Daniel Collin and the education that never ends

Daniel Collin’s route into finance included a sales floor at Bloomingdale’s. After his sophomore year at Tulane, his summer plans changed. He sold suits instead of taking the usual internship. A customer, J.P. Morgan Florida vice chairman Bruce Prolow, came into the store; the encounter led to an internship in Palm Beach. Collin had come prepared with a résumé. There are more conventional recruitment strategies, but few that offer quite so literal a chance to measure up.

The detail matters because it complicates the tidy career narrative that tends to follow a successful financier. Once the job titles accumulate, the beginning can look inevitable. A department store restores the contingency. Someone had to walk through the door. Someone else had to be ready. Opportunity, in this version, involved customer service before it involved investment committees.

Today Collin is a founding partner and co-chief executive officer of Monomoy Capital Partners, based in Greenwich, Connecticut. His work spans investment strategy, relationships with investors and collaboration with portfolio company managers. Those responsibilities require several kinds of fluency: understanding a business, explaining an investment and helping people act on a plan. The suit salesman’s first lesson has aged rather well.

Buying a business means learning its habits

Collin earned a Bachelor of Science in Management at Tulane. He became an investment banker at JP Morgan Chase, concentrating on industrial businesses, then worked at KPS Capital Partners before starting Monomoy in 2005 with Justin Hillenbrand and Stephen Presser. The progression took him from advising on businesses to investing in their improvement. A transaction could become the beginning of a relationship rather than its final deliverable.

Monomoy’s early investment thