You don't own your audience. Your distributors do. So what exactly is a distribution strategy meant to achieve?

In this episode, Wayne and Gareth get into the practical mechanics of building a distribution strategy from the ground up: starting with the two things every portfolio manager needs to define before anything else: what the fund actually does, and who it's really for. They unpack why "our target market is everyone" doesn't survive contact with an actual marketing plan, how to build out three to five genuine client personas rather than one vague catch-all, and why a fund that works for retail doesn't automatically mean it works for institutions: but rarely the reverse.

They explore why messaging matters more than performance in isolation, because performance without context just invites comparison on cost and numbers alone, and why fund groups so rarely tell investors when a fund won't perform well, even though professional buyers consistently ask for exactly that honesty. They also dig into the difference between portfolio managers as people (rarely natural communicators) and portfolio managers as businesses (responsible for turning that into the right message), why platform listings come down to governance and demand rather than performance alone, why chasing likes and views is the wrong metric compared to building real authority and trust, and why something as unglamorous as a wrong OCF on a factsheet can quietly undo months of awareness-building.

The throughline: distribution isn't something that happens to you: even without owning your audience, there's real, meaningful work to be done to influence how they find you.

If you want to understand where your model sits and what it needs to work harder on, the Roadmap to £10bn package is the place to start: https://www.zeyro.one/roadmap-to-10bn-package