Carl Allegretti and the art of bringing everyone along

For his 70th marathon, Carl Allegretti brought reinforcements. Colleagues from Arbor Investments joined him at the 2024 Chicago Marathon. Companies in the firm’s portfolio joined the effort, too. By the end, he had raised $277,491 for charity. A race that could have been a private anniversary had acquired the population of a work project.

The number is striking. So is the method. Allegretti has spent much of his professional life gathering people, directing their work and persuading them to take part in something larger than their own assignment. On this occasion, the assignment happened to involve 26.2 miles. Meetings usually have better chairs.

In February 2025, Arbor promoted him to co-CEO. His responsibilities include talent procurement, deal flow and investor relations. Each is a different version of a people question: who should work here, who should partner with us, and who should trust us with capital? His route to that job runs through a football scholarship, an accounting degree and two large professional services firms.

A lineman’s introduction to teamwork

Allegretti grew up in Gary, Indiana, and attended Andrean High School. Football was part of a wider sporting life that included wrestling and track. He went on to Butler University as a scholarship football player, graduating in 1983 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting. His brothers Paul and Jim also played football at Butler. In this family, a college reunion could plausibly discuss blocking assignments.

The attraction of the football detail is easy to overstate. Playing a team sport does not automatically produce a good executive, any more than owning running shoes produces a marathoner. Still, it gives his later commitments a history. The sport that helped organize his student years kept appearing in his adult life, through family weekends, youth programs and the boards he joined.

He started a youth football league in 2004. By the National Football Foundation’s 2022 account, it had given more than 10,000 children, from kindergarten through eighth grade, an opportunity to play. That is a different kind of return from the one measured in an investment fund. It involves making room for the next group of players.

Football remained an institutional commitment as well. Allegretti received the National Football Foundation’s Leadership Hall of Fame honor in 2022. He also joined USA Football’s board that year, and the College Football Hall of Fame welcomed him to its board in 2023. The connection stretched across playing, organizing and governance.

The long apprenticeship in people

His professional career began at Arthur Andersen’s Chicago office in 1983. He rose to partner and took on leadership responsibilities in tax. In 2002, he helped lead the firm’s Chicago tax practice to Deloitte. A career timeline can compress that transition into a single line. Moving a practice means that the line contains a great many people. Clients still need answers, colleagues still need someone to turn to, and work still has to get done while the name over the door changes. It is a revealing assignment for someone whose later career would revolve around keeping organizations moving.

At Deloitte, the scale of his responsibilities increased. He served as chairman and CEO of Deloitte Tax LLP, led the global private practice, became vice chairman of the US board and sat on the global board. He also led Deloitte Canada’s tax practice. These were assignments in a profession where technical expertise and relationships have to coexist; being right about a calculation is only part of getting an organization to work.

Before joining Arbor, he was managing partner of Deloitte’s Chicago office, with responsibility for approximately 6,000 professionals. His earlier leadership of Deloitte Tax involved approximately 10,000 tax and advisory professionals. Those figures belong to different roles. Together, they suggest the organizational scale he had encountered before entering a much smaller investment firm.

The move to Arbor was announced in February 2020, with his arrival scheduled for March. A long career in professional services was about to take a new direction. Food businesses would bring different products, customers and operating questions. The work of finding people and getting them to function together would remain familiar.

An old connection, a new table

Arbor’s founder, Gregory Purcell, was already familiar to Allegretti. Their connection reached back decades. In a later interview, Allegretti recalled encountering Purcell during his time at Reyes and watching him leave to start his own business. By the time Allegretti joined Arbor, the relationship had a history that no introduction could manufacture.

The firm concentrates on food, beverage and related businesses. That focus puts it among owners and entrepreneurs whose products are decidedly tangible: things that must be made, moved and sold. Allegretti’s background in private-company work offered a route into that world through the owners and their organizations.

