About Us

After some years as management consultants helping businesses develop winning strategies and improve profitability, partners Rich Ryan and Jim Balet set out to see if they could run businesses of their own instead of telling other people how to run theirs. With that, Thayer Bancroft Equity Partners was launched and each partner found a business to acquire and began creating value through investing in lower middle market companies.

Since those first acquisitions in 2005 Thayer Bancroft has focused on the basics: buying good companies at a fair price and with prudent capital structures – and then growing them through perseverance and disciplined attention to operations. Over the years we’ve found success investing in manufacturing and business-to-business services. We’ve also found that identifying opportunities and building winning teams is fun and energizing for us and profitable for our investors.

We started out following the Independent Sponsor model, which to those unfamiliar with the term, is private equity investing without a committed fund. This approach requires a little more up front work for each deal as we cannot call committed capital for each acquisition. The upside to this model is we are better able to focus on each business, to create value with patience and focus, and then exit at a time that’s right for the business as opposed to an artificial timeline imposed by the fund structure. Over the years the Independent Sponsor model has matured considerably and rapidly becoming an asset class all its own. This means more access to capital, larger deals and more interesting partners to work with. Nonetheless, the basics are the same and we remain dedicated to finding, acquiring and growing interesting businesses just the same as when we started out.

Thayer Bancroft is based in suburban Pittsburgh, PA.