we prefer to enter markets with few competitors or where differentiated results can lead to market share gains and premium pricing. The second criteria that we look for are strategic asset allocation support to ensure that we have a secular tailwind supporting persistent and durable capital flows over the long term. And lastly, the investment strategy needs to be scalable from a capability and capacity standpoint to have the potential growth into a meaningful part of our platform. Our capacity discipline helps ensure that we can sustainably do this through flows and compounding while preserving alpha generation for the long term.
The final pillar that we look for is the second of platform opportunity for the firm at large, to ensure that any incremental strategy is additive and provides a combination of capability expansion, business diversification, and operational synergies. From a capability standpoint, our goal is really to expand the breadth, not just at the onboarding of the new team, but also through what we call vertical and horizontal growth. Vertical expansion is organic growth in nature and refers to the ability of the franchise to further monetize their existing research process and capabilities. This can be done through custom structural implementation, co-investment opportunities, as well as sub-strategy vehicles. Horizontal expansion encompasses both organic and inorganic growth, and that pushes us into new categories like alternatives, private market investing, as well as targeted specialist strategies.
This can be done by incubating a new capability within an existing team or onboarding a capability through our natural course of process, through a lift out, or highly selective M&A. Next is looking at the potential business opportunities and diversification benefits by looking at how a team impacts our product mix, our client mix, our regional mix, and strategy mix, as well as the correlation of potential revenues to existing businesses. The last platform consideration is the operational synergies and new strategy that we call operational alpha. We assess each new franchise through the lens of an independent organization, as well as through the Artisan platform, to make sure our model is additive from an investment, operation, and distribution perspective, without disrupting our core business. Our process is deliberate, it's exhaustive, and it's highly selective.
As I mentioned earlier, it's our strong belief that laying the foundation for successful outcomes begins well before a team is added to our platform. But it's our ongoing support model that ensures that these businesses develop into long-term, sustainable franchises. My colleague, Keegan, is gonna go through some of the ongoing support that we do with teams, and give a few key examples of how that process is put into action.
Thanks, Chris. As Jason and Chris alluded, the evaluation process is quite lengthy. In some cases, it can take upwards of three years, and our efforts there are really focused on analyzing versus building. Once the individual or team comes to Artisan, the design and build process is highly customized. The initial days are critical, as we're laying the foundation and the actions we take early on to shape the culture, durability, and growth optionality for the future. Just as the investment team is accountable for generating performance, we are accountable to them in providing the necessary environment and resources needed to achieve those outcomes. As we like to say, promote, enforce, and maintain that distraction-free investing environment. Distraction-free investing is a differentiator, and we hear it repeatedly when we engage with prospective talent.
At other firms, portfolio managers can spend high amounts of time roped away into other areas such as recruiting, compliance, marketing, and committee meetings. We take a different approach here. Our PMs spend almost all their time on people, process, and the portfolio. We think that having the right people and processes in place improves the potential for strong performance and, in turn, benefits future marketing events. We provide our teams with duration. We also are patient and know the eventual inflection point in client adoption will come, as long as we build the foundation correctly and carefully. To achieve this distraction-free environment, we need to understand the criteria that is required to work successfully. We must build infrastructure and provide the operational and structural support, and provide the team with the necessary working and seed capital to execute their philosophy.
In the early days, we are laying the foundation for durability. We are focused on getting the team up and running, onboarding investment and non-investment teams, designing strategies, building out an office, and establishing that philosophy and culture to operate in. Vetting and integrating infrastructure and investment tools are big components in the first few months. Initial performance is critical. Therefore, we must minimize distractions and the PM's time away from the portfolios. We must onboard dedicated business leaders so that they can spend time communicating the team's story and engaging with external client relationships. With time comes performance. It brings asset growth, scale, and new complexities. The support of the team continues, but begins to evolve to areas like talent sourcing and evaluation, strategy, communications, and expansions of the team in other areas.
With appropriate, when appropriate, teams begin to think about the next phase of growth. After careful consideration, we launch additional capabilities where we see obvious synergies, minimal distractions, and alpha potential. Finally, our most mature teams require different support in order to extend the duration. This involves transitioning leaderships, exercising capacity management, thinking about client diversification, and strategic initiatives to bring further monetization to the brand and philosophy. From day one to year 25, we are side-by-side partners to these teams in both a proactive and reactive manner. Our firm's success lies with their performance, and our franchise leaders understand operational alpha is an important component to the overall success story. Our investment teams view us as an extension of their team. They can come to us with small or big requests, and we will handle with urgency and with tailored guidance.
The path to asset and revenue growth takes time. We strongly believe that if we build it right initially, growth optionality, optionality is endless. So as Jason sort of pointed out here, we're gonna talk a little about a few examples. And we thought the first one here would be the Credit Team. It's a really fantastic example to show how we applied our framework outside of the public equities space for the first time and delivered high-quality outcomes to both clients and shareholders. You know, the business over the last decade has produced significant alpha, top decile results versus peers, and we've launched three strategies over traditional and alternative categories, with the fourth in process now. Credit was an obvious gap on our platform over a decade ago.
We moved into it, required us to be, you know, both patient, highly analytical, and, and really patient with our right partner. Despite the talent, you know, working in an asset class that was a little bit different for us with, you know, outside of equities, the process didn't work, both in how we evaluated the talent and onboarded the talent. When we think about credit, many asset classes do not appeal to us. The asset allocation potential and addressable market is wide, but the alpha potential can be low, manager dispersion, can be fairly tight, and in the end, you're also left with a lot of competitive passive options. This is especially true in investment-grade core and core plus asset classes. But there are pockets like EM debt and high yield, where our assessment process actually works out quite nicely.
Differentiation is possible, manager dispersion is wider, and alpha has been and has been persistently achieved. Bryan Krug was a unique talent. He ran a successful large strategy at a, at a large organization with top decile performance and a portfolio that looked different from peers. Bryan wanted to bet on himself and build a world-class investment business focused on investing across the corporate capital structure. He was committed to building and training a team and demonstrated a long-term entrepreneurial mindset, and most importantly, impressed us with his flexible approach and way that he underwrote the credit securities. The High Income Strategy design at Artisan was, was fairly similar to what he was running at his prior firm. We allowed for greater concentration. We agreed on a more disciplined capacity management approach and slightly more investment freedom.
The biggest undertaking here was understanding what Bryan needed to be successful from a resource perspective, assessing those requirements, and implementing them in a thoughtful manner, building in slack and optionality for future growth. We brought in a new order management system, custom-built new portfolio analysis tools, recruited a new analyst team, and established an office in Kansas City before moving the team later to Denver. With early performance success, the High-Income Strategy assets grew, which required resource growth. We added specialized capabilities like a data scientist, junior resource, junior research associates, and a dedicated COO. We've expanded the distribution team on the dedicated side from one to three. Bryan promoted talent, and we modernized the research portal.
Finally, we applied Bryan philosophy and other mandates across vehicle channels, Credit Opportunities, a long-short credit strategy, Floating Rate, liquid bank loan strategy, and, as Jason alluded, we are excited to have our first close, hopefully in Q4, for Dislocation Opportunities, our first closed-end drawdown fund, which we've seen early interest from several prominent family offices and institutional clients on. In nearly 10 years, we've seen Bryan assets grow to over $8 billion. We've seen the strategy count go from 0 to 4. We've seen the dedicated investment and non-investment team grow from 1 to 16 people. And above all, the team has generated exceptional results for its clients.
The foundation Bryan and team have built today gives us confidence, and we expect the team's revenue to grow meaningfully in the upcoming years as we compound results, fill existing capacity, and build new business lines like Dislocation Opportunities. You know, on past earnings calls, Eric's definitely discussed the excitement we have around our EMsights team. This is yet another example of a team where we think there is massive potential for substantial revenue growth in the next several years. As a refresher, this is an opportunity that presented itself when Michael Cirami, Mike O'Brien, and Sarah Orvin's former firm was acquired by a larger bank. This created an opportunity for us to engage, highlight the advantages of our business model, and discuss how we've partnered with investment teams.
Our success with Brian and the credit team gave us credibility when engaging with non-invested investors like Michael, and confidence that we could once again execute within a new and complex asset class. The insights team is led by exceptional people and investors. Their philosophy is centered around looking beyond the benchmark, executing exhaustive original research, and building portfolios focused on risks that matter within inefficient markets. Now, two years, the insights team also believes in operational alpha. They recognize that the complexity of their business presents both opportunities as well as distractions, and appreciates the benefit of a like-minded partner. Now, two years into the partnership, we are more than pleased with the development and early success that they achieved, as evidenced by their high excess returns and initial peer rankings.
History suggests that when we blend the four topics highlighted here on this page, increasing TAM, active demand, a unique process, and a world-class team with a strong performance, growth typically follows. While the U.S. secondary, U.S. security count is in decline, the EM and debt market has grown more than 5 times in the last decade. Moreover, most U.S. investors ignore the majority of the market, focused on index countries issuing sovereign debt dominated in hard currencies, ignoring almost 80% of the market that's issued in local currencies, as well as half the market that's issued by corporates. The EMsights team believes that this is a mistake, and these pockets of the market offer additional diversification and alpha potential.
Unlike the U.S. equity market, where passive management accounts for about 50% of the total assets, EM debt assets are about 90% actively managed, aligning well with our commercial assessment needs. We see the largest players in the space averaging north of $20 billion with mixed results, and we think this is a great opportunity for the team to take share. With EMsights, we have strategically come to the market with three strategies offered, with a range of risk profiles and vehicles targeted at all client types globally. We received our first large mandate win earlier this summer, and the pipeline for the team is really robust. We believe our early performance and highly competitive peerings will lead to significant demand across all channels, and we anticipate the EMsights franchise could be managing $several billion over the next few years.
Turn it back over to Jason to briefly talk about the future. You know, the time and capital we've allocated in the past few years has positioned us for substantial growth, which we are really excited to highlight.
Thanks, Keegan. Just a couple of thoughts from the beginning made. You know, one, one of the things that might jump off the page at you when you think about the process, you heard Chris talk a little bit about some of the factors that we look at, and you might think to yourself, "Well, geez, those are really subjective factors, like, how do you measure grit, determination, and hunger?" And the reality is, you can take anything that's subjective and make it objective. For example, you know, when we were talking to Mike Cirami, you start talking about his track record and his performance, and you want him to be able to relive the scar tissue of his entire track record. And he can pull it up from his memory at a moment's notice.
What happened in 2018? Well, in Q1, Argentina defaulted. They had a meltdown, and that caused 150 basis points of underperformance. He can continuously go through that to tell us that he is living and eating and breathing the success or failure of his strategy. When you think about grit or determination, when we ask a potential investor a question, something that's a little bit more open-ended, that causes them to have to think for a little while, are they texting you or emailing you at 2:00 A.M., giving you some thoughts or some examples? Are they emailing you a week later with a presentation, going through how they thought about the question in a little bit more detail?
Those are big, big determinative factors that allow us to, to assess whether these folks are really what it takes to make it on the Artisan platform. And so I think that's, you know, that's a, that's a big differentiator for us. And, you know, in, in the case of something like EMsights and, and Mike, you know, like, like Eric had mentioned, these folks are, are, are really walking away from, you know, these very, very successful opportunities. But we're really running to where the building might be smoking or potentially even burning, and that's really where we find some of the best opportunities that can come across our platform. I think the first meeting I took when I joined Artisan was an emerging markets debt team, because Eric and I both agreed at the time that emerging markets debt is really interesting.
It's actually become even more interesting over the five years since. But it didn't make that absolute threshold of what we were looking for. So we just patiently waited for that opportunity, and then we had this bluebird fall on our lap with the Morgan Stanley's Eaton Vance acquisition, and we were able to partner with Mike, Mike, and Sarah, and now we're off to the races. You know, I'm looking at Sam Sellers, our COO, but I think tomorrow we're implementing our second large separate account for the EMsights team, and we have another one waiting in the wings. So we're really excited about that franchise. I'm gonna wrap up my section and then turn it over to Chris Krein to talk about distribution.
But I think it's really important to reflect on, you know, one thing that is obviously well known. We are in the, we are in the business of active management. But I think if you harken back to all of our Finance 101 classes or our statistics class, what do we all learn? We learn that alpha is hard to come by, and we also learn that it's unpredictable, and that you have to be patient. And that's certainly one of the skills that we think we bring to the table. You know, when you look at our strategies, they're different from benchmarks, they're different from peers, and they typically have a characteristic, or multiple characteristics that look like high Active Share, high Tracking Error, more concentration.
And so when you combine those characteristics with unique talent and our platform that resources these teams and allows them to invest in a very distraction-free environment, we think it produces the alpha that you've all come to expect of Artisan, and we truly believe that that is repeatable in the future. Patience, to us, is a skill. In this industry, we seem to be very much lacking in patience, but we believe it, that it's a skill, and we think it's a competitive advantage at Artisan when we compare ourselves to peers. Like I said earlier, we don't set marketing targets or sales targets for our teams. We set investment excellence targets. We want them to be excellent at what we expect them to be excellent at, which is investing. And if they do that, the rest will take care of itself.
You see that on this slide. So Eric mentioned over the course of the history of Artisan, we've had 28 strategies on the field. We only have 25 today because we've closed 3. If you look at the formative years, from years 1 to 4 and years 5 to 8, the nascent growth and then the foundational growth, you realize that we actually have almost half of our strategies in that bucket, meaning that we are loaded for an inflection in growth as long as we continue to deliver on the successful investment performance that I think our clients have come to appreciate. When we do inflect in years 9 to 12 and 13 to 16, you see what compounding can look like. We can just tell you that the history of Artisan has continued to repeat itself time and time again.
We've seen this happen throughout the course of our 30 years of doing this, and so we have no reason to believe that we won't be successful with the strategies that we've been planting the seeds on and watering and growing for that ultimate success to manifest itself on the platform. So it does take time for that inflection, but we are confident that it will occur and that the growth will soon follow with these strategies. So let me talk a little bit about those strategies. In the last decade, as we've come to share with you, we've been busy. We've been adding franchises. We've been launching capabilities from established as well as new teams.
The pace of launches has been more rapid, and we think that that's appropriate, given the rigorous nature of our process and also the depth of the Investment Strategy Group. But importantly, the established teams have also been highly innovative, and they've partnered with us to expand out. Like Chris had mentioned, we have both vertical expansion opportunities as well as horizontal expansion opportunities. To be able to partner with an established franchise is really a big advantage for us. Why? Well, they have a brand, they have a team, they have a culture, they have a track record, and importantly, they have a client base that is more than willing to look at as an early adopter of that strategy.
And so that's a real big competitive advantage for us, and we want to lean into that where we can find those opportunities. We have been investing a significant amount of working capital and seed capital along these strategies, and we fully expect that the return on these seed and working capital investments will come to fruition in the not-too-distant future. If you look at the right side of the page, which is our developing strategies, what you'll find is that we have 15 strategies that we've launched over the last 10 years. That's 60% of our strategy count. If you look at the revenue and the AUM that they represent, it's only 20%.
However, when you look at the path of history, the established franchises, and you mirror that against the newer franchises or the developing strategies, what you'll find is that these strategies have obviously much shorter track records, but the time to growth has been, has been truncated. 5.2 years to reach $1 billion in the established franchises versus 2 years in our developing strategies. Why do we think that is? Well, we think that the Artisan brand and the halo effect associated with Artisan has really come to the benefit of these newer teams. The length of the records is short, but they've all continued to develop along the same landscape from a performance perspective as our established teams. You can see the records are nearly identical at over 235+ basis points, and their percentile ranks are also world-class and high quality.
So we don't think it's a question of if they will inflect, it's just a question of when they will inflect. I thought a lot about this slide when we were putting the presentation together. And, you know, the one, the one thing that sort of comes to mind is, you're probably thinking to yourself: "Well, geez, Jason, you know, new franchise due diligence, these don't look like very novel asset classes to me. I've seen them for a while, and so you're a little late to the game." And I wouldn't disagree with you, but I would say that, you know, we're not trying to be first at what we do. We're not trying to be the biggest at what we do. We're trying to be the best.
You know, if you think back to what Keegan had mentioned about launching the credit franchise, just, like, think about that for a moment. We didn't have... We didn't- we had never done a credit transaction on the platform prior to 2014, and yet here we are today, 9 years later, and we have one of, if not the best, credit teams on the planet, delivering the, some of the best and most exceptional investment results. And credit wasn't novel in 2014. Eric and I were investing in high yield strategies probably in the mid- to late-1990s. And so we could just continue to repeat that. We just want to be the best at what we do. We don't know when the opportunity is going to arise, but we know it will arise.
I think what's really important here is there's probably 3 areas that sort of associate with the future. Number 1 is private markets. The number 2 is differentiated credit, and number 3 is new geographies. That doesn't mean they're all going to come in isolation. Oftentimes, they're all going to come together, and so we really want to focus on just delivering and finding that best talent. You know, we truly believe that the lift-out approach makes the most sense, as Eric had mentioned, and C.J. is gonna show you why, mathematically. But we're not saying that we wouldn't do an acquisition, and maybe one of these asset classes is associated with an acquisition, and we're certainly willing to do that.
We have a strong pipeline of activity and conversations with bankers, but that's not really the hallmark of who we are. That would be a last resort for us, unless it made complete sense to our platform and our business, and wasn't disruptive. Looking ahead, before I turn it over to Chris, you know, I think hopefully you've taken away from this, that we've preemptively invested across the investment landscape, across the operational landscape, and now across the distribution landscape, which you're going to hear about in a minute. We really think there's multiple ways to win on the Artisan platform for growth. When you think about the existing franchise, we have about a dozen franchises that have multi-decade track records.
They have exceptional long-term performance, well-known brands in the industry, and are the go-to place for active management, as and when their strategies are in favor from an asset allocation perspective. We think that there's going to be a continuation of opportunity, both in from beta and alpha, and even some modest growth potential. New strategies on developing teams. Clearly, we've got all three levers to be pulled: organic growth at the right time, alpha and beta. Certainly, we're always on the prowl for new strategies and new franchises, so that will be a continued lever for growth. When you think about distribution, there's really three things that we've invested in. Number one, we've invested in new talent.
This talent is typically associated with areas that are not in our power alleys, so think about alternatives, alternative credit, where we are continuing to build out our capabilities. Number two is, and I, you know, I give Chris a lot of credit. He's really been shifting the mindset and the culture of our sales organization from one that is a little bit more service-oriented to one that's a little bit more forward-leaning and sales-oriented, which he can get into in a minute. And then lastly, we've spent a lot of time and spent a lot of effort on our data and analytics, helping us achieve better conversations with clients, better interactions with clients, and just knowing where to go and where to look and where to hunt for opportunities.
With that, I'd like to turn it over to the global head of distribution, Chris Krein, and he can talk you through where we're headed from a distribution perspective.
Good afternoon. How's everyone doing? Thanks, Jason, for the introduction. I appreciate it. So we're here to talk a little bit about distribution at Artisan Partners, and we have a wonderful investment foundation for which my team gets to work with. So I'm excited to talk to you a little bit about what we're doing. From a distribution standpoint, we operate on a hybrid model, so I'm sure some of you have heard a lot about that from a lot of different people. So let me tell you a little bit about what a hybrid model means for us. What we're trying to do is we're trying to marry expertise with volume. The linchpin of our distribution model is in our dedicated teams.
We have a group of people that wake up every single solitary day that are dedicated to each one of our investment teams, and all they think about is the commercial effort of that team. There are a lot of functions on that team. It's spearheaded by what we call a business leader on each of those teams, and they're thinking constantly about how we're going to sell our clients the merits of what we do from an investment perspective. What does this service model look like by channel? What is the right business mix for this, this channel? Where do we hunt, and what do we do? How do we talk to people about what we're trying to do? Is it a technical sale, or is... Do we need to talk about how the, the stocks go?
This group is critical to our investment culture. We heard a lot today about distraction-free investing and protecting our team's time and having them focus on what they're doing, and that's compounding our clients' capital. Our dedicated teams, that's their main job, making sure that we set out a commercial effort, but we protect that team's time and focus on what is most important to every single solitary stakeholder at Artisan Partners, and that's that compounding of our clients' capital. A dedicated team can't do it all, and they need to look for points of leverage, and we look at internal leverage and external leverage sources. From an internal standpoint, we have a few that we work with. The first is our national accounts team that deals with big broker-dealer relationships and RIA platforms, the research component to that.
The next is an RIA field team that is going, and that's hand-to-hand combat with different RIAs out in the different geographies across the United States. We have a team over in EMEA that is working with those markets over there for the products that they see fit. And Australia and APAC, we have a group down there who's offering our products down there. What these centralized teams are doing is they're building and fostering great relationships with clients and prospects, in their respective channels, in their geographies, and then they're leaning on the dedicated teams for their expertise. If you know, you look at me, I'm going to give you a football analogy, right?
I'm trying to get these, these centralized teams to get it to the 50-yard line and then call for help and get the, the expertise to close those. We align their interests to work in harmony, right? That way, I have an efficient origination team with experts to be able to close business and provide the world-class service that our clients come to expect. External leverage, and Jason alluded to a little bit of this, investment consultants. They allow us to access the institutional markets efficiently. That is a hallmark of what we've done here over our 30 years. Intermediaries, that's the broker-dealers, the RIA platforms, banks, and those trust companies.
These are single points of sales and service for us and key components to what we're doing, and they operate as professional buyers, and we'll get into a little bit more of how that helps us later. And the last is technology and data partners. That ranges everything from databases to opportunity and risk scoring. I'm old enough that I got into this business, and they handed me a green book that was about 2 feet wide, and you started with A, and you ended with Z. And when your finger wore out, you took a break, and you know, then you started to get calling again.
Unfortunately, we can make technological investments in this day and age where we can make it a little bit easier, a little bit smarter, and we can operate with a small footprint team that's the best-in-class at what they do, and they can be efficient. I liked what Keegan did, so I figure I'd give you an example as well. And, you know, we'll continue on the EMsights group. I thought maybe it would be helpful if everybody understood about how what they're doing when they're evaluating talent dovetails with what the distribution group is looking to do when they come. So, Mr. Cirami was identified, and we vetted him, and we recruited him to come to Artisan. And then that day comes where Jason rings my phone, and he says, "Look, I got a live one.
We're gonna need you to go find some distribution talent." They bring me into the fold, and then we have an assessment that needs to go on there, right? Where are we gonna take this? What are the, what are the components that are going to be? Where can these products be successful, and what do we need to do? In this case, the consulting community was very important, leveraging our institutional brand on a global basis. There's a large pool of assets that were going out there. And we needed someone who could understand the real complexities of this asset class. This was a very new venture for us. Our centralized teams had not seen emerging market debt, and we needed someone who could really understand and translate to them, and show us the way.
We go out, just like they do. We rank all the EMD salespersons that are in the marketplace, and from top to bottom, and then my finger starts to call. And, you know, hopefully, we form some relationships with these folks over time, and we know them, and we recruit the person that's going to come in there. This is really important, the power of one solid partner. It magnifies any opportunity more than an army of people that you can put on the field. It provides one crucial element to all of our investment teams, and that's trust.
They have one person that they look to, who wakes up every day, just as we talked about before, and thinks about them, and where they're going to go, and what they're going to do, and translates that big marketplace. They are their true partner, and they're navigating the world for them. Next, we're gonna identify the channels. With that person, we're gonna build out business plans for all of the points of leverage that we'll talk about in a little bit, and begin on training and execution and doing that. Then you get to the evaluation stage. Where are your gaps? What skill sets do you know that you need? You don't wanna do everything on day one as you learn, and there's progression.
Over time, what you wanna do is you wanna understand what skill sets you have, what skill sets you need from your initial interaction in the marketplace, and augment that team. You know, sets you up for some foundational growth in that strategy. As Jason and Keegan alluded to, we have, you know, our first two, you know, cornerstone investors, I would say, in the EMsights group that are coming on, one last month and one very, very shortly. We heard a lot about the investment components of this firm, and I think that's really important. We are first and foremost an investment firm, and we hold our investment-oriented culture sacred here. From a distribution standpoint, that's quite refreshing.
You know, not being a sales or oriented culture that needs to go out and grab every nickel that's on the ground, but thoughtful growth. We align our distribution efforts with who we are, and distribution does not dictate the development of our investment strategies. This thoughtful growth component that we're talking about is critical to maintaining that culture, and as with everything at Artisan, it starts with talent. I would probably say that I spend about 50% of my time out in the marketplace just getting to know talent and resourcing people who aren't gonna come work here for us today, but we need to develop a pipeline for the future. These dedicated professionals, it requires, you know, years and years of conversations. They're making a commitment to a team.
There's a risk and a reward equation that goes in there. They need to believe in their partner on the investment side as well. And then we align their incentives with them. There's a revenue share that's separate from the investment team's revenue share. It's a little bit higher at the point of sale to incentivize that growth, but it exists in perpetuity. We focus on the long-term growth of clients, the duration of clients, as we've heard. That leads me to the second component, and that's time. Time is always our friend. When we talk about distribution at Artisan, we prefer very, very high barriers to entry. We want to compete on our investment capability and our operational strength. These barriers require a commitment to the investment strategy from our clients.
They believe they're the right clients, and that helps to extend the duration. Something I'm very proud of, the average length of our top 10 relationships is 15 years. That's not something that you see, and as it goes, it's equally impressive as you go down the chart. With that high barrier and a longer commitment, we match capacity with fees, the right terms. We talk a lot in the distribution area of the world here at Artisan, about the right client and the right terms, and that's what we mean. By you combining the right client and the right terms, that creates a more durable revenue stream. Now, the sales guy is going to talk about present value, and you know, we may or may not. So you can, smart guys over there, you can correct me if I'm wrong.
But if you present value, this revenue stream versus a retail or a shorter revenue stream, even with higher fees, you're gonna get a better outcome. So what we prefer and what we try to structure is a small distribution team with a high present value versus a larger distribution model with higher asset turnover. It aligns with who we are. And then finally, with a small distribution team, you need to be thoughtful about your leverage points. And to Eric's point, this is where we manage change in the organization. This is how you evolve and create economic alignment with your specific partners. In our early years, the firm concentrated heavily on the institutional consulting firms for leverage. We have a phenomenal brand with those folks.
They're the foundation of the firm, and they're very, very long duration in nature. As you can see, we have 11 consulting relationships over $1 billion, and some of our biggest, longest standing ones are even larger and longer duration than that. The next phase, we identified centralized research within the broker-dealers. As they were transitioning from their commission structures to their fee structures, they centralized research and put things into specific models and things like that. That was a very important component for us. It allowed us to compete in a big space with those higher barriers that we like. It institutionalized the process of getting into the more retail markets. Gave us the leverage to compete there with a very, very small and a very, very focused distribution team.
We leveraged relationships and brand in the institutional consultant community next, to help us become a global firm. And that was the result of our product evolution. As you saw, global products come to fore within Artisan Partners, and our teams were stretching their ability to manage things. We needed to go and find them assets, and those assets often lay in the EMEA markets and down in Australia back in the day. We continued leveraging when we brought those relationships in as those businesses grew and hired our teams that were in there to continue that growth along the way. We have migrated into different sorts of strategies in fixed income, which took us into different markets. Now we have alternative capabilities. The industry is always going to continue to evolve.
The success of our business has seen a lot of growth. That's a catalyst for us to evolve. This model will need to evolve as well, but it'll always evolve around a core set of principles, investments first, and our culture is there. So what are we doing in terms of evolution? We talked a little bit about the alternative investments. We went right back to a proven strategy for us there, and we hired and recruited a piece of talent. Took a very long time to get the culture right and the individual right, to be able to fit within our organization and see the world the same way, but he's come on to our organization. He's gonna lead an alternative platform for growth to be able to help us expand into that.
We're aligning resources and amplifying the sales of our newer, more complex strategies, and we're centralizing some resources to shift and orient more towards a sales culture within the firm. As businesses have grown, the number of clients that went out also grew, and you need to shift that service more toward that expertise bucket and leave your leverage sales force out there to sell. You also need to provide them the tools to be able to sell as well. So we have portfolio specialist groups and are aligning with the Investment Strategies Group to really provide the resources and the tools in the pathway to sell, to free up their time to do what they do best. That's what salespeople like to do. They want to get into the market. They want to interact with clients. They want to win business.
We've also invested in our digital platform, and that helps us to manage headcount, and it helps us to get people smarter about their business and what they're doing, where they're going. It helps them to manage opportunity and risk. One of the favorite things I like to talk about is our CARs report, and that's our Clients At Risk report. Back in the day, you would look at performance, and you would guess as to who is there. We have a dashboard that everybody can wake up to, and they can see exactly where their entire book of clients looks and where they should be spending their time, and what the opportunity is and what the risk is in the book. That's very helpful in being efficient. We want them to be more nimble in communication and delivery and measurement.
We have communications professionals embedded in every team that are creating very fast, very quick content to be able to react to the market and give our salespeople information to talk to. We need to be able to deliver that, and we also need to be able to measure that so that we can interact when it makes the most sense. So what do you get when you combine all of these things? This is a picture of where our assets are today, and this is what we believe that thoughtful growth strategy produces. This is a broadly diversified set of clients. It takes advantage of leverage across all channels and all geographies, and it gives us relationships that we can utilize for our next set of products and beyond.
Thoughtful distribution, you know, the investments are at your core, and this is what you get. You get an average length of relationship that is long, long duration clients, clients that come to you, in meaningful size with multiple products, and clients that seriously evaluate your new pipeline of strategies as they come to market. You know, Jason talked about, you know, 25 strategies are out there. I always like to tell people that, you know, a lot of our really good, really long duration clients focus a lot on our 26th investment strategy, which is what Eric and Jason and this team does when they evaluate talent and bring them.
It's very gratifying when they call you and say, "When you got the new one coming in, I want to be the first one to take a look." And I'm a sales guy, I tell everyone that they get the first look, and it works out just fine. But, you know, that's very, very important as a foundation for growth that Jason alluded to. And then the last thing that you get when you get thoughtful growth is diversification. This is a very diversified book of business. It's changing and evolving over time. It has grown throughout the evolution of Artisan Partners in our last 30 years. And lastly, I think it'll serve as a great foundation for growth in the future. Thank you. C.J.?
Good afternoon, everybody. So my job is to take everything you heard today and try to instill that into a set of financials that you, that you can use. You heard Jason say that we don't set targets. We have investment targets. So how I take investment targets into financials is a challenge, but I'll give you the, a foundation for how we think about growth. I'll talk about our margin outlook, and I'll talk about our capital management policy. As I listened today and was thinking about what I've heard, there were three words that really resonated with me as it resonates to the financial statements. One is quality, one is durable, and one is repeatable. You know, superior investment performance and delivering on that over the long time really produces quality revenues.
Having like-minded, long-term-oriented clients and strategic relationships has produced a durable client base. And finally, the investment in talent we've made, at high hit rates, has resulted in successful outcomes that are definitely repeatable. I always start my presentations with, our transparent and predictable financial model. This slide was part of our 2013 IPO roadshow. It hasn't changed since. We're still doing things, the way we said we were going to do them in 2013. You know, we take a long-term approach. Growth is really the outcome of our disciplined business process that you heard us talk about today. We protect our fee rates, finding the right clients on the wrong terms, on the right terms.
We manage capacity, and if we're not a good fit with a client, we walk away, we say no. I think the cornerstone, from a shareholder's perspective of our financial model, is the variable nature of our expenses. Our revenues fluctuate, and so do our expenses. So during the financial crisis, during the sharp market downturns, we don't have PMs calling us, asking us how they're going to get paid and how they're going to pay their investment teams. They can wake up every morning, they know their average AUM, they know their AUM, they know their average fee rate, and they can calculate what their bonus pool is. That gives them a lot of transparency and predictability for the future.
So in my 13, 14 years here, I've never had a PM call and ask how they're going to be compensated or their team is. Quite a different experience at a larger firm I worked at prior to that. Finally, we have strong cash flows, and we maintain a conservative balance sheet, which allows us to have a very high dividend payout ratio, which rewards our shareholders. And finally, we're all about aligning interests with our clients, shareholders, and our investment teams. Eric talked about the quality shareholders outcomes, shareholder outcomes that we've delivered. I think it's worth repeating. You know, over the past 10 years, our shareholders have been rewarded with exceptional outcomes. We've nearly doubled our AUM, we've maintained strong above-average profitability, and we've returned meaningful capital to shareholders.
We've accomplished this with minimal capital utilized, highly profitable outcomes, and the balance sheet has not even been encumbered. I think you'll see later in my presentation that how we've done it is a lower risk profile than, say, for instance, M&A. For us, it's all about patience and time. This chart is really telling. It bears some explaining. So on the left side, you have the annual revenues generated. On the bottom, you have the number of years, and then on the right side, you have the annual revenues at certain milestones and the number of teams that have reached those milestones. I'm sorry, it's a little bit hard to see.
But, you know, on average, it takes a team 4 years to generate $10 million of revenue on an annualized basis. In year 8, teams are generating $50 million. And then, you know, the hockey stick starts to happen. You know, they double from 50 to 100 in 3 years, and then over a longer duration period, teams that have been around for 19 years, approximately 20 years, are generating $200 million. We've had a very high hit rate, and the repeatability, franchise after franchise, team after team, has followed this path. The good news is that we have what, 15 strategies in that foundational phase.
So if you think about the runway over the next 5-10 years and the growth, if our success rate and our hit rate is as successful it is with the longer-established teams, we should be generating a fair amount of growth, if it plays out, which to this day, all of our teams, very high rate, over 80% of our teams, have been on track with these milestones as they progress through their life cycle here at Artisan. This is a slide that you saw in Jason's presentation. I'm gonna use it to sort of help you think about growth. I call it the financial outlook framework. On the left side, you have our developing strategies. Those are the 15 strategies that are under 10 years old that Jason talked about.
Our established strategies are on the right side of the of the slide, and they're in their compounding and durable growth phases. So I'll go into a little bit more detail on these. I think this is an amazing chart. This is a chart of our established strategies and how they have compounded AUM over the last 20 years. So they currently comprise 80% of our revenues, 83% of our AUM. They have superior performance, a sticky client base, and stable fee rates. And I think this is just remarkable. If you think about how we've grown this business with these established strategies, going from $23 billion in 2003 to $119 billion as of June 30th, 2023, overwhelmingly, it's been the compounding effect of investment returns, and it's not been about net flows.
You know, these mature strategies are in their durable foundation. We would expect clients to be taking money after years of investing with us to meet their needs and their desires for the money that they invested with us. So to me, this slide tells us, you know, rather than focus on net flows, we should be focused on the compounding effect and the power of that with our established strategies. Inversely, with our developing strategies that are all under 10 years old, they have very strong performance. They have differentiated investment results that we've talked about, similar to performance in the early years to our established strategies, and we expect these strategies to scale and compound. Having said that, we have invested in our first strategy, the Credit Team, back in 2014, when we brought on Bryan Krug.
Brian and the Developing World and Antero Peak make up the majority of those revenues. The other 12 strategies, there's 15 in total here, are, you know, negligible in, in contribution right now, to the firm's profitability. Having said that, these 15 strategies are currently, you know, annualized revenues of about $200 million a year. Meaningful contribution to the firm's profitability, yet not nowhere near its scale. This slide is, you know, something we thought a lot about when we tried to put together a way for us to think about growth for our developing strategies. You know, on the left side are our established strategies. It's never our objective to be the largest. Our objective is to be the best.
The established strategies, if we take the top 10 strategies in each of the categories in which our 10 strategies operate, and you take the average AUM of those peers, it's about $260 billion. We currently are about $119 billion, so that's a cumulative of those 10 strategies, which is about 46% of the addressable market. Again, that seems like a low percentage, but our objective is not to be the largest. Our objective is to be the best. If you then extrapolate that to our developing strategies and the opportunity there, they currently only comprise $24 billion of the $287 billion of the average top 10 in their respective categories. Similar performance as the established strategies.
As I showed on the prior slide, their trajectory is on track with our former strategies that have grown in their foundational phases. So there's quite a bit of room to grow if you were to extrapolate that $24 billion to 46% versus the 8% that we currently have captured. You know, we're often asked about, you know, are we gonna do M&A? Why don't we acquire somebody? Have we considered it? You know, the answer is absolutely yes, we have. We've looked at many opportunities, but our bar is extremely high. We haven't seen the combination of talent and alignment of cost, culture, risk, that meet our bar for a new investment.
Our talent-driven model really lends itself well to finding passionate investors who are willing to bet on themselves and who want to own their outcome, and we just haven't seen that in any M&A opportunities. The other limiting factor we have is obviously our balance sheet. We generate strong cash flows, as I indicated earlier. We have high profitability, but we reward our shareholders with consistent quarterly dividends, 80% of the cash we generated, so there isn't much dry powder on the balance sheet to do an M&A. Having said that, if we found something that met our bar for criteria, we could get creative, and we could figure out a way to get something done. It would have to be on the lower side.
We'd want it to look more like the acquisition of, of capabilities versus buying assets, because our model where, we marry talent with the capabilities of the firm, we ask them to bet on themselves, start from zero, take risk with us, has really worked well, rather than buying assets, where you're just trying to extend the duration of the cash flows to get yourself repaid. So when we look at these, risk factors, and requirements for M&A, and we look at the, the characteristics of our talent acquisition model versus the M&A, we then think about, okay, what results have we driven? So since 2013, when we went public, we have, we've invested $120 million across, the 15 developing strategies that I talked about earlier.
We define our investments in the strategies as the amount of capital that we have to outlay while those teams and strategies are growing to break even. So to date, we've invested $120 million, and we've had a cumulative contribution profit from those 15 strategies of $370 million, net of our investment of $120 million. $500 million dollar gross profit. A very nice return on that $120 million dollar investment. We then thought about, well, how does that compare to M&A?
We took similar metrics and assumed that we invested $120 million on day one in an asset that at 13.5x PE grew that asset 8% annually, and that would yield a $126 million dollar profit contribution over that same period. So as you can see, our talent acquisition model, return on that investment is, what? Several times larger than if we were to do M&A. Highly attractive return on capital for our shareholder. I'm also often asked about margin expansion. Probably the question I get the most. You know, our margin on average over the years has been 39%. More recently, we've made, you know, a fair amount of investments in these 15 new developing strategies.
We've invested in distribution, that Chris talked about. We've expanded our operational capabilities, and those investments are certainly dragging on our margin. We're not afraid to make investments in future growth, which we have, because we know once we execute on what we have, we know our margins can get back to the high thirties, low forties. We saw that in 2020, or 2021, when, you know, we went from 36% margin in 2019 up to, 44% in 2021. So the answer to the question: Can our margins expand? Yes, our model is built for those margins to expand. We've made significant investments in future growth, and now we're focused on harvesting that growth. Finally, sort of, we believe we've been strong stewards of our shareholders' capital. We have historically-...
paid out in excess of 90%. In some years, we've paid out more than 100%. We add back the cash that the non-cash expenses on the, on the P&L, to our cash generation to figure out the amount of cash available for dividend. We expect to continue to be focused on a high dividend payout, while investing in our future growth. The last couple years, we have held back about $20 million each from the special dividend, to seed new investments, in new strategies, primarily with fixed income strategies. We continue to consider whether we hold back some of the special. We make that decision in January of each year. And it wouldn't surprise me if we held back more. Our seed book right now is quite full.
We've planted the seeds for growth, and now we're, as Chris indicated, we're in the harvesting mode. So finally, you know, in summary, you know, our financial model, you know, really is built to deliver quality outcomes for our shareholders. We have a quality revenue base, durable client relationships, and repeatable outcomes. You know, our growth, as you know, it's, it's lumpy, it's not linear. We're subject to market fluctuations, but it is of high quality. And, we think that the, the dividend yield that shareholders enjoy, are worth waiting- are worth, you know, retaining, and harvesting while we wait for that growth to come, which we know it will come. So thanks for your time today, and, turn it over to Eileen for Q&A.
Good afternoon. I'll move us into the Q&A portion of the afternoon. For those of you in the room, we know this is not a shy crowd, so we expect a very lively and interactive conversation. If you have a question, I encourage you to raise your hand, and we will bring a mic over to you. I know we have an online audience as well, participating via Zoom. For those of you online, please submit your question in the Q&A box of your Zoom screen, and I will proxy. So with that, let's open it up. Any questions from those of you in the room? Please raise your hand. I will also check on our Zoom box. Oh, over there.
Hi, John Dunn at Wolfe ISI. You talked about the horizontal and vertical avenues for growth. Maybe just starting on the geographical piece, I think it's 75% of your assets is U.S., 25 outside of the U.S. That international piece, where do you expect that to go as a contribution over the next maybe five years? Could it be bigger? And what products particularly? Thank you.
Sure. I'll kick us off, and I'll hand it over to Chris Krein to add on. We've certainly grown our global presence in terms of the opportunity set from an investment standpoint, in terms of where we're operating, in terms of the number of offices, our head count, investment talent. For example, during COVID, we opened an office in Hong Kong to support our China Post-Venture Team, and even more so over the last 10 years, as you mentioned, we have incrementally grown our AUM outside of the U.S. Today, it represents about a quarter of our AUM. Over time, we think there's tremendous potential to continue that global expansion of our client base as well as our asset base. As it stands today, we have heavy concentration in Europe, Australia, as well as parts of Asia.
As we've talked about, EMsights, for example, we're off to a great start with momentum behind us. Many of those early anchor clients are actually out of the US. The Middle East, even more so, has been a really fertile ground for us in terms of clients allocating to our strategy today, but also representing a pretty significant portion of our pipeline. So we are excited about our global opportunity set, from an AUM standpoint, and we expect further expansion of our client base. But I'll hand it over to Chris.
No, I think that's, I think that's right. And I think that, you know, I expect to see the, the international portion grow, and it's really going to be driven by, by the, the products that we have in the market. If you look at, you know, our expansion into fixed income, you know, we're seeing, you know, Brian have a lot of opportunities overseas with the European markets and the Middle East markets. If you look at just the opportunity set for emerging markets debt, it's massive on the European continent, and there's just a lot bigger pools to fish in over there. The other thing I would say is, while, you know, we have grown our, our global base, you know, it is relatively nascent in, in terms of the industry.
So, you know, we have assets in there that are, you know, now operating very efficiently. And we have 10 years of building Artisan brand, which was not quite simple. We all take for granted that in the United States, you know, you say the word Artisan, everyone knows exactly what you're talking about. You know, there was a lot of investment that was made in building brand outside of the United States, and that's done. But I would say definitely based on, you know, international growth, and that's really, again-
... just like everything here, driven by, you know, the investment opportunity set and what the buyers are willing to do.
