In May 2013, Courtney Ellenbogen needed 67 strokes to finish a round of golf in Oklahoma. She made six birdies, helped Duke win the NCAA Central Regional, and moved from a tie for thirtieth into a tie for eighth. It was a satisfying way to finish a tournament: the individual score improved, and the whole team went home with something.
Years later, Ellenbogen would be talking about a different kind of shared result. As co-founder of Aesthetic Partners, she would argue for deals in which the people on both sides still wanted to work together after the documents were signed. The scorecard had changed. The interesting question remained how an individual’s ambitions could contribute to a larger enterprise.
It is tempting to draw a straight line from competitive sport to business leadership. Straight lines are wonderfully convenient for profile writers. People usually take a more complicated route. Ellenbogen’s includes junior golf, an economics degree, investment banking, private equity, Harvard Business School, and a company she built with Faraz Karbasi. Each chapter has its own evidence of what she chose to spend time doing.
A Virginia teenager with somewhere to be
Ellenbogen grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia. Before university, her golf schedule was already taking her far beyond it. In 2007 she won the Rolex Tournament of Champions and the Mizuno Junior at Chateau Elan. That summer, the American Junior Golf Association announced her selection for the U.S. PING Junior Solheim Cup team as a captain’s pick.
The competition took her to Båstad, Sweden, where twelve American girls faced twelve Europeans. A teenager from Blacksburg was now part of an international team. The invitation mattered on its own terms: a place earned in a competitive junior field, with a national team shirt to go with the luggage.
She also qualified for the U.S. Women’s Open in 2007 and 2008. These were appearances in a professional championship while she was still an amateur. There is a useful distinction between enjoying golf and arranging your adolescence around qualifying for that tournament. Ellenbogen’s early record belongs firmly to the second category.
At Blacksburg High School, she lettered for four years on the boys’ golf team and helped it win two state championships. The sporting background extended into the family: her father, Bill, played professional football. Her grandmother Wilma graduated from Duke in 1941. When Ellenbogen went to Duke, there was both a family connection and an athletic career of her own to pursue.
The round that came together
Her first college season supplied an early result worth remembering. At the 2009 Tar Heel Invitational, she opened with a two-under-par 70. Four birdies, including one on the first hole, put the Duke freshman one shot off the lead after the opening round. Coach Dan Brooks credited the work she had been putting into her swing.
A few months later, in January 2010, she finished fifth at the Harder Hall Invitational in Florida. Her four rounds included a 68, and her total left her three strokes behind the winning score. The field included Alexis Thompson. These were substantial competitive company and substantial results for a first-year university student.
By her senior spring, the regional championship in Oklahoma offered another kind of satisfaction. Her first two rounds were 73 and 75. On the last day, she produced the 67. One bogey accompanied those six birdies; Duke finished six strokes ahead of Oklahoma.
“It was just a smooth round all the way around.”Courtney Ellenbogen, May 2013
The line is pleasingly free of ceremony. A good day at work, described by someone who knew exactly what had gone into it. The team photograph from that tournament preserves the collective part: matching blue shirts, a coach, teammates, and a result that belonged to all of them.
Learning to buy, deciding to build
Ellenbogen graduated from Duke in 2013 with a B.S. in Economics. Her subsequent career included investment banking at Deutsche Bank and private equity at The Carlyle Group, where she worked on its flagship buyout fund. Those jobs put her on the financial side of businesses: studying them, assessing them, and considering where investment could lead.
Her experience also spans Johnson & Johnson and the seed investor Victress Capital. By the time she was completing an MBA at Harvard Business School, she had encountered businesses through several different institutional windows. The next step was to take responsibility for one herself.
Ellenbogen and Karbasi started Aesthetic Partners in 2018 while completing their MBAs. They used a search fund approach: raise backing, find an existing business, acquire it, and operate it. It is a route into entrepreneurship with an unusual opening assignment. Before you can run your company, you have to find it.
They acquired their first business in Miami after a search lasting only a few months. That early speed followed a deliberate conversation about what they wanted to build. Ellenbogen has described geographic selection as central to their planning: markets with room to grow, expanding populations and household incomes, and an acquisition environment they could navigate.
