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Unusual as it is to run money from a village in the Cotswolds, Mr Yarrow has proven his bank manager wrong - accumulating £220m of assets over the past 18 years.

His business, Wise Investments, sits somewhere between a regional IFA firm and a London wealth manager. It now manages investment portfolios on behalf of 500-600 individual clients dotted around the UK, as well as four pooled funds.

The company’s development has been relatively uneventful by industry standards. This is a source of pride rather than embarrassment for the sales-shy Mr Yarrow. He stresses any growth has been based entirely on client referrals, rather than advertising or acquisition.

This focus on high quality rather than fast growth has proved its worth over the past two years in particular. Although the manager admits he underestimated the credit crunch and did not bring his clients through it "as dry shot as we would have wished", most have remained loyal. The firm’s assets under management have swelled by more than 30 per cent since the end of 2006, when the FTSE 100 was a good 12 per cent higher. Mr Yarrow did not make any redundancies during the recession.

One twist in Wise’s story came in 2004, when it merged with a Reading-based IFA-cum-investment firm called Ager Financial Services, run by David Stephenson. The FSA's so-called 'four-eye' rule requires all investment management companies to employ at least two fund managers.

For this reason, the two companies had worked together on a joint investment management venture since 1998. But the compliance costs associated with running Wise, Ager and the joint venture separately eventually became such that Mr Yarrow suggested they collapse the structure into a single entity, which took the Wise brand.

This history explains three-quarters of the fund range. Two funds of funds were launched in April 2004: TB Wise Investment, which is managed by Mr Yarrow, and TB Wise Active Growth, which is managed by Mr Stephenson. A year and a half later, Mr Yarrow launched an Income fund of funds, TB Wise Income.

The final sub-fund in Wise’s Oeic pen, Evenlode Income, has a different genesis. The only non-multi-manager fund in the range, it was launched last October by Hugh Yarrow, son of the founder.

Mr Yarrow Jnr worked at Rathbone Unit Trust Management (Rutm) for more than six years, assisting Carl Stick on the Rathbone Income fund and ultimately running his own High Income vehicle. But Rutm suffered heavy redemptions in 2008 following a period of poor performance on Rathbone Income, which held the majority of the firm's assets. Hugh Yarrow's fund was eventually merged with another and the young manager asked to leave "as a result of management realising consolidation would be necessary", Rutm chief executive Peter Pearson Lund told Investment Adviser at the time.

The younger Mr Yarrow promptly joined his father's firm. He is determined to make the best of the move, stressing the decision has not been made lightly. "I've hopefully made my last career move," he declares. "Wise is a family-run and family-owned business that has been managed very conservatively, with a long-term outlook, over the years. It's a nice place to do something with that long-term perspective."

The four funds, along with one segregated mandate the company runs for a wealthy client, have roughly £58m in assets under management. Since almost no assets come from third parties - "I get the impression IFAs don't buy funds unless they're marketed," says Mr Yarrow Snr - this means Wise has channelled a little over a quarter of its clients’ money into the funds over the years. Mr Yarrow cites this figure as evidence that his advisers are under no pressure to place assets in the funds; the obvious risk with wealth management firms that have their own fund range.

"If you treat people right they enjoy the relationship, they stay, and they tend to recommend other people. It's not in our interest to push people into products they're not comfortable with," he notes.

Mr Yarrow says he is unlikely to recommend his own funds to more cautious clients, for example, as they are mainly invested in investment trusts, which tend to be more volatile than open-ended funds due to the discount effect. But he stresses his entire pension pot sits in the TB Wise Investment fund and the more adventurous clients prefer their money to be invested alongside his. "I micro-manage those funds on a day-to-day basis in a way I simply can’t with advisory portfolios," he explains.

All three of the Wise funds of funds sit in the IMA Active Managed sector to allow the managers the maximum flexibility to move in and out of markets when they see fit. With hindsight, Mr Yarrow concedes he ought to have made better use of this flexibility in 2007. He remained more fully invested than many of his peers and his five-year track record now looks like a geared version of its FTSE All-Share benchmark, with significant underperformance in 2007-08.

"I got the market wrong," he says. "In 2007 I reasoned that the overvaluation was in residential and commercial property but not in stocks, because you don't usually get a market peak that is lower than the previous one. We were out of property and banks and housebuilders, but obviously we should have been out of a lot more."

Now Mr Yarrow is again bullish on equities. But he differs from the broad consensus on which geographies look most attractive, with no exposure to emerging markets or even the Asia Pacific region.

"The consensus is that all the growth is in the East and all the debt is in the West, so the conclusion is that you should invest in the East," he says. "But the best time to invest in anything is when it's gone through a period of adversity. There are some incredibly strong companies in the West that have got through the last few years and will survive. That's not priced in."