Arbor’s leadership has described the firm as operating increasingly like a food conglomerate. That description helps explain why recruiting specialists matters. A collection of businesses creates recurring needs in finance, operations, branding, supply chain and human resources. Knowing the purchase price does not answer all the questions that arrive after the purchase.

The 2025 leadership changes divided responsibilities accordingly. Allegretti became co-CEO alongside Purcell, while John Jordan became president, reporting to Allegretti and taking oversight of the portfolio companies. Allegretti’s assignment emphasized cultivating opportunities and recruiting talent. The arrangement gave the relationship work and the operating work identifiable owners.

The bakery and the family business

At Crown Bakeries, where Allegretti was identified as co-chairperson in January 2025, a series of appointments showed the practical side of building a team. The company announced changes spanning commercial leadership, finance, operations and people. Allegretti’s comments emphasized the team built by Cordia Harrington and Yianny Caparos and the combination of experience in its leadership ranks.

A bakery can make the abstractions of organizational design wonderfully concrete. Production lines, facility renovations and customer orders give people decisions that must turn into physical results. Crown’s announcement paired its leadership changes with plans for further investment. The people and the equipment belonged to the same growth story.

Another example arrived in April 2025, when Arbor closed Fund VI with more than $1.2 billion in capital commitments and recapitalized Rubix Foods. The business had been owned by Arbor Fund IV and the Block family since 2019. The new fund acquired their interests, while the existing senior leadership continued in place.

Allegretti used the occasion to emphasize partnerships with family owners and entrepreneurs. The details matter: different investors, continuity in management, and a family receiving liquidity after years of working with Arbor. It is an example of relationships surviving a change in the financial structure around them.

Saturday has its own board meeting

A more informal view of Allegretti appears in a letter he wrote to Illinois supporters in 2018. Both his sons, Joe and Nick, had studied business there. Nick played football. Carl recalled Dad’s Day visits, introductions to Joe’s college friends and the family’s recurring trips to games. He also recalled sitting with Joe and arguing about football throughout the action.

The scene gives the executive biography some welcome noise. Carl was a parent in the stands, pleased with his sons’ experiences and quite prepared to have an opinion about a play. His letter thanked the coaches who had worked with Nick and explained the family’s commitment to Illinois football fundraising. Attachment became participation.

By 2021, he was sharing footage of Nick warming up before a Kansas City Chiefs playoff game. Nick’s movements reminded Carl of wrestling, another sport with a place in the family’s history. The post caught a father enjoying the details of his son’s work. A lineman knows there is something to watch before the ball is snapped.

The favors, and the four dogs

The marathon fundraising story has an equally domestic detail. In PAWS Chicago’s 2024 impact report, Allegretti described a household with four large dogs: Samson, Delilah, Maggie and Wolfie. Wolfie came from PAWS. His affection for the dogs offered a straightforward explanation for why the animal welfare organization belonged among his charitable commitments.

Asked about recruiting donors, he gave an answer with very little executive packaging: “I called in a lot of favors.” The same report described donations arriving at very different amounts, with thanks given to each donor. The humor lies in the candor. The work lies in making the calls.

“I called in a lot of favors.”

Carl Allegretti, on recruiting donors

Across these episodes, the recurring action is an invitation: to join a practice, work at a company, play in a league, support a program or take part in a race. The invitations have different stakes. They also give a clearer picture of Allegretti than a stack of titles alone can provide.

There is a useful modesty in the marathon anecdote, despite the size of the fundraising total. Favors have a history. A request draws on earlier conversations, shared work and the expectation that someone will answer when their turn comes. His answer leaves all that machinery visible. It also gives the reader something refreshingly ordinary to picture: a person asking another person for help, then remembering to say thank you.

At Arbor, his next opportunity may begin with an owner or a potential recruit. On the football sideline, it may begin with an argument about the last play. After decades of organizing professional teams and showing up for personal ones, he seems comfortable having other people in the picture. His 70th marathon supplied the group photograph in motion.