“The geographic strategy was the most important thing”Courtney Ellenbogen, reflecting on the company’s early choices
Florida and North Carolina emerged from that process. The practical point is easy to miss in a founder story. The pair were choosing both an industry and places in which to operate. A promising category could still produce a poor business if the local conditions made expansion too difficult or expensive.
Keeping the name on the door
As Aesthetic Partners expanded, its proposition centered on helping established founders grow while preserving their brands. Ellenbogen’s work sits inside that relationship. She is an entrepreneur negotiating with other entrepreneurs, each of whom has already built something with a reputation, a team, and a way of doing things.
In November 2023, the company announced its partnership with Norwest. By then, it reported having added twenty practices since 2019, across California, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. Norwest’s Sonya Brown and Scott Mitchell joined its board. The stated purpose was to fund infrastructure and expansion.
Ellenbogen described a selective approach to partnerships and a desire to complement the expertise already present in the businesses. Karbasi, meanwhile, described the two co-founders as sharing a competitive nature. His account placed that competitiveness alongside the partner founders’ wish to preserve their teams, brands, and culture.
There is a recognizable business tension here. Shared ownership makes it possible to provide resources across a network. Local identity gives an individual business much of its meaning. Ellenbogen’s chosen model asks those things to coexist. It makes the relationship between the central team and each founder an operating concern, with consequences well beyond the acquisition meeting.
The support involved is often resolutely ordinary: recruiting, marketing, payroll, accounting, business reporting, and help with real estate. Lease negotiations rarely make the cover of a business magazine. They do, however, help determine whether the next location opens and whether its numbers work.
Marketing · accounting
Founder relationships
A conceptual view of the company’s stated model, rather than a measure of financial results.
The CEO’s calendar gives the game away
When Ellenbogen spoke at Harvard Business School’s Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Conference in 2023, the lessons shared afterward were strikingly practical. Recruit senior talent sooner than seems necessary. Approach deals with the long relationship in mind. Devote a substantial part of leadership to building the team.
Those priorities describe a particular version of the founder’s job. Hiring takes time. Functional expertise has to exist before an ambitious plan can be carried out reliably. People across the business need ownership of initiatives. A chief executive can have a persuasive presentation and still lack the organization required to deliver it.
“Hire earlier and higher than you think you need to.”Advice shared from Ellenbogen’s 2023 Harvard appearance
Her 2025 conversation with Annie Robertson Hockey on the Platform Perspectives podcast returned to the same territory. The discussion explored flexible partnerships, individual business identities, and alignment across a growing organization. The recurring subject was how to work with differences inside a company whose members share a broader ambition.
There is restraint in that approach. A leader can announce a uniform process in an afternoon. Earning participation takes longer and involves other people having opinions. Ellenbogen’s public leadership advice accepts that time cost. It places the people implementing a decision near the center of the decision itself.
Still room in the bag
Her life beyond the company has its own variety. Ellenbogen’s Duke alumni biography lists cycling, skiing, golf, and backpacking in national parks in the United States and abroad. Her college biography also records that she plays classical piano. There are several ways to spend a free afternoon here, and very few involve sitting still.
The golf connection continues, although her alumni biography treats keeping up her game with a touch of humor. Competition once meant a tournament calendar and a place in the lineup. These days, her public work also includes speaking to people considering entrepreneurship. In 2025, she joined entrepreneur and Aesthetic Partners board member Kent Weaver to talk with students at UCLA Anderson.
That puts her on the other side of the classroom conversation she once entered as an MBA student. She can now discuss the search, the first acquisition, the hiring decisions, and the challenge of growing alongside other founders. The useful material is in those particulars. A company is a sequence of choices made with other people, and her advice keeps returning to the people.
Back in Oklahoma, the final-round number was 67. It was precise, public, and immediately useful to the team. Leading a growing business offers fewer neat endings. Ellenbogen’s stated priorities suggest where she intends to keep working: selecting partners carefully, bringing in expertise early, and building an organization in which individual ambition has room to contribute.