FBR Funds is building its business one advisor at a time. For those who think the Arlington, Virginia firm is taking the slow boat to China, think again. FBR has gone from $55 million in its funds at the end of March of last year to almost $150 million at the end of January of this year.

Where most funds have been belt tightening because of shriveling assets, FBR has been steadily growing its business. Even so, the firm isn't dancing on the tables yet; FBR has carefully pruned its marketing budget to include only the most effective measures.

"We used to get together some advisors for dinners," said David Ellison, portfolio managers for the two financial services funds. "We've sort of backed away from that a little bit because most of the guys just came for the dinner."

While FBR is a no-load fund family, the firm does not directly market to retail clients. Furthermore, FBR shies away from expensive, broad-based efforts to capture the attention of advisors.

"For us to go out and spend $100,000 to do some kind of special mailing, we don't have the profitability to do that," said Ellison. "It's blocking and tackling one guy at a time."

How exactly does FBR do that?

"We have two people who work to basically reach out to the advisors through mailing lists and other resources," said Ellison. "The conferences for them are a chance to get a list of people who are interested and the classic networking game."

Ellison said that FBR focuses on establishing and developing relationships with individual advisors. The firm is playing a long game in which performance does not play a large role in the promotion of the funds.

"If advisors are looking for good funds and good fund managers, and your performance is reasonably good over time, you have to be really patient," said Ellison. "I never talk performance when I talk to them."

Fidelity vet Ellison does sell his slow-and-steady-wins-the-race style of investing that produces reliable but unspectacular returns. Knowing he will never make it onto CNBC as a star manager, he also argued that the propensity to feature one-hit wonders has only served to harm investors.

"CNBC a fascinating product that does a disservice to the individual investor," Ellison said. "They're out there presenting a product that doesn't have any sort of intellectual backup. In a sense, it's almost dumbed down."

Ultimately, this dissemination of shallow investment information has given investors the false sense of security that led to the decimation of many self-directed portfolios during the tech crash. Now that the message has struck home for many, advisor business is booming -- and that's good news for FBR.

"The financial IQ of the average investor has gone down," said Ellison. "It's sort of like everybody decided they could be a pro baseball player and tried out for the team. They got up to the plate against Roger Clemens and finally realized that they couldn't do it and they got crushed. It's been unfortunate to see it happen, but the individual investor has not been treated well." 

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