The firm
A firm built around one question: what is this really worth?
Gryffon Advisors has been, in turn, a consultant to brokers, a licensed portfolio manager, a management and social-impact consultancy, and a holding company. The form has changed. The habit of mind has not.
The company was incorporated in January 1998. Its first clients were institutional stockbroking firms, and its first business was telling them how to build a research and dealing operation that institutions would take seriously. That is an unglamorous place to start, but it is a good one: you learn early what separates a real investment case from a well-told story.
The natural next step was to manage money rather than advise on how it should be managed. The firm was renamed Gryffon Investment Advisors, took a portfolio management licence from the Securities and Exchange Board of India, and set out as an institutional portfolio manager. Its clients were not retail investors. They were banks, other portfolio management companies, and a hedge fund in the United States — professionals who could tell the difference between a good year and a good process.
“In March 2008 we decided it was going to be very difficult to handle the fall that was coming. In April we returned all the money.”
Anand P Tandon, Managing Partner
That decision is the one the firm is still measured by. It is easy to say afterwards that the crisis was obvious; very few managers acted on it, and fewer still acted against their own fee income. Gryffon returned client capital in full, wound the mandate down in an orderly way, and subsequently surrendered the portfolio management licence rather than keep a permission it no longer intended to use.
What followed was a quieter and broader decade. The firm carried on as a consultancy, and the work widened well beyond markets: corporate social responsibility strategy for companies that had just been handed a statutory obligation and little idea how to discharge it; content development for education programmes; and independent evaluation of whether funded projects were actually achieving anything — the evidence a board needs before it signs off another year of spending. Alongside that came consulting in urban development and urban management for public-sector clients, including work in Telangana.
Because the company had once been a portfolio manager, it also carried capital on its own balance sheet. That capital is now working. Gryffon has become the vehicle through which the partners hold interests in unlisted businesses and back the ventures they help build — a holding company with an advisory practice attached, rather than the other way round.
In December 2017 the private limited company was converted to a limited liability partnership, Gryffon Advisors LLP, and the firm moved to Hyderabad, where it is based today.
Milestones
The record
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1998
Incorporation
The company is incorporated in Mumbai as a business and management consultancy. Its earliest clients are institutional stockbroking firms.
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2001–02
Portfolio management
Renamed Gryffon Investment Advisors Private Limited and licensed by SEBI as a portfolio manager. Mandates come from banks, other portfolio management companies and an overseas hedge fund.
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2008
Capital returned
Judging the coming correction too severe to manage through, the partners resolve in March to return client capital and complete the return in April. The portfolio management licence is subsequently surrendered.
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2009–16
The consulting decade
Management and investment consulting across a range of businesses, private and public. CSR strategy, education content development and independent evaluation of programme efficacy. Urban development and urban management engagements in the public sector, including work in Telangana.
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2017
Conversion and move
The private limited company converts to Gryffon Advisors LLP. The firm’s base moves to Hyderabad.
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Today
Holding company and advisory practice
Gryffon holds the partners’ unlisted investments and acts as the holding vehicle for new ventures, while continuing a deliberately small advisory practice.
The emblem
Poison and gold
A griffin is a cross between a raptor and a lion. The mythologies attach two properties to it above all others: it senses poison, and it guards gold.
For a firm that was, at the time it took the name, in the business of managing other people’s savings, that was an unusually precise job description — find what is genuinely valuable, and protect it from what will destroy it. The engraved mark on our stationery is a deliberate piece of old-fashioned restraint, and we have resisted every temptation to modernise it.
A note on regulatory status
Gryffon Advisors LLP does not hold, and does not currently seek, registration with SEBI as a portfolio manager, investment adviser or research analyst. The portfolio management licence described above belonged to the predecessor company and was surrendered after client capital was returned in 2008. The firm does not manage money for third parties, and nothing on this website should be read as investment advice or as an offer of any regulated service.