About Us

Highlights

• Managing Partner Shore Search, backing first time CEOs who acquire lower middle-market businesses ($1–10M EBITDA).
• Former Chief Executive Officer of Mission Veterinary Partners (2018–2024), led scaling the company into a national, people-first platform.
• Former CEO of StatLab Medical Products, building it into one of the premier anatomic pathology suppliers in the United States.
• Early-career operator in a family business that grew revenue 7x and team size 5x over four years.
• Board member across healthcare and services platforms; recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award; summa cum laude graduate of University of Notre Dame (BBA). Married with two sons.

My Why

My father was one of six children and grew up with nothing. After serving in the Army for two years during the Vietnam War, he came home and stood in an unemployment line. He eventually got a job as a parking lot attendant and was later given the opportunity to buy the lot from the owner in downtown Detroit. Of course, he had no money and no way to finance it. His only lucky break was that no one in their right mind wanted to buy a parking lot in downtown Detroit in 1975, so the seller financed the sale. My father paid off the note over the next 15 years.

Fast forward to today: my father owns or operates 20 parking lots and garages in downtown Detroit and is the embodiment of the American Dream. I watched him work day and night throughout my childhood. I saw him wake up in the middle of the night to shovel snow on his lots and sidewalks so no one would slip and fall. I had the good fortune of working in the parking lot booths as a child, where I learned how to talk to customers and manage a workforce. I learned more on those parking lots than I did in college or during my time on Wall Street.

For my dad’s 40th birthday, he received a framed picture of the Park-Rite org chart that captured his day-to-day reality. It was meant to be both humorous and admiring — a reflection of everything he did for his employees. I was only 14 when he received that gift, but the image stuck with me and has stayed with me ever since. My respect and admiration for small business owners has only grown as I’ve gotten older.

Small business owners are the best. They wear every hat (marketing, customer service, HR, accounting) and give their all every day, even with the odds stacked against them. Banks require personal guarantees if they want to grow. They pay taxes most people don’t even know exist. They deal with regulations from cities, states, and the federal government. Most days are simply a grind to survive. Every now and then they catch a break that keeps them going long enough to fight for the next one.

That’s why I’m passionate about partnering with the right kind of people and giving them the shot in the arm they and their businesses have been looking for.

Highlights

• Former Chief Operating Officer, Mission Veterinary Partners, responsible for leading 330+ locations, 8,000+ team members and $1.2B national portfolio of veterinary hospitals.
• Former Chief Transformation Officer, Mission Pet Health, responsible for leading the integration of two $1B+ organizations into a leading national platform.
• Over a decade of experience at a leading national provider of animal health products and services, as a top-performing commercial leader.
• Board Member, Empower Aesthetics and Comfort Temp HVAC & Plumbing; graduate of Michigan State University (Go Green); wife and mom of two boys.

My Why

I grew up in the family construction business, which as a kid felt like nothing but an inconvenience. For years, the office was in our basement as the business grew. Work and life were completely and literally intertwined. Work spilled into evenings and weekends, plans were delayed, family worked in the business – me included - and customers always came first. My parents wore every hat imaginable, every single day. It was their reputation on the line after all, and their responsibility to protect it – 24/7. I helped when I was told and held plenty of roles, which if you asked them, probably earned a “satisfactory” at best in an annual review. But that wasn’t the point, was it? The lesson was grit and sacrifice; it just took me a while to understand that.

Later, I followed my passion into animal health and worked at a small, father-and-son veterinary hospital. Vastly different businesses, same realities. The work wasn’t glamorous, we did whatever needed to be done. Just like my parents, the owners were always on call. If they weren’t, they were guaranteed to be losing sleep over a critical patient transferred after-hours, a key recruit we were competing to sign, or a client that had left less than satisfied.

After graduation, I took the corporate path for more than a decade. From the outside it looked like the right move, a safe path and a stark departure from the businesses I’d grown up in - big structure, big resources, big org charts. I assumed they must be doing something right; but that wasn’t my experience. With scale came layers, long decision cycles, and strategies that didn’t always align with what customers actually needed. Somewhere between the frontline and the boardroom, something broke.

Tired of pushing uphill, I took a leap of faith in 2019 when I was given the opportunity to build at Mission Veterinary Partners. I believed in the vision, while lofty: create an organization built around caring for its people so they could continue pouring into their calling, caring for pets.

We didn’t just talk about doing things differently, we did it. We built the brick house. We celebrated wins, got things wrong and made them right, and we showed up every day to keep our commitment to do right by the people we served. We brought a vision to life and changed lives along the way.

Somewhere along that journey is when it clicked, I’m a builder, and I never want to do anything else. I finally understood why owners like my parents chose this path.

Now, I’m on a mission to work alongside small business owners, like you, who show up every day - in their communities, for their teams, and with their customers. Your drive, ideas, passion, and grit are unmatched. With the right people in your corner, you can have it all.

