Let's jump right into it, Jon.
Although it's been several years since Grosvenor became a public company, many investors still aren't sure of the, or aware of the GCMG story. So maybe let's start there. You describe yourself as a solutions provider across alternative investments in the private markets. Maybe just tell us a little bit more what that means in practice and how you're different than more traditional GPs?
Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me down here. Not a hard sell to come to Florida in February from Chicago.
Not at all.
So I'll be heading back to a snowstorm, apparently, there on Wednesday. So maybe just start from a bit of an overview to try to give some context to the question. I think the nice thing about the GCM Grosvenor story, the nice thing about the solutions provider category, is that we sit in the middle of an alternative investment ecosystem that has tremendous tailwinds behind it. The word "solutions provider," I'm sure you could ask a few different people and get a few different answers, but the way I like to think about it is sitting at the center and being an important element of making sure that that ecosystem operates effectively.
So when I think about ourselves as we face clients, whether those are institutional clients, individual investors, public pensions, sovereign wealth funds, and you mentioned this in your opening remarks, we have the ability to provide them really any solution across the alts category, and solution can mean it could be a portfolio focused on co-investments, a portfolio focused on secondary investments, direct investments, fund investments, and then our ability to package that solution to the client across private equity, real estate, credit, infrastructure, hedge funds can either be in the form of commingled funds, traditional institutional commingled funds, closed-end funds. It could be evergreen funds. It could be customized separate accounts, which is a huge part of our business and a strong part of our value proposition. It could be registered funds for the individual investor, so a lot of different flexibilities there.
And then as it relates to how we focus to the kind of, as you use the term, traditional GPs or the rest of the ecosystem, we're effectively a partner and a provider of capital. We can invest alongside those managers in specific transactions to buy companies, to buy assets, to buy securities. We can invest in their funds. We can buy secondary interest in their funds. And so it really is sitting at the center of that ecosystem. And I think one of the things that sometimes is a bit misunderstood is that the solutions providers kind of compete with the traditional GPs, to use your term. And it's really not the case at all. It's really a matter of coexistence.
Most investors in the world will have relationships with plenty of GPs that you think of as traditional GPs, and will also have a relationship, or more than one relationship, with a solutions provider that's helping them build out a different part of their alternatives portfolio.
Very interesting. Maybe we just move on to fundraising. I know you just reported earnings yesterday, $7 billion of fundraising last year, and expectations are that's going to grow this year. So across the industry, obviously, it's been a difficult few years in terms of fundraising. But what is the outlook you're hearing from GPs as we start 2025? Some more optimistic, more bullish about the environment?
Yeah. So maybe I'll start at the macro level and then make a few kind of micro comments or comments that I think are idiosyncratic to GCM Grosvenor. At a macro level, frankly, we don't always get it right, but the fundraising trend that we've seen over the past few years has not been remotely surprising to us. We went into 2023 thinking that it would be a more difficult fundraising environment for the market, and it was. We went into 2024 thinking that it would be an improvement upon 2023, and we go into 2025 thinking it'll be an improvement upon 2024. I think that there's a few reasons for that. In general, when you look at some of the alternative asset classes, like a private credit, like an infrastructure, if you look at the individual investors' allocation to alternatives, there's big tailwinds behind those secular tailwinds behind those.
Asset allocations to those assets are growing off a lower base. If you look at some of the more mature parts of the alternative asset arena, like a private equity or like a real estate, where flows have been more muted over the past couple of years, it simply improves through the passage of time. Importantly, no one is sitting there, at least that we're seeing, saying, "I don't want these asset classes anymore," or, "This isn't doing a good job for me." It's more a math problem of, "My asset allocation is X, and I'm at X plus a little bit, and I can't do any more." But time solves that.
