In an industry obsessed with breadth, Cooper Investors’ Endeavour Fund is doubling down on depth and specialisation.
By: Laurence Parker-Brown, The Inside Network
Source: The Inside Adviser
June 16th 2025
Speaking at The Inside Network’s recent Equities & Growth Symposium, the co-portfolio managers of the Endeavour Fund, Geoff Di Felice and Marcus Guzzardi offered a rare glimpse into their concentrated, global, and distinctly human approach to investing.
Since its inception in 2021, the Endeavour Fund has quietly built a reputation for capital preservation and high-conviction compounding — focusing on a maximum of 15 holdings from around the world, drawn from four favoured business models, with capital deployed only when the risk-return profile is absolutely compelling. The result is not a clone of the benchmark but a handcrafted portfolio built for resilience in a world moving from abundance to scarcity.
Guzzardi, whose investment training began with forensic-style research and developed into a broader understanding of people and culture, described the pair’s philosophy as rooted in process and partnership. “Every number in a financial statement is the product of a decision by management and its team,” he said. “Understanding culture — who can execute, who’s aligned, who has the long view — is critical.” Their partnership is a study in balance: Guzzardi brings intensity and linear thinking, Di Felice surrounds problems with peripheral vision and system-level insight. Together, they divide and conquer, with one partner taking the lead on each idea, while both remain deeply embedded in the conversation.
Their story is one of alignment. The Endeavour Fund was born from a shared ambition to compound their own capital — what they describe as “turning every dollar into four over a decade.” With significant personal investment and a stringent risk lens, the pair manage the fund with an absolute-return mindset. “Capital preservation is the mantra,” Di Felice said. “Every investment starts with risk.” They will allocate up to 10 per cent of the fund to a single holding, meaning many businesses are eliminated outright. Those that make the cut fit into one of four categories: rollouts, content, royalties, and niche service providers. All are designed to thrive in a constrained world where pricing power, resilience, and capital discipline are non-negotiables.
That worldview — scarcity over abundance — has been shaping the Endeavour Fund’s portfolio well before recent market volatility. Guzzardi noted that most of their investments were already made through a lens of constraint: companies that sell productivity, not vanity, to their customers; restaurants that compete on experience, not scale; and content owners with under-monetised IP, ready for global syndication. When the market sells everything indiscriminately, they step in with clarity. “This is where the next five years of returns can be made,” Guzzardi said, noting the portfolio recently held 25 per cent in cash, ready for deployment.
Di Felice drew on lessons from 2008, when he began his career with a fund managing money for endowments like Harvard. “You learn that there are moments — windows — where you have to be ready. You point the ship into the storm.” The Endeavour Fund is now doing just that, using the April drawdown to acquire businesses they’ve tracked for years, but where valuation or timing previously didn’t stack up. Importantly, they don’t fall in love with management teams or ideas: instead, they look for evidence — what milestones are being met, how capital is being reinvested, and whether businesses are executing against real-world KPIs.
Their long-standing investment in Ryan Specialty Group is illustrative. A major holding since the fund’s inception, the insurance brokerage was founded by the legendary Pat Ryan, who previously built Aon. The managers flew to Florida to meet him — not in a boardroom, but over lunch at a country club in Naples. There were no earnings models on the table, only a conversation about what it means to build a world-class service business. “It gave us deep conviction — not just in the numbers, but in the DNA of the business,” Guzzardi recalled. “That meeting still informs how we assess other services companies today.”
Content is another area of focus, particularly under-monetised sports media. The managers saw the slowdown in Netflix’s US subscriber growth in 2022 not as a red flag but a signal: the streaming giant would need live sports to grow again. That led them to TKO Group, owner of UFC and WWE, whose content can now be streamed on Netflix. “This is IP that doesn’t age. It travels. It monetises across media rights, sponsorship, live events,” Di Felice explained. “And the management team is as aggressive in business as their athletes are in the ring.” Their edge lies in seeing these shifts early and placing capital behind the catalysts.
Royalties — whether in commodities, software, or intellectual property — round-out the portfolio’s diversification. All of these business models offer high operating leverage, structural scarcity, and long-term cash flow visibility. “What we’re doing is simple,” Di Felice said. “But we do it with intensity and depth. We want to know these businesses as well as a long-term private owner would.” That specialist knowledge allows them to price risk precisely and hold positions through volatility, confident in the underlying economics.
This is not investing by committee. Decision-making is fast, collaborative, and grounded in trust. “Every quarter we ask, ‘What were the two most important decisions we made?’” Di Felice said. “And did we make them with clarity?” That reflexiveness is key when managing a concentrated portfolio. Unlike most funds that chase breadth, the Endeavour Fund chases understanding. If they can’t underwrite the next 10 years of a business, they simply pass.
There is also a quiet optimism that runs through their commentary. Despite market panic, both Guzzardi and Di Felice see this as a buyer’s market — especially for investors with dry powder and patience. “Valuations have pulled back,” Di Felice noted. “But this isn’t a deep correction yet. If people are nervous now, just wait.” They believe the listed markets will eventually reflect the enduring value of resilient, founder-led businesses — and the Endeavour Fund, with its capital ready and playbook intact, is poised to benefit when that happens.
Their view is long, but their execution is swift. “We’re not trying to time the market. We’re trying to own the best businesses when they’re mispriced,” Guzzardi said. With a global opportunity set, a repeatable process, and two investment managers who are as aligned with each other as they are with their clients, the Cooper Investors Endeavour Fund is carving out a differentiated path — one built not on speed or scale, but on discipline, depth, and endurance.
