Wealth Manager Profile: Charles MacKinnon

Thurleigh's Charles MacKinnon is a wealth manager who eats his own cooking and expects other fund managers to do the same. In the above video he casts his verdict - reluctantly - on the investment banks that are losing private clients to firms like Thurleigh.

It’s a good job that Charles MacKinnon and Thurleigh Investment Managers LLP have made it to the cover of this magazine, because Hello! was never going to be an option.

But ‘Charles MacKinnon invites you to take a tour of his company’s beautiful and stylish offices’ is not a cover line you are likely to see in any magazine soon. Thurleigh resides in a rather tatty serviced office block in the civil service-dominated Bermuda triangle of elegance circumscribed by Victoria, Pimlico and St. James’s Park tube stations.

Indeed, most of the furniture at Thurleigh HQ was left behind by the denizens of the Solicitor General’s office when they decamped to somewhere far more elegant at the taxpayer’s expense. The tables and chairs are borrowed, the carpet salvaged from the landing of Nana MacKinnon’s house. The glasses, however, are totally new – from IKEA.

‘It’s all deliberate’, says MacKinnon, who enjoyed far plusher surroundings at Goldman Sachs for 15 years before setting up Thurleigh in 2003 with David Rosier, a veteran of Mercury Asset Management. In MacKinnon’s case, the new venture followed an extended period of literal gardening leave during which he took a diploma in garden design.

‘Yes, it’s cheap as chips and yes I long for more glamorous offices,’ he says. ‘But it wouldn’t improve business if we did.

‘People aren’t stupid; they see acres of empty space, a flunkey at the door, pretty girls serving the coffee and they know someone has paid for that.’

According to MacKinnon, if Thurleigh was an airline, it would be EasyJet – a bizarre concept for a firm that has a client threshold of £2 million in assets and the airborne carriage of preference for many of those served might be the private jet or first class.

MacKinnon said: ‘We had no clients when we set up, but we did have a model in the EasyJet concept. We saw a real appetite for people to get from A to B in a new plane at a time convenient for them. They wanted to do it the most economical way possible and didn’t mind where they sat in the plane.’

Without the aid of sales people, relationship managers or even a marketing function, Thurleigh now looks after £160 million of assets for 38 families.