Practicing Stewardship Real, Small & Away.
Covepilot, Fredericksburg, Texas
Necessity is the mother of invention. Over the past decade, a question kept recurring: “What are you investing in and how can I get in on it?” A “fund” was created as the formal response. It’s an open, blind pool, alternatives portfolio for family and friends who want to invest in real assets, inside a small investment vehicle, away from the ups and downs of the mainstream stock market. Protecting downside risk is the pillar, cashflow is the benefit. But all of this needed a name, an identity that spoke to the investors’ heartbeat and mindset.
Every Pivotol project starts with curiosity-driven discovery. The interviews with potential clients produced profoundly simple insights. People wanted something “other” for their portfolios, but even sophisticated investors didn’t know how to discover or engage this vague and seemingly risky notion of ‘alternatives.’ The name “Covepilot” summons up the image of a specialized vehicle for landing in hard-to reach places. The first fund became the “Stillwater Portfolio,” aimed at finding those lower-risk, steady cash flowing investments characterized by their beautiful calmness. But this was the head, what about the heart?
The brand story process uncovered a deeper value-set uniting investors of all levels. Each of them had a language around the concept of “Stewardship” and ambiguity around what it meant to PRACTICE stewardship with their resources. What makes someone a steward vs. a mere manager? For Covepilot, the Practice of Stewardship became the battlecry, an invitation to put Stewards in charge of managers and to let governing principles be the model more than some mono-focused investment strategy. Practically, this meant the fund would consider all opportunities that satisfied these qualifications:
“Real” hard assets
“Small” and agile fund size looking for other “Small” and agile fund managers
Downside protection and cash flow “Away” from the stock market
Imaginative Imagery
Because Covepilot promotes a “Vision” instead of a single “Strategy,” we needed a way to speak to people intuitively as much as practically. We blended evocative imagery that tells the story with intimate, down-home “real” photos of the offices and main players. Reinforce the metaphor, show investors who the people are—it’s that simple.
MAKING IT TANGIBLE
This is powerful in the investing space. Fund managers typically want to make their pitches heady, esoteric and brilliant, and the result is often confusing. So we wanted to give people tactile and experiential ways to engage the “heady” stuff in a more human and interactive way. Annual reports are bound and mailed, not sent as PDFs, as we want people to take time to truly engage the content in a tangible manner. Every interaction needs to be meaningful.
Website=Credibility
Because the fund is so unique, and because it was so new, the website needed to creatively accomplish two things:
First, it needed to act as a simple referral tool, without having any perceivable “marketing” benefit for SEC regulations. It should offer a way to tell the story and introduce the concept without being loud and self-aggrandizing.
Second, it needed to add validity to calls made to underlying fund managers. They needed to know this was a real fund, not just a group of tire kickers.