A couple of years of slower commitments, some distributions, even though they haven't been huge, reflation of equity markets can solve that mathematical problem real quick to get people kind of back to what I would call a more normal level. I don't think 2025 will be quite 2021 in terms of fundraising, but I do think it'll be better than 2024. When it comes to us specifically, the nice thing about our business is the visibility that we have to our pipeline and the role that we play in our clients' portfolios. It tends to be the case that as a separate account provider or as a kind of a core allocation within an investor's portfolio, you're kind of the last one that gets hurt in more difficult environments. You're playing a pretty crucial role. You're an extension of staff.
You're providing advice and services beyond just the investment return. So you have a pretty nice, stable position, and then when it comes to the transparency into the pipeline, about 75%-80% of our capital flows or our fundraising in any given year are coming from existing clients doing re-ups, existing clients cross-selling or doing another activity with us, and then about 20% or so comes from new client acquisition, so as we sit at January 1st of any given year, we have a pretty good sense of what's going to happen in that year, which gives us the confidence to make statements around what we think will happen from a fundraising perspective.
That's great. Yeah, and that visibility definitely feeds its way into your, obviously, your FRE target as well. So maybe we can go there. You've stated publicly that your goal is to double FRE over the next five years. An ambitious target, but certainly achievable, and you're on track given what you've done in 2024. How are you positioning your business such that you can drive sustainable FRE growth over the long term? And what type of risks, either competitive or environmental, can kind of derail that trajectory in your view?
Yeah, so the most important thing that we can do every single day is maintain the focus on our clients. If our clients are doing well, we'll do well. If we're treating our prospects like their clients, that will also yield good results, and the reality is, all of us in this alternative investment space are fortunate to be in it. It's a very good space with good tailwinds. You have to execute. You can't take anything for granted, but that embedded growth profile provides a lot of ballast and a lot of stability for the business, which gives us the confidence about what the future can hold. It's a combination of that industry as well as our position in that industry, then when you go kind of a layer down, a layer beneath that, there's a lot of really good micro trends.
You still have investors growing allocations in infrastructure, which is a place where we're a clear market leader. You still have investors growing allocations in private credit, which is a place where we have a fantastic solution. Even in the more mature parts of the alternative, like private equity, those are still growing at whatever your capital rate assumption is from a market standpoint. And so those trends on the asset side are good. Then you get to the investor side of things. Not every investor in the world is at allocation. Your kind of worst case is someone that's at allocation, but most people are still building. Individual investors, a tremendous amount of growth there. I don't think a huge amount of that growth is actually baked into our five-year kind of forecast.
And then you've got operating leverage in the business, which we've shown over the past several years in terms of our FRE margin. And so I think we don't know exactly how we'll get there. We don't know exactly. It won't be exactly linear, but we feel like we've got a lot of tools at our disposal that enable us to get there. And we're certainly on track already with what we see happen in 2024, what we see happening in 2025, and so feel good. Look, there's no guarantees. You asked about risks. We could wake up tomorrow to some form of a market crisis that will throw everyone's plans out the window. But I think what we feel pretty good about is barring significant kind of exogenous factors like that, execution will yield us those results. Doesn't mean you don't have to work hard.
Doesn't mean you don't have to execute, but feel like it's very achievable from what we can see.
I look forward to keeping you honest for that.
Okay.
Maybe moving on to your private markets business, which does benefit from those secular tailwinds that you were just talking about. You serve as an intermediary by partnering with thousands of different GPs to help their clients access the private markets. Maybe if you just could spend some time walking us through your process or the Grosvenor process of sourcing managers, getting them comfortable with the platform, and then ultimately allocating capital to them.
Yeah. So it's a great question. And I think the process is applicable whether you're selecting a fund investment, whether you're selecting a co-investment, a secondary investment, a direct investment. There's a lot of commonalities across those processes. And I think you used the right word, which is process. It is process-oriented. It is repeatable. It is scalable. It is not dependent on any single person. And that doesn't mean it doesn't evolve. It does innovate. It does change because, of course, you're always getting better. But it is process-oriented. And the nice thing about our business is it's a no-star system business also. So it's the institution and, of course, the people at the institution, the combination of the people that are at the institution that are delivering that kind of scalable, repeatable, process-oriented solution.
The nice thing is people in our industry are generally good about knowing who has money. So that's not to say we don't have to work at origination because, of course, we do. You have to nurture those relationships, develop those relationships. But generally, we're in a place where we're a first call for folks that are looking for capital. And that's not just because we have money, although that's definitely a big part of it, but we can be a good partner to them. We can invest early in their funds. As a small and emerging manager, we can be there with institutional capital early. We can co-invest. We can buy secondaries. We can co-invest in different forms. We could be part of the deal upfront. We could be part of a syndication later on. We can be a credit provider.
So we're a nice institution to have in their lives that can work in a kind of repeatable, responsible institutional way that can give very clear and quick feedback. And once we're a partner of yours, we can be very sticky with you as well. And so each of the different verticals and each of the different types of investments will have a different exact investment committee process and things along those lines. But it mostly revolves around being a good partner and making sure that we're covering the verticals that we cover kind of holistically on a global basis.
Yeah. And maybe just double-clicking there. I spoke to a few of your competitors in the solution provider space. What differentiates your offering from theirs?
Yeah. It's a good question. And I've been asked that a couple of times today. And at least for better or worse, I give the same answer, which is disappointing to people sometimes. I think there's more similarities than there are differences. I think that our business plan, and I would hope no one's business plan, is dependent on kind of taking market share. I don't think we wouldn't all be able to sit up here and talk about our incredibly high stickiness and incredibly high re-up rates if we were sitting there taking clients from each other. It's a big world out there, and everyone can kind of win.
Now, if you talk about specific types of opportunities that might be available in the market, all things being equal, we definitely all have, I won't even call them strengths and weaknesses, but maybe majors and minors in terms of focus area. I would put our infrastructure capability up against anyone's. We've been doing it a very long time, very successfully. We've gotten to a place where we've evolved our private credit capabilities in a way that I think meets the market needs in terms of funds and co-investments and secondaries, and I'd put that capability up against anyone. We have a fantastic small and emerging manager business in private equity that we're known for. There are certain markets from a geography perspective that we just happen to have more history in or more resources in than others.
For example, we've had a fantastic business in Japan for three decades and have a great office there that's been very productive. So I think you can find those differences, but they're a little bit about as much kind of historical accident or historical focus as they are. It's more that than fundamental differences in how you approach the business or the value you can add. Some of it comes down to your legacy and your history. We grew up always as an investment manager, strong capabilities in custom accounts. Of course, we provide consultant-type services and advice around those separate account relationships, but we didn't grow up as a consulting firm as some of our peers did. So you can find those nuances, but I would say they're formidable competitors. They do a great job.
I think the solutions providers in general provide a hugely value-added role to client portfolios in the marketplace, and the good thing for all of us is that we're in a good market and we can all kind of win without it's not a zero-sum game.
Yeah. It definitely sounds like a rising tide could raise all ships in this case. You just had a final close for the first vintage of your Elevate fund strategy, raising nearly $800 million to back middle-market GPs. Just curious, what tends to be the average commitment size for those GPs? And how does kind of your unique insight into your GPs drive your decisions to see them?
Yeah. So it's a great question. Elevate is a new strategy within our private equity business, but leverages our decades of private equity experience. And what we're doing in that strategy is we are seeding new private equity firms and in return, obviously, receiving the return on the investments that that firm will make in their fund, but we're also getting some structural alpha or excess return from taking a piece of the revenues of those firms as a seeder, as a provider of the first capital. That is a new packaging of a capability, but it obviously leverages the decades of experience of backing new firms. Importantly, these aren't new investors. So these are people that are experienced investors with track record. They may likely exist at another firm, and they just want to start out and build their own business.
We know that ecosystem from trafficking in the market generally of all the funds. People know that we're a backer of first-time fund managers or at least first-time doing it on their own. They come to us. We go to them to kind of create the opportunity. It's leveraging our network to do the proper due diligence around those opportunities. Sometimes they have a track record they can share. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they have a track record that they can share that you want to verify. Having all of the connectivity and the network in the marketplace, I think the referencing that we can do is about as valuable an aspect of the diligence as anything.
And I personally think that if you structure those deals properly and back the right firms, you should be able to create institutional quality private equity returns plus from that revenue share or participation in the management company opportunity. So it's a strategy that we're excited about developing over time.
Excellent. Thank you. Maybe I just want to shift gears maybe into your private retail endeavors. Your firm has obviously had a strong track record with institutional clients, but obviously trying to grow your presence in the retail space like everyone else.
Yeah.
We've seen retail fundraising for you pick up in recent quarters, but what steps are you kind of taking in terms of distribution or product innovation to kind of expand your presence in the channel? I know you just recently launched the CION Grosvenor Infrastructure Fund, and you already just spoke to how you think your infrastructure capabilities are best in class.
That's correct.
Maybe not just what are your expectations for that product specifically and then maybe for your retail fundraising going forward?
So I think you hit the right two points in your question, which is the fundamental aspects of the strategy have to be about product design and distribution capabilities.
Right.
There's no question that the market opportunities are there. The tailwinds are there. And no one is unique in that thought. What I do think matters is kind of your mindset or your approach to the market. And our view is that why does this opportunity exist? This opportunity exists because alternatives have found their way onto the efficient frontier, have found their way into adding value to institutional portfolios for decades, and there's no reason why individuals shouldn't be able to afford themselves with that same opportunity. And over time, I think that the way an individual's portfolio looks in terms of its alternatives and investments will look similar to an institution's. I don't think that you go into the retail or the individual investor market because you think that you're going to be able to persistently capture higher fees.
I don't think you go into that market because you think that the portfolios will fundamentally look different and they're going to have all their portfolio with one or two managers. I think that the long-term view that we have on that market is if we all do it right collectively as a group of alternative asset managers, we should be delivering the same types of solutions and the same types of answers that institutional investors have determined work for them over decades of experience and plenty of mistakes along the way. There are obviously certain regulatory requirements that do require product innovation. So when you look at our business today, about $4 billion or so of our AUM comes from the individual investor. It's been about $3 billion of capital raising over the past few years. Most of that has been through the wirehouse channel.
And most of that has been from taking some of the exact same capabilities we offered institutions and offering it to individual investors. No one talks about it, but we've had a huge amount of success in separate accounts in the individual investor channel for high-net-worth individuals or for our advisors that can then create a portfolio that they could offer to multiple of their investors. We've had success with hedge fund-registered products. We've had success with institutional closed-end products. The next stage of evolution for us and, of course, for the marketplace is to design product that can meet different accreditation standards, which is what you're seeing with the Infrastructure Interval Fund, which is a ticker-enabled fund where you can invest daily. You can redeem quarterly. You can buy it through a ticker, so you don't need wet signatures on sub docs, 20 pages long.
And it's just obviously taking a lot of the operational inefficiency out of it. And we're really excited about that entering in a big way through that marketplace because of what we think is a unique capability we have in infrastructure. And there'll be more product. We already have, as I said, separate accounts. We have registered product in the hedge fund space. We now have registered product in the infrastructure space, and we'll have more registered product in other asset classes over time. The other part of it is distribution. We've had resources at the firm that have been successful in distributing to the wirehouses, which is how we have that $4 billion of AUM. And we've decided, as you noted in your question, to partner with a firm called CION on our Infrastructure Interval Fund.
