Among impact financial advisors, assets go and assets come. Utah investor Jim Sorenson has been on both sides of such ebbs and flows.
About a decade ago, unhappy with the impact investing vehicles available at his major wirehouse wealth manager, Sorenson transferred management of his considerable assets to anchor Sepio Capital, a new financial advisory firm formed by veterans of Merrill Lynch’s wealth management arm.
Within three years, the new firm had helped Sorenson Impact Foundation rotate 100% of its assets to align its endowment with positive impact and the Sustainable Development Goals.
That achievement, in turn, encouraged the umbrella Sorenson Impact Group to establish its own advisory firm to manage not only the foundation’s assets, but outside capital as well. Lauren Sercu left Sepio and co-founded Sorenson Impact Advisory in 2023.
Now, it’s Sorenson Impact Advisory that is on the incoming side of assets and talent that are transferring from another wealth manager.
This month, the firm is absorbing a half-dozen advisors and other professionals, along with many of their clients, from Align Impact, the early impact advisory that ran out of money and shuttered its operations at the end of April, as ImpactAlpha was the first to report. The reshuffle of high net worth clients and other asset owners is expected to roughly double the Sorenson advisory’s assets under management from about $255 million at the end of last year (disclosure: Sorenson Impact Foundation is an investor in ImpactAlpha).
“We wanted to really see the clients taken care of, and we really wanted to set up a platform for growth,” Sorenson told ImpactAlpha on the sidelines of this month’s Mission Investors Exchange conference. He said the foundation’s portfolio had, over time, met its benchmarks and delivered market-rate returns.
“And we want to show that this can be done and really survive and thrive in the marketplace and create a recognition of the need for pure impact advisory services.”
Culture of operators
Denver-based Align Impact, one of the earliest purpose-built impact advisory firms, shut its doors at the end of last month. The firm had raised $1.5 million in financing at the end of 2024, but was nearly out of money by the middle of last year and was unable to raise additional capital
CEO Matthew Weatherley-White said the firm had been unable to find a buyer. About 50 clients scrambled to find new advisors. Some of them will follow Align’s team to Sorenson Impact Advisory. Weatherley-White, a cofounder of Caprock Group, joined Align in 2023 and became CEO last year when Align’s founder, Jennifer Kenning, stepped down.
“There’s slender overlap in the Venn diagram of ‘good operators’ and ‘cares deeply about impact.’ That’s Sorenson. A culture of impact and a culture of operators,” Weatherley-White told ImpactAlpha. “Jim is 100% – he’s committed. This is the firm that I belong at.”
Also joining Sorenson Impact Advisory is Jack Meyercord, who founded the advisory Conscious Endeavors, which was itself acquired by Align Impact last year. Align partners Kristin Viola and Courtney Joyner-Gage will also move to Sorenson, along with director of operations Annemarie Happee and Alex Cote, an investment principal.
The combined team’s mandate is to prove that a 100% mission-aligned institutional portfolio can outperform traditional benchmarks.
“Over the long term, our belief is that there’s a premium around prioritizing non-financial factors that are material, that are sustainability oriented. We think there will be a premium for that, and that’s been our experience so far,” Sercu said in an interview. In the future, what could be a challenging environment for stocks and bonds may make the kind of private-markets assets that Sorenson specializes in even more attractive.
“We’re looking for non-correlated strategies that are delivering high impact and strong risk-adjusted returns, regardless of how the two most important traditional asset classes are doing,” she said.
Replacing a financial advisor
The failure of Align Impact notwithstanding, pure-play impact advisory firms may be well-positioned to pick up clients as more foundations and family offices seek to direct their capital to impact investments. The process of choosing a new advisor – and firing the old one – was such a sensitive topic at the Mission Investors Exchange gathering that a session on the topic was closed to the media.
Jim Sorenson’s own experience points to the limitations of large wealth-management platforms that, because of their broader mandates, may not have the expertise or offerings to satisfy the demands of impact investors.
After he formed the Sorenson Impact Foundation, Sorenson said he realized that only 5% of its assets – the legal minimum – were being deployed for the purposes of the foundation. “The other 95% was all over the place. And so I went to the bank where our wealth managers were. The wealth managers were constrained to offer what was on the platform of the bank.”
When he asked for vehicles for deeper impact, “I got blank looks, kind of head scratching,” he remembers. “There wasn’t anything on there that met my needs in terms of impact.”
Between 2017 and 2020, the Sepio team rotated all of the foundation’s assets to align with one or more of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Jim Sorenson said other families and foundations started asking how they could do the same. “I’m also thinking that it would be great to have an advisory that is 100% dedicated to impact investing,” he recalls.
Sercu, who previously worked at Cambridge Associates, which manages the endowments of many foundations, joined up to co-found Sorenson Impact Advisory.
Sorenson’s family assets remain at Sepio and are not exclusively allocated to impact investments, he said. “They’re not 100%, but they’re moving in the direction of that,” he said. In terms of performance, the portfolio of the foundation and his personal portfolio are “neck in neck,” he added.
Sorenson said he has subsidized the operations of Sorenson Impact Advisory as it grows its AUM and thus its fee revenues. The new infusion of assets under management will bring it closer to break-even, possibly this year, he said.
Within three to five years, he said, “I think we are definitely going to cross the billion-dollar threshold in AUM. I think it could be more than that.”
