The way Jane White describes her start in the money management industry over four decades ago, her name might just as well have been "girl."
Or "little girl."
Today, she's known as president and chief executive officer — of Granahan Investment Management, a Waltham, Mass.-based small-cap growth equity boutique with $3.3 billion in assets under management.
Asked how she managed to get from A to B, Ms. White, in an interview, cited a love for the job of equity analyst, hard work, good stock-picking skills and an unwillingness to take "no" for an answer.
When she landed her first money management job in Boston in 1980 as a "research assistant or a secretary, whatever you want to call it … I could not believe that people got paid to do research and to be analysts," Ms. White recalled.
"I was like, this is the job for me. I am really good at research. I love technology and this is just nirvana," she said.
But heaven would have to wait — for a little while, anyway.
"I told them … that I wanted to be an analyst and they told me, well, you can't do that! You're a girl," said Ms. White, adding that the message wasn't a subtle one. At the time, "it was just taken for granted."
She decided to leave in search of a firm that would allow her to be an analyst and found one in 1983 at a young Boston-based money manager, Granahan-Everitt Investments Inc., as well as a mentor in the boutique's president, Jack Granahan.
"He said if you want to be an analyst, if you put the work in, I will do everything in my power to help you, and well, he did," Ms. White said. She began at Granahan-Everitt as an administrative assistant but was promoted to analyst by the time the firm was sold two years later to another Boston-based manager.
Ms. White said her hard work at Granahan-Everitt impressed Mr. Granahan enough that he asked her to join him in 1985 as co-founder of Granahan Investment Management, with the starting title of vice president.
"Jack and I worked really well together. He liked teaching," she recalled.
Mr. Granahan owned 90% of the firm at the start and Ms. White owned 10% but "as time went on, I owned more." She became president and CEO of the firm in 2011 and Mr. Granahan, who became chairman at that time, retired in 2017.
Ms. White said she currently owns 20% of the firm but is trimming her position as "we're trying to get stock into the hands of the next generation."
Over her more than a decade at the helm, Ms. White said she's worked to diversify Granahan's business, beginning with its client base.
When she became CEO in 2011, a single client, Vanguard Group Inc., was absorbing all of the small-cap and midcap firm's more than $3 billion in capacity.
"We started to diversify away from Vanguard, giving them back $2 billion" over 18 months beginning in 2011 and bringing in about $1 billion from other clients, she said.
Then in 2017, Vanguard decided to take back its remaining $2 billion that Granahan was subadvising and the money manager's assets under management tumbled to $1.4 billion that year.
On the back of Granahan's strong long-term performance numbers, its AUM rebounded strongly to just under $5 billion at the end of 2021, before the growth equity sell-off of 2022 left the firm with $3.3 billion at year end.
Ms. White said her team has also worked to diversify the firm's product offerings, expanding its lineup to 10 strategies from three when she became CEO, including four UCITs funds, which in turn diversified Granahan's business geographically, with roughly 50% of its AUM now managed for European investors.
"So, we're diversified by product now, by geography, by type of client" — with subadvisory business, separate institutional accounts, Europe-focused UCITs funds — creating a "very strong platform for growth," Ms. White said.
And "we've got this flagship product" — Granahan's $920 million small-cap core growth strategy — "that we've been managing for 30 years, owning the process and continuing to perfect what we do," she said, adding "its record stands for itself."
For the year just ended, however, Granahan's biggest strategies failed to beat their benchmarks, even though they continued to add significant value over longer time periods. For the 12 months through March 31, the firm's small-cap-focused growth strategy, with just under half of the firm's AUM, suffered an 11.6% decline, trailing its Russell 2000 Growth benchmark's 10.6% drop. But for the three- and five-year periods through March 31, Granahan continued to handily best the benchmark by an annualized 3.9 points and 12.3 points, respectively.
In 2022, health-care stocks, typically one of the most defensive sectors, were down more than the Russell 2000 growth equity index for the first time in history, bottoming roughly a year ago down 44%, Ms. White noted. They've since recovered, along with a number of clean energy names, but "not enough to pull us out of the doldrums," she said.
The biggest bright spot of a very difficult year in 2022 was that Granahan was able to retain its clients, with some of the bigger ones giving the firm more money to manage as asset prices dropped sharply, she said.
On March 30, for example, the $21 billion Los Angeles City Employees' Retirement System renewed its contract with Granahan, which was running a $124 million active U.S. small-cap growth equity portfolio for the pension fund, even though it has underperformed its benchmark since the September 2020 start of the mandate. A three-year track record is an insufficient period of time to assess performance, noted LACERS' CIO Rod June.
When your clients "respect what you're doing and they understand what you're doing and they double down on what you're doing … I'm pretty proud of that," Ms. White said.