I think that we will also. I know that we will also continue to invest in further internal distribution resources. The marginal dollar of investment right now at the firm is probably on balance going into distribution. And within distribution, it's going to the individual investor. I don't think that multiple vectors of distribution capabilities are problematic. I think you can pursue lots of strategies. There's other firms in our space, which I'm sure you cover and can think of, that have had very successful partnerships around distribution in the individual investor channel. Some of the firms have partnered with more than one of them and have raised billions of dollars of capital. CION has partnered with other firms in the channel that have had success. And I think you can do both.
I think that you can look to leverage your distribution through partnerships while you're building your own distribution and that kind of multi-pronged approach of continuing to roll out product, some capability that already exists, some that's new product, and then thinking about different channels of distribution and different types of partnerships as well as resources and distribution will continue to be the plan, and over time, we were talking to an investor earlier that was talking about 10 years type of things. I said 10 years is a little bit far from my eye to see, but the idea that significantly higher percentages of your capital coming from the individual investor over that type of timeframe, I think, would be a surprise if that wasn't the case.
Great to hear. Maybe we just shift over to your hedge fund solutions business, the other side of Grosvenor, or the ARS business, as you call it. It's facing broader industry headwinds and allocations, and you've seen management fees stagnate there in recent years. It still makes up about a third of your fee-paying assets. And you said going forward, you would expect the flows to remain neutral. So what is the trajectory of that business going forward? And does it simply provide a meaningful cross-selling opportunity with private markets? I'm just trying to understand what's the opportunity?
Sure, so the first thing I would say to that is the business has been around generating value for clients, generating value for equity holders or for the business for 50-plus years. About every six months, you could probably find an article somewhere calling for the death of hedge funds or the death of-it used to be fund of funds, and 50-plus years later, it's still providing value to clients. I don't think that you can ever think of it as just a cross-sell opportunity, even though it is. What you have to be doing is adding value to clients' portfolios, first and foremost, and when you look over long periods of time and what clients are trying to achieve with their hedge fund allocation, we've done that.
We've done in excess of what is the expectation over the past couple of years in terms of returns, both on an absolute basis, on a relative basis, in terms of alpha production. And so that's the most important thing. Are you adding value to client portfolios? And certainly, there's been periods of time where being long-levered something feels really, really good, and it's hard to compete with something that's lower vol and hedged. It's hard to compete with those long-levered outcomes. And that was what we were in or may still be in, that type of environment.
I do think that as people see and experience higher interest rates, as people experience inflation, as people experience volatility, as people experience concentration in market outcomes from a certain number of stocks, as people feel geopolitical risk or things like that, the idea of a hedged approach, the idea of a dampened volatility approach, and the idea of doing that through something that's not quite as illiquid as private markets is something where market sentiment improves around that. We're not ready to call for a wholesale shift in the environment, but I would tell you on balance, it certainly feels better now than it would have a couple of years ago. And again, most importantly, we feel good about the value we're adding for clients. It is true that the relationships we have with our clients in the hedge fund space are very, very deep. They're very, very long-standing.
They're very, very trusted, and so the ability to evolve with those clients over time into doing other things with them has been a great source of growth for us. About 30% of our clients in the absolute return strategy space also work with us in a private markets vertical, and that number was zero 10 years ago.
That's great. Kind of one of the things that's interesting to me as I started to peel back the Grosvenor story is the positive mix shift that we're seeing across your business, the growth in the private markets and the more direct-oriented secondary strategy specifically. I was hoping you'd give me some color on what is driving that shift in your business and what is the type of benefits or impact maybe on your fees, your fee rate, and maybe incremental margin from that as well.
So the main driver of anything that happens in our business for the most part, obviously, we can make sure that we're positioning ourselves properly and we're executing properly. But at the end of the day, it's about investor evolution and investor appetite. And so when you think about the business, and Stacie Selinger, our head of IR, refers to it as the double mix shift, when you think about the double mix shift going on, it's obviously, one, the appetite for private markets has just been robust. And so we've seen that grow at a faster rate than the absolute return strategies, which is causing it to increase as a percentage of our AUM, our fee-paying AUM, and our management fees. And then the other thing that's happening is within private markets, you're seeing a greater percentage of client allocations going to co-invest strategies and secondary strategies.
We're a net beneficiary of that because most solutions providers, and certainly us as a solutions provider, have strong capabilities in those areas. Those are higher fee, higher value-add allocations, which is why you've seen in a period of time when a lot of people talk about fee compression or other things, we haven't seen that. We've seen a tremendous amount of stability, even a little bit of growth in fee rate. I think it's because of that shift. What's interesting is that kind of evolution that you see happens even faster in the asset classes that are newer.
So for private equity, which has been around for five decades, it took people 40 of those years to figure out, "Hey, let's do some more in secondaries and let's do the more in co-investment." You look at infrastructure or private credit that are relatively new, out of the gate, investors were starting with allocations to the co-investment strategies and the secondary strategies. And so we're a huge beneficiary of that to be in a place where we don't have to wait for that market to mature so much to see that shift happen in our business. And so if you look at something like infrastructure for us, a $15 billion business, actually a greater percentage of the assets in our infrastructure business are for co-invest secondary and direct strategies as compared to funds. And it would be the opposite in private equity.
And so some of that is just us seeing where the puck is going, seeing that eventually over time, the asset classes will evolve to get to similar end states. And so let's make sure that we're positioning our business on the front end to be able to capture that opportunity set. And it's worked out pretty well.
Excellent. Maybe just shifting over to the expenses and margin. You've had a lot of success, and you talked about that earlier, in driving operating leverage in your business. We've seen your FRE margins expand from 31% just four years ago to, I think, 42% in the last 12 months. Where does that leverage come from, and how sustainable is it? And how should we think about the potential margin trajectory as you progress towards your 2028 goal of doubling FRE?
So the first thing I would say, and we actually talked about this in one of our meetings this morning, there's no free lunch. So for us to retain our clients, for us to grow our business, for us to evolve and innovate over time, we have to make sure that we are investing in our most important, frankly, our only asset, which is our people. And that means that you're investing in the people that are with you today, and you're investing in new people in the form of new investments you're making to achieve growth over time. And so when you look at our overall awards system or overall compensation model, there are three general ways that you can compensate people.
It's through fee-related earnings, salary and bonus associated with fee-related earnings, through carried interest, both on an awarded basis, but also through discretionary comp as incentive fees come in, so incentive fee-oriented, and then there's stock. When you look at the three of those things together, those three tools of awards are up about 15% over the past couple of years. And I think it's important to point that out, not to get everyone so excited about how much we're spending, but it's important to point out that we've been able to generate operating leverage in the business while investing in the business. And that's really, really critical because we always need to be investing in the business. If we don't invest and innovate, someone else will do it and beat us. And so that's been kind of critically important.
I think one of the reasons you've been able to see it is we invested a lot in the business prior to being a public company four years ago. So we saw that operating leverage in the business and knew it was coming over the coming years. If I look over the next couple of years, for sure, or I look over the next three, four years as I think about that doubling of FRE, there's still operating leverage in the business. At some point, that won't be part of the story anymore, I suppose. It's just not yet. I actually think that there are. It's a good business. It's a good business that enables you to have growth and have operating leverage while investing in your people, and we're pretty focused on that.
I actually think over time, as you see even more of the incentive earnings power come into play, you might even change your story a little bit on what kind of FRE operating leverage you have. But for now, we feel pretty good that that can stay part of the story of doubling FRE over the next four years, including last year, five years.
Great to hear. I did want to see if there's any questions in the audience. If you do, just raise your hand, and we have a runner.
I hope I don't have to answer this one. How do you see B of A investments in consumer banking changing with continued high interest rates? Must have been a person before me.
That probably is. Any questions in the room? Nope, then I'll continue. I know when Pam was here last year, she did talk a lot about the positive culture at Grosvenor and how that embeds itself in your day-to-day operations. What makes your culture unique? And I know you talked a little bit about how you align your compensation strategy to help drive that positive culture.