I would just also add on, kind of, some of our distribution partnerships are worth mentioning. Take Australia, for example. We have a distribution partnership there, helping us tap into opportunity sets and pockets of the market that, given our pretty leanly staffed distribution team, we wouldn't have as efficiently covered. So we do have partnerships on a global basis. And to Chris's point earlier about the leverage points, that's something we think really long and hard about. And lastly, I know you were asking about more AUM and our client base and global expansion, but I think if I were to extrapolate that question more broadly, frankly, on the investment side, which we always bring everything back to the investment side, we actually think long and hard about our model, and we're excited about our model, which has been largely U.S.-centric from a talent standpoint.
We think our model actually could be hugely leveraged to, to a global talent opportunity set, and that's something we're excited about from a go-forward standpoint as well. Ken?
Hi, thanks for taking my question. Ken Lee, RBC Capital Markets. In terms of potential team lift outs or acquisitions, it sounds like you've been doing a lot of due diligence across several categories investment strategies. What's sort of, like, been holding back in terms of announcing a completion of an acquisition? Is it just waiting to find the right team, the right fit, or is it just an overall tougher environment to consummate a transaction? Thanks.
Jason, you want to take that one?
Thanks. Thanks for the question. You know, I think it's a twofold answer. The first part is, you know, oftentimes when you're doing an acquisition, it's to, you know, enrich a generation of talent that is no longer incentivized to have skin in the game. And that's obviously hard for us, and we're betting on a second tier of talent that might be equally as impressive, but less known and harder to predict and evaluate. I also think that, you know, the assets that you're buying, you have to make a bet that you... And C.J. mentioned this, you're making a bet that you can actually extend the duration of those assets.
And to us, that's, that's just a hard mechanism for us to determine, and we don't have an army of individuals out there on the sales side. We're, we're an investment-first organization, so it's, it's really hard to sort of map out how we're gonna tackle that unwieldy process of, of, you know, matching assets to our talent. And then, you know, the third piece, which C.J. really highlighted, is, you know, you tend to have to spend, you know, an increasingly high multiple to, to acquire those assets. And so the, the high wire position act that you wind up incorporating is, is extremely, extremely dangerous. And, you know, we're not. We don't need to. We can just be patient. We, you know, I, I'll expand the question out a little bit. You know, there's people, people talk about direct lending and private credit.
It's all the craze and the rage today, and we agree. We think it's a very interesting asset class. We think it's here to stay. We think it's gonna grow. But, you know, do we want to spend 30x EBITDA in order to, you know, grab a $3 billion shop? That seems like a pretty aggressive assumption when we know if we map out, okay, interest rates have gone from 0 to 5%, 5.5%. Maybe they're on their way to 7%, if Jamie Dimon is correct. I'll guarantee you that, you know, some of these private credit shops and some of their funds are gonna have some disruption. And when that disruption occurs, we're gonna be there. We're gonna be waiting.
This just goes back to my, you know, the building's burning or the building's smoking. We'll be waiting with the catcher's mitt or the pillow to grab that individual or that talent or that team and bring them onto, you know, a harbinger of a platform, which is Artisan. So we just need to be patient. I know it seems like that's the right strategy because everybody else is doing it, but the fact that everybody's doing it tells us it's probably not the right strategy, at least not for us.
I'm gonna take one from online, from an anonymous viewer. How do we think about strategies eligible for performance fees in the future? Will performance fees be a larger contributor to revenues 5-10 years from now? I'll kick this off, and then, I'll ask C.J., and potentially Chris Krein to chime in. Overall, as we look at our book of business in AUM today, incentive fees is not a huge component of how we structure our client arrangements. The majority of our assets today are very much still in commingled vehicles, separate accounts. There probably are some exceptions that are more of a performance fee-based structure, but as we think more and more about drawdown vehicles, alternatives, private funds, over time, we do expect kind of that performance fee to incrementally uptick.
I'll hand it over to... C.J. has the mic, so I'll hand it over to C.J.
Yeah, we currently have less than a dozen performance fee accounts. They're primarily in our growth strategies. You saw sort of our current high water mark back in 2021 when growth was running. I think we earned about $16 million in performance fees, so it's less than 3% of our AUM. It's currently quite, you know, a low percentage of our revenues, less than 7%. And so, you know, we're always willing to take performance fee accounts. I'll let Chris talk a little bit more about that. But typically, given the outperformance, you know, clients pass and take the rack rate.
... Yeah, I think that last statement is exactly true. I mean, everyone talks on the long-only side of the business, that they want performance fees. And, you know, we love them. I mean, you look at the long duration performance of our assets, you bring everyone that you can. It sort of shakes itself out in due diligence. And, you know, an allocator will, "I'm not hiring you because I think you're going to underperform. So if you're going to outperform to that degree, why in the world would I want to give away that upside?" So it shakes out in due diligence. Some of our newer strategies in the credit strategy, when we talk about the drawdown strategies, that will warrant performance fees, and that will grow incrementally over time.
But, you know, on the long, on the long side, if we can get them, I'll take them. And all of our... You know, Jason said earlier that, you know, the fire in their eye and, and, you know that, there isn't a single portfolio manager in our suite whose eyes don't light up when I bring them back a performance fee. They're all willing to bet on themselves. The clients sort of become wiser as we get through the diligence process, I would say.
I'll take one more from online, from Kevin Reynolds. The credit team case study side, can you elaborate on the Dislocation Opportunities anticipated in Q4 2023? Is this referring to possible talent acquisition, or is it commentary about the investment environment that the credit team anticipates? Well, we can most certainly confirm that this is capabilities that we have at the firm today, and really an extension of the core competencies of our credit team, led by Bryan Krug. We knew when Bryan joined us in late 2013, he was here to build a durable credit franchise. We know high income was going to be the first strategy, similar to what he had managed at his predecessor firm.
We knew at the time, once we get High Income into a critical size, we will launch his second strategy, which is Credit Opportunities, a long-short credit hedge fund. We knew from there, there were going to be multiple strategies underpinning the credit franchise. Credit Dislocation came about, again, as an additional extension of Bryan and the team's core competency, which is securities, which is kind of issuer selection. From there, we wanted to continue to increase the degrees of investment freedom. We saw that from a market cycle standpoint, there are often dislocations, small and large, that take place episodically. We also saw Bryan and the team's performance when they successfully navigated COVID, and took advantage of significant dislocations in pockets of the market.
We also saw the market landscape as it relates to other dislocation strategies out there, where perhaps a call and a drawdown of capital is not as efficient as what we would have done. So Credit Dislocation came about. We're very excited. We have a couple of anchor clients on the family office space, on the institutional space, and we are very optimistic about our first close. So with that, I'll hand it over to Keegan, who I think has the mic.
Yeah, I think Eileen really had a lot of good talking points there. We saw a really good opportunity to extend the capabilities of Bryan's team. This is something that he wanted to do. We're also seeing from the allocation side, a return to both public and differentiated credit, so that's, that marries nicely. But I think a big thing, and we're, you know, as it's a private fund, so we're unable to really talk about the specifics. We really saw a missing in that COVID environment, where a lot of, a lot of funds came to market and were not able to capture, both, you know, really call capital in a quick manner, right? So a lot of these large funds came, and they called 10%. The dislocation corrected itself in 90 days, and you were sort of moved on.
you know, we thought that hard and said: Hey, we need to build something a little more efficient, so we can put money to work, you know, quickly, and generate returns, you know, in a more efficient manner. So that's what we're excited about, and you know, we'll have more specifics for you down the road.
