Silverleafe Capital Partners

Silverleafe Capital Partners

Silverleafe Capital Partners was founded in 2011 by Thomas B. Winborne, Kemper W. Vest, and C. Thomas Brown Jr. in Richmond, Virginia. The firm emerged from a gap the founders observed inside large institutional platforms — a need for outsourced chief investment officer services that operate with the direct conviction of a family office rather than the diffusion of a consultant. Winborne, who had previously served as CIO of a major regional bank's wealth division, structured the firm to sit physically and culturally closer to its clients than common fund-of-funds aggregators. The founding group invested their own capital alongside early clients, establishing a permanent alignment mechanism that remains central to the firm's architecture. The firm deploys capital across four primary sleeves — public equities, private credit, absolute-return hedge fund strategies, and direct real estate. Silverleafe does not build off-the-shelf model portfolios. Each client mandate is constructed from a curated menu that includes direct indexing, private credit interval funds, and institutional real estate partnerships. The firm has historically favored private credit structures that provide contractual cash yields with legal protections, and its real estate exposure tends toward necessity-based assets such as medical office and industrial properties in secondary Southeast markets. The public equity book employs tax-managed separate accounts rather than mutual funds or ETFs, a structural choice designed to harvest losses for taxable families. The firm's investment committee meets formally each month to re-underwrite tactical tilts, but strategic allocation shifts are infrequent and require unanimous consent from the three founding partners. Silverleafe operates from a single headquarters in Richmond and has deliberately avoided building a national office footprint. The firm's compact structure reflects its thesis that a small, aligned investment committee can oversee multi-asset mandates more effectively than large, siloed teams. In 2023, the firm formalized its private credit allocation by adding dedicated underwriting capacity, a move that signaled a deepening commitment to non-bank lending at a moment when regional banks were retreating from the space. The firm does not disclose total assets under advisement or management, and it has never participated in the industry rankings circulated by trade publications — a posture consistent with its Richmond anchor and its avoidance of institutional marketing machinery. What structurally differentiates Silverleafe is its combination of an OCIO mandate with direct investing capabilities. Most OCIO providers — even large ones — delegate implementation to third-party managers and charge layers of fees for allocation advice. Silverleafe instead runs its own sleeves of direct real estate and private credit while also selecting external managers for hedge fund and specialty equity mandates. This hybrid model allows the firm to control implementation costs on core allocations and negotiate harder on manager fees for satellite positions. The three co-founders remain the firm's controlling equity holders, and no external financial sponsor has taken a stake — a governance structure that keeps the investment committee answerable only to clients and each other.