Harpswell Capital Advisors

Harpswell Capital Advisors

Harpswell Capital Advisors was founded as a boutique investment advisory firm by John P. Moore, a CFA charterholder with over 25 years in finance. The firm operates from Yarmouth, Maine, and was built to serve foundations, endowments, hospitals, museums, and a limited number of families (per the firm website). Moore previously served as a financial expert for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and worked on Capitol Hill. The firm follows what it calls the "endowment approach" to investing — allocating to specialized managers across venture capital, private equity, hedge funds, and public equities. The investment strategy stresses broad diversification and a mix of active and passive mandates. Harpswell manages client capital through the outsourced CIO (OCIO) model, customizing asset allocation and manager selection for each client. The firm explicitly structures itself like a college endowment office or family office, differentiating from typical RIAs and Wall Street banks (per firm website). Harpswell's team is intentionally lean — the three named investment professionals include Moore, Vice President Vanessa Bryant, and Vice President Claude R. Perrier, a CPA who previously advised ultra-high-net-worth families at CTC | myCFO and served as Executive Director of the Maine State Retirement System. An advisory board supplements depth with Emily R. McComb (Harvard Business School), David Russ (Spruceview Capital), and Gus Sauter (retired CIO of Vanguard). In 2020, the firm was named to investor.com's Top Charitable Financial Advisor Firms list (per firm website). Harpswell's structural differentiator is its narrow focus: it serves a capped roster of nonprofit clients, behaving more like a family office than a traditional asset manager. The firm integrates social-impact values into its investment framework and maintains what it describes as a flat organizational structure where every team member contributes to client outcomes. This stands in contrast to larger OCIO providers or multibillion-dollar endowments.