Other questions from our audience in the room? Sure. Just grabbing for glasses. I don't know, Keegan, if you want to continue on credit drawdown fund. There's another question from a different online audience: Can you size credit drawdown fund?
You know, I think we have some early indications, but right now we're actually not able to talk about it at this time, so.
Great. Some pretty quiet traffic online. Anything else from audience in the room? Ken?
Hey, thanks for taking the question. Just one on the returns on invested capital. I think in one of the slides you mentioned, there was, like, $120 million invested in some of the newer developing teams in the past. Would you expect to see higher returns on invested capital going forward for any kind of incremental teams, given that I think in the past... The operational side. Just wondering how the ROIC could evolve going forward? Thanks.
... Yeah, I'll let C.J. provide specific details, but if you look at our seed book today, you're absolutely right, about $120 million. Most of that is skewed to the newer—the newly launched strategies, particularly in fixed income, where it's seed capital intensive compared to our equity-like strategies. You think about EMsights, for example, where in a very really short period of time, we've launched 3 strategies under that team, under multiple vehicles. Again, getting to the question we talked about earlier, is a very global client base, prospect base for us. So not only did we seed a mutual fund across strategies, we were thinking about that, how to harness and capitalize on that global client base and also seed a different vehicle such as UCITS.
So fixed income, all heavier seed requirements, but thinking about multiple vehicles to capitalize on that global asset base has also incrementally increased the seed investments for some of the newer strategies. C.J.?
Yeah, I would say that, you know, it's really hard to answer that question because it's really dependent upon the team that we acquire, or lift out, or however you wanna talk about it, but every team's different. Our most recent team, EMsights, required more team members, more data, and a new operating system, which certainly required a larger investment in that strategy, initially, than we had seen from other teams. So I can't give you specifics, but it's really dependent upon the team, the strategy, and the asset class.
John?
Thanks. I thought the metric of 2 years getting to $1 billion is an interesting concept and a good result. Any, the smaller developing strategies you think are most likely to be able to follow that path to, say, $1 billion over 2 years?
Artisan, who wants to take that one? I'm going to punt it to Jason. I was going to look at the back of the room to Eric, but Jason will take that one.
Yeah, I think, I think we've got the real possibility with a few of our strategies. You know, I think you heard Eric, and you heard Chris and maybe a little bit of myself talk. You know, we're sort of repeating ourselves a little bit with EMsights, but, you know, we're aligning a lot of the resources on the distribution side, both from a people perspective, from a material perspective, and just the outreach in general. We think that the brand that they've brought over from Eaton Vance really resonates in the marketplace. We've got, I think, multiple arrows with which we can shoot and then hit the bull's-eye with. We have Global Unconstrained, which tends to focus on, you know, an absolute orientation for the high net worth space.
You know, in 2022, they put up positive numbers when there was carnage in the bond market. We think that that has really, you know, caught people's eyes and caught people's attention. You have a local strategy that resonates in the UCITS world with our European clients, and then you have a blended strategy that seems to be latched on with our institutional marketplace. And so I think that they, you know, and you combine that with their exceptional performance, I mean, if you look at the returns that they've been able to generate across the board, whether it's the absolute returns or the relative outcomes, they're exceptional. And so you combine that with their brand and the Artisan framework, we think that there's a, you know, a clear path.
We have some other strategies that I would say will not hit that $1 billion, but we recognize that we're just planting the seeds. We think that this, it'll take a longer time, and it's expected. But I'd say that there's a pretty good mix on the platform that has the opportunity to reach that in a pretty short period of time.
Great. We have a question from Brian Moriarty. I think, Brian, if you're the Brian I'm thinking of, thank you for calling in from Morningstar. Can you think about the tension... Sorry, can you talk about the tension between margin and investment in the firm? Do you ever feel like you can invest and margins will come in too much? Well, I can pretty confidently say the answer to that question, in short, is a no. But I will turn it over to C.J. to elaborate.
Yeah, I mean, the answer is no. We invest where we need to grow and to support our investment teams. We're fortunate to have attractive margins, and we're willing to take them down for future growth, because we know as we harvest the capacity that we have in the firm, you know, margins will grow. So we're happy to invest, and I've never felt any pressure to not make an investment that we need to make.
Frankly, I would point to our margins over the most recent past as an indication of our investments into new capabilities. Eric?
Yeah, I would just add on to C.J.'s point that, our mindset is not around the margin, with regards to business activity. It's around the risk of weakening our operations for the rest of the franchises. So if we continually bring on new teams at a fast rate, and it does bring down margin, that's a fine outcome. We're fine with that. What we're not fine with is to bring in a lot of new teams, and it brings down the operational service and support to our existing teams so that they're distracted and not compounding. That is where we pull back on activity....
So it really is a governor when we look at that operational component that we want to—I think it was Chris's slides earlier, just about the support level and, you know, how we service teams. That's a critical component of growth. The fact of the matter is now that we have enormous breadth across credit and alternatives, we've laid that foundational work for leverage. So some of those distractions are gonna go away because we can now process an enormous amount of securities around the world, you know, especially from a derivative standpoint now, and also from a private standpoint, so—and then add in the credit. That gives enormous leverage in the organization.
I think circling back on just scaling products, you know, $2 billion is a very fast rate. That poses a lot of alarms for: are you taking money too fast? Are you moving your portfolio managers around the world just to gather those assets? And are you distracting, on top of it, if it's a capacity constrained strategy, you just nailed down a bit of inception date risk. So if you have a bump in the road, maybe in year 4, and you brought them all in year 1, and it's $2 billion out of the 4, you got half your book, that would be at risk in a quick order.
So we do think about, you know, revenue diversification and the, the velocity of revenue that comes in, not to disrupt, to Jason's point, the foundation of growth. Because it's about the leverage that comes in the later years, and it's finding patient clients, patient investors that want to compound with us. And these, these questions that are popping up around, you know, how fast can you grow and what does this do to your margin? Those are secondary effects to how good of talent can we bring into the model, and how can we minimize the risk so that, again, we bring that back to a high-value firm.
Great, and I'm conscious of the clock. We're a few minutes past 1:30 P.M. I know many of you made the journey to be here, so I want to be respectful of everyone's time. And we're happy to take those at the conclusion of this event. I do want to end where Eric and Jason have started our day, with reiterating the message of alpha and time. Artisan is in the business of generating and compounding alpha for our clients. It has been our singular focus since our founding in 1994. Everything we do and every decision we make is consciously designed to support alpha generation. Alpha generation is at the core of our historic growth and will continue to be at the core of our growth potential going forward.
We are really excited for our future and our growth trajectory. As Jason said, we are heavily loaded with an inflection point of growth. We're well positioned to deliver quality outcomes for our clients and our shareholders. Lastly, as Eric mentioned, time is the most precious asset, often known as the eighth wonder of the world. So thank you for spending your day with us. We appreciate your continued support, and we look forward to continuing our dialogue with you. So thank you again for being here.