Building something is hard. It’s exhausting. And it’s worth it.

Highlights

• Former Chief Growth Officer at Mission Veterinary Partners, responsible for leading M&A, organic growth strategy, and FP&A - completed >250 acquisitions generating $750M in revenue
• Former Chief Strategy Officer & Chief Marketing Officer with two decades of operator & leadership experience in sales, marketing, operations, M&A, and analytics - experience spans businesses ranging from <$10M to $1B+ in revenue
• Current Partner at Shore Capital Search Partners, Founding Partner at Station VI Partners, and Board Member at OMS360
• Michigan native living outside of Chicago with wife and three daughters (proud Girl Dad)

My Why

In 2018, I joined Mission Veterinary Partners. There were ~10 people in our office and we had ~20 animal hospitals in Michigan and Wisconsin. Over the next seven years, we became one of the fastest growing companies in healthcare. We did ~300 deals with veterinary practice owners and I met hundreds, if not thousands, of small business owners who wanted to monetize their life’s work. It was one of the biggest financial and emotional decisions of their life and while it was easy for them to compare valuations & deal terms, it was hard to know what life would be like after the sale and even harder to know if the buyer would deliver on their promises.

Over seven years, we competed against dozens of competitors – consolidators, aggregators, roll ups, whatever you want to call them. Their M&A salespeople did a great job of selling a good story. They would tell small business owners that “nothing will change, we will take the hard stuff off your plate, your rollover equity will be worth a lot,” – but almost all those companies didn’t deliver on the promises they made.

It is easy to tell a story that nothing will change and to write a big check to get someone to sell their business. It is hard, expensive, and time consuming to build a company that can integrate businesses, recruit and retain talent, and influence change with team members who have worked for someone else for the last 5, 10, 20 years. The sale is easy. The hard part comes after the sale, and most buyers don’t do a good job because they, or their investors, don’t want to spend the time or money that it takes to build the brick house.

Most of our competitors built straw houses. They piled debt on the business to buy a lot of animal hospitals. They told a good story about back-office support, but they didn’t deliver on the promises they made. Their salespeople weren’t liars – they believed the vision that they were selling. But these companies couldn’t recruit and retain, they didn’t integrate people or systems, and things did change (because they always do – don’t believe anyone who says things won’t change). Eventually their broken promises caught up to them and it broke their reputation. They lost doctors, revenues and profits dropped, they couldn’t service the debt they used to buy all those businesses, and then the banks came calling.

As a result, I personally know dozens of small business owners who sold to those other companies and their rollover equity is now worthless. Their vision of retirement is in jeopardy, the business they built is unrecognizable, and there is nothing they can do about it. It is unconscionable.

This is why I am here.  I love small businesses and I know the sacrifice that small business owners make to build a successful business. To me, being a steward of your life’s work, your nest egg, and your generational wealth is what this is all about. I’ve seen it fail, and it is unconscionable to me that there are still aggregators out there irresponsibly flipping businesses made of straw houses because someone will be left holding the bag. My mission is to make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

Highlights

• Former Chief Financial Officer, Mission Veterinary Partners, responsible for leading finance, administrative, and support functions — raised more than $1.6B in equity and debt to fund business expansion.
• Former Chief Financial Officer for several PE-backed human healthcare businesses with aggressive growth strategies and successful exits.
• Former pilot with an aviation degree from Eastern Michigan University and an MBA from the University of Michigan.
• Currently resides on a small farm north of Ann Arbor with his wife and four children.

My Why

While studying aviation operations in pursuit of a career as a professional pilot, I discovered a passion for helping businesses operate efficiently, grow, and thrive. After a few years working in a diverse aviation business, a close friend approached me about helping him manage his rapidly growing physical therapy practice. Seeing that the challenges he faced were no different from those we faced in aviation, I knew I could help.

In the early days of our partnership, I worked in nearly every role at the company, except a physical therapist. With limited resources, we divided and conquered to keep the business moving forward. In just a few years, we grew the practice from six locations to thirty-two across southeast Michigan. The business was acquired by ATI Physical Therapy in 2013. The experience of professionalizing and rapidly scaling a multi-site platform sparked a desire to help other businesses achieve similar success.

Since then, I’ve spent most of my career supporting founders, financial sponsors, and leadership teams of high-growth companies. I’ve worked in the trenches alongside entrepreneurs and operators who have made tremendous sacrifices to grow their businesses in an increasingly complex environment. While my support has primarily been strategic and finance focused, I’ve worn many hats - from IT to HR, from financing acquisitions to supporting operations. I thrive in environments where smart people align around a common goal and work together in pursuit of meaningful outcomes.

Rapidly building and scaling a business takes a great deal of work, but with the right people, it can be incredibly rewarding.