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You come from an operator background, having built and scaled a 180+ employee food manufacturing business in South America. How has that experience shaped your approach to search compared to more traditional, finance-led searchers?
Coming from an operator background changes what I pay attention to first.
Compared with a more finance-led approach, I tend to start with the operating reality of the business: how production runs, where quality issues emerge, how pricing is managed, where working capital gets trapped, and whether the organization can absorb growth. Having founded and scaled a 180+ employee frozen-goods business in South America, I learned that in lower middle market companies, value is usually created less by structuring and more by operational consistency.
A spreadsheet can tell you what happened; it rarely tells you how a plant runs on a Tuesday morning. That experience has made me underwrite businesses through an execution lens: not just whether the numbers look attractive, but whether the business can actually be improved in durable ways.
What motivated your transition from operator to search fund entrepreneur, and why pursue a traditional search model in the U.S. specifically? Who are your backers?
For me, this was less a career pivot than a continuation of what I most enjoy doing.
What has always energized me is understanding how a business really works, identifying what constrains performance, and then building the systems, team, and discipline needed to scale it. The traditional search model creates a rare opportunity to do that in a focused, entrepreneurial way: acquire an established business with real customers, real cash flows, and real operational complexity, and then help it reach its next stage of development through hands-on ownership.
I chose to pursue this in the U.S. because the market combines scale, fragmentation, strong acquisition financing, and a deep base of founder-owned businesses facing succession transitions. It is a market where an operator can still build a real edge.
I was fortunate to raise Aguad Capital Partners with backing from a mix of dedicated search fund investors, family offices, and experienced operators, including Gestalt Capital, The Operand Group, Hadley Family Capital, Reframe Search Capital, Heritage Holding, Sleyster Family Office, Ventura Search Capital, Grant Street Investments, Ventus Capital Partners, Martell Capital Partners, Blake Macleod and Alfonso Blohm (formerly Archipelago), Mark Rice, and Andy Savin.
I was also especially honored to have the support of Clayton Sachs and Tom Jackson, who were my professors of Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition at Columbia Business School — a class that was one of the most formative parts of my time at Columbia — as well as Alex Schneider, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Kellogg, with deep experience in ETA and food and beverage manufacturing.
Your target industries are food manufacturing and specialty distribution. Why pursue an industry-focused search fund, and what makes these sectors particularly attractive to you? Are you also targeting a specific geographic focus within the U.S.?
I chose an industry-focused search quite deliberately because domain familiarity matters most in sectors where execution drives outcomes.
Food manufacturing and specialty distribution are attractive to me because they are essential, tangible businesses where performance is shaped by operational discipline every day. Pricing, service, quality, throughput, and working capital all matter in very real ways. They are also fragmented and often founder-led, which creates room for thoughtful professionalization and long-term value creation.
There is also a personal dimension. I know the rhythm of food businesses. I understand how quality, service levels, production planning, and commercial execution interact, and how small operational decisions compound over time.
From a geographic standpoint, I am open across the U.S., with a preference for regions that combine strong food ecosystems, logistics infrastructure, and attractive demographics. I am less anchored to one state than to finding the right business in the right operating environment.
You’ve highlighted fragmentation and under-professionalization in your target sectors. What specific inefficiencies or opportunities do you consistently see that others might overlook?
One recurring pattern is that many of these businesses are stronger than they appear strategically, but weaker than they should be operationally.
You often see issues such as SKU proliferation, inconsistent pricing discipline, weak forecasting, underdeveloped sales processes, poor production planning, yield losses, or working capital leakage. These are not abstract strategy problems. They are operational frictions that build quietly over time and end up affecting margins, service levels, and management bandwidth.
What makes these situations interesting is that they are often misread. From the outside, they can look like mediocre businesses. From an operator’s perspective, they may actually be solid businesses carrying avoidable inefficiencies. In other words, what others see as mess, I often see as solvable complexity.
That is where operating experience matters. If you have lived inside these environments, you become much better at distinguishing between structural problems and fixable ones. That distinction is critical in the lower middle market.
How does your “operator-first” mindset influence the way you evaluate potential acquisition targets during the search phase? Does focusing on a single industry give you a meaningful advantage when engaging with brokers or business owners?
An operator-first mindset makes me focus on controllability before possibility.
When I evaluate a business, I want to understand how value is created on a daily basis: how products move through the system, where margins are earned or lost, how decisions get made, where customer relationships are strongest, and what tends to break under pressure. I am trying to determine not only whether the business is attractive, but whether it is understandable and improvable.
That lens also affects the questions I ask. I tend to move quickly from the headline financials to the operating reality underneath them: pricing discipline, plant utilization, service levels, production cadence, management depth, and commercial execution.
Yes, focusing on a single industry gives me a meaningful advantage. It sharpens pattern recognition, improves diligence, and makes conversations with brokers and owners much more substantive. Owners in particular can tell very quickly whether you genuinely understand their business. When you can engage at a practical level, credibility builds faster.
Given your experience managing complex operations, what are the first operational levers you look to pull post-acquisition to drive value creation? In food manufacturing, where margins can be tight and execution is critical, how do you balance growth initiatives with operational discipline?
My instinct post-acquisition is to first stabilize, simplify, and create visibility.
In businesses like these, the first wins often come from improving the operating cadence: better planning, cleaner reporting, sharper KPI tracking, more disciplined pricing, tighter inventory management, clearer accountability, and, in many cases, a more focused product portfolio. In food manufacturing especially, small execution improvements can have an outsized impact because margins are often tight and inefficiencies compound quickly.
I also believe growth should follow operational readiness, not precede it. Growth is valuable only if the operating base can absorb it. Otherwise, it tends to magnify existing weaknesses rather than create value.
So the balance, in practice, is to build a stronger core first and then grow from a more stable foundation. The objective is not simply to grow faster, but to grow better in a way that strengthens the business rather than stretching it.
Many searchers talk about being “long-term stewards” of the businesses they acquire. What does that mean in practice for you, particularly in people-intensive industries like manufacturing and distribution?
For me, long-term stewardship means leaving a business stronger, more durable, and better organized than I found it.
In people-intensive industries, that starts with respect. Many of these businesses have been built over decades through hard work, trust, and deep customer relationships. Stewardship does not mean arriving with a playbook and imposing change for its own sake. It means understanding what already works, preserving the strengths of the business, and then professionalizing it thoughtfully.
In practice, that means building systems that reduce chaos, developing managers, creating clarity around expectations and accountability, and investing in a culture where people know what good looks like. It also means making decisions with a long time horizon rather than optimizing for short-term optics.
I see stewardship as both an operational and human responsibility. Especially in manufacturing and distribution, value is ultimately created through people, not just process.
Looking ahead, how do you think operator-led search funds will evolve? Do you see industry-focused searches becoming a key advantage compared to more generalist, “agnostic” search funds?
I believe operator-led search funds will become more important as the ecosystem matures.
As more capital and talent enter the space, differentiation matters more. In my view, operating credibility and sector familiarity are increasingly valuable because they improve three things at once: sourcing judgment, seller credibility, and post-acquisition execution. In a more competitive market, that combination becomes a real advantage.
I do think industry-focused searches will continue to gain relevance, particularly in sectors where complexity is operational rather than financial. That does not mean generalist searches will disappear, and many excellent businesses can still be acquired by broad, thoughtful searchers. But I do believe we will see more entrepreneurs leaning into sectors where they have a repeatable edge.
Ultimately, the searchers who stand out will be the ones who can combine entrepreneurial ambition with genuine operating depth. That is where I think the model is heading, and it is very much the approach I am trying to embody through Aguad Capital Partners.
