Welcome to the first in our 'Building a Boutique' mini-series! In these candid chats, we ask boutique founders their deepest secrets - motivations, mistakes and triumphs - and how each of these have helped to shape the successful businesses they run today.As multi-manager investors, we not only need to discover the best fund managers in the industry, but we need to learn about the conditions and environment that keeps these managers incentivised to perform. Often, we find these intangible qualities in small, privately or partner-owned businesses, known as boutiques.In our first episode, we catch up with Charles Montanaro and Cedric Durant des Aulnois on how their boutique, Montanaro Asset Management, was launched and how they built the business to manage £3.5bn of client assets.