ARC Advisory

ARC Advisory

Britt Harris formed ARC Advisory in 2019 after a four-decade career inside some of the largest pools of institutional capital in the world. He had been chief investment officer at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, where he oversaw roughly $240 billion in assets, and before that he ran the University of Texas Investment Management Company, growing its endowment complex from a few billion to over $70 billion by the time he departed in 2017. The firm he built next was not a fund. ARC Advisory is structured as a high-touch investment consultancy that applies the governance models, risk frameworks, and manager-selection discipline Harris refined inside public pension and endowment walls to private-family and foundation portfolios. The advisory constructs bespoke investment programs across private markets, with a known emphasis on real estate, infrastructure, and private credit. The work mirrors the endowment-style approach Harris championed at UTIMCO — a heavy tilt toward illiquid, income-producing assets coupled with rigorous external-manager underwriting. Rather than pooling client capital into proprietary vehicles, ARC Advisory helps each family design an institutionally sound allocation, then negotiates access to top-quartile funds and direct co-investment opportunities on their behalf. The geographic reach is transatlantic, with sourcing capability across North America and Western Europe. The team is deliberately small, operating from Nashville, Tennessee, with a model built on relationship depth rather than asset-gathering scale. Harris has noted publicly that he works with a limited number of families, allowing the firm to function more like an outsourced family-office CIO than a traditional advisory practice. In early 2024, Harris spoke at an industry conference about what he described as a 'generational transfer of institutional knowledge' to private capital allocators, reinforcing the firm's posture as a bridge between endowment-style rigor and single-family-office agility. No parallel investment vehicles or philanthropic entities have been disclosed under the ARC Advisory banner. What separates ARC Advisory from a conventional RIA or multi-family office is its founding thesis: the best investment governance does not require the largest balance sheet. Harris built his reputation managing giant pools of permanent capital, but the firm effectively commercializes the intellectual property from that career — the asset-allocation models, the operational due-diligence checklists, the boardroom temperament — for families who want institutional process without institutional bureaucracy. The structure is pure advisory, deliberately avoiding conflicts that arise when a firm both recommends and sells proprietary products.