Managers & fees
Owen Brisco
Management contracts, fee structures, what a manager actually does for the split.
Owen reads management agreements for a living and writes the company pages. His running complaint is that most Michigan managers publish a service list and no number, which is exactly why every review here says “Not published” out loud instead of guessing.
What Owen is responsible for
Management contracts, fee structures, what a manager actually does for the split. Corrections on those pages come to this desk first. Our standards are set out on how we test and the editorial policy page.
How Owen works
Owen works from the contract outwards. He looks for the rate, then for the exclusions, then for the exit clause, on the basis that those three things predict how a company behaves far better than its service list does. When a company publishes none of them, that absence is the finding, and he writes it as one.
The rule Owen will not bend
A fee is a fee only when the company prints it. Everything else is a quote somebody gave one owner once.
That is not a stylistic preference. A review site that estimates a fee creates a number that did not exist, and the next person to read it treats it as a benchmark — including, sometimes, the company itself. We would rather publish a gap than manufacture a figure, and every page on this site is written that way.
Getting a correction in front of Owen
Email the desk with the page and the specific line. If a company has published something since we last read its site, send the URL rather than the figure — we cite published pages, not correspondence, so a link gets the row updated and an email with a number in it does not. Corrections are made and dated on the page. There is more on the process on the contact page.