A small firm, built to outlast its founders.

Sixteen years, one partnership, one mandate.

We opened the firm in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis with $82 million in assets from families who had followed our founding partners from their prior institutions. We have added roughly two to four client families a year since then. We have never acquired another firm, never merged, never sold equity to a private-equity sponsor, and have no plans to do any of those things.

That is a deliberate choice. Most advisory firms that grow fast do so by changing what they are — adding product lines, hiring aggressively, taking on junior clients to feed a larger overhead. We decided early that we would rather stay small and do a narrow thing well than grow into something our founding clients would not recognize.

Our structure

Independent. Fee-only. Fiduciary.

Sterling Lane is a Delaware LLC, wholly owned by its four active partners. We are a Registered Investment Adviser with the SEC (CRD #159228) and held to a fiduciary standard on every recommendation we make.

We do not sell insurance, earn commissions on trades, receive revenue shares from fund companies, or participate in any referral arrangement that creates a financial incentive to recommend one investment over another. Our only source of revenue is the advisory fee our clients pay us directly.

Our clients

Families, foundations, and founders.

Our clients are a mix of three groups: first- and second-generation wealth from private business sales, multi-generational family capital that has been with us since the firm’s founding, and a small group of private foundations and endowments (under $50M AUM each) for whom we serve as outsourced investment office.

What these clients share is a long time horizon, a preference for concentrated portfolios of high-quality businesses, and a tolerance for the occasional year when our approach will underperform the broad market. We are explicit about that trade-off in writing before the relationship begins.