Yeah. It's actually interesting. So I've been at GCM Grosvenor for 14 years. I've spent my whole career in alts, and I was with another alt firm that went public before where I was in the role of strategy and IR. And so I've had this question asked of me a lot, which is, "Now that you're a public company, don't you just have to focus on growth only and all this? Or don't you just have to, aren't you focused on the short term?" Or you get all the questions along those lines. And what made me think of that is when you think about the culture, whether you're a private company or a public company, if you're in the alternative space, the thing that matters is your people. And what people want is they want career opportunity, they want evolution in their role, and they want economic opportunity.
People come to this industry, I'm sure, for the intellectual challenge of it and the excitement of working with other smart and motivated people, but they absolutely come for the economic opportunity as well. The only way to keep people motivated, therefore, is to grow, is to innovate. And that's the only thing that will afford them the role opportunity and the economic opportunity. And in order to grow and innovate in your business, you need to have motivated people. And I think motivated people comes down to them enjoying the environment that they work in, teamwork, collaboration, lack of bureaucracy. I think it comes down to people feeling like, as a firm, you're doing the right thing. We start every kind of new client or new employee orientation meeting with kind of the same message, which is, "If you're going to work here, remember one thing.
If it's good for the client, it'll be good for us." Always in that order, always in that order. So the idea of feeling like you're adding value to your clients, the idea that you're feeling intellectually stimulated every day, and the idea that you're a part of a team, and the idea that if you have success, you'll be economically rewarded for it is kind of the simple formula. It's not so simple to execute every day. It gets harder as you get bigger. But it's definitely, I think, the most important job we have as a senior management team is to be focused on that.
That's great to hear. And then maybe just wrapping up on capital return, what is the firm's current capital return framework, and how has that evolved as the firm has grown, and maybe how you're thinking about balancing those investments that you talked about into the firm with returning capital to shareholders?
Yeah. So I think the first thing I'd say is, which we were talking about a little bit ago when we were talking about margin, is the good thing about the business model is you can kind of do all of it. You can invest in the business and generate attractive returns on capital for investors. So for us, it's been obviously a dividend that, thankfully, over the past few weeks, has become a lower yield. I think the stocks performed a little bit. And it's been buyback programs that have been relatively active. There hasn't been much, if any. I don't know if it's 1% or something like that type of dilution since we went public four years ago. So we were an active participant in buying stock.
But the first thing is always to make sure that we're not limiting ourselves in terms of in any way by not making good investments in the business. So we feel like that's always what we're doing first. Mostly, that's just through people. At some point in time, we get asked this a lot. Is there some sort of more significant use of capital? Maybe something inorganic or some other large investment. For us, that frame is really, really simple, and it's a high bar. It's got to be the right thing strategically. We've got to be able to wake up the next day and say, "All of our clients and our people and everyone's better off for having done it." It's got to be the right thing culturally, and it's got to be the right thing financially.
It's hard to do that in any business, and it's particularly hard to do that in people business where there's just a little bit of ego involved in the industry. So it's going to remain a high bar for us, but we'll keep looking for those uses of capital. In the absence of that, we'll make sure that the experience of our shareholders through dividend as well as managing dilution remains a priority in terms of use of capital. We do get the question, if it's on your mind from time to time, "Well, how do you balance that with liquidity?" Because there's not a huge amount of liquidity in the stock. Our view has been to just remain patient on that front. If we execute on our business plan, grow the value of the business, grow the value of the equity, that helps with dollar volume.
We've seen that actually start to move a little bit over the recent periods of time, and at some point in time, there will be some other impetus that will enable us to have more liquidity in the stock, but that can never be the reason or the driver for doing something. It has to be a business reason first, with that being a positive side effect.
Excellent. That is all my questions. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you, Jon.
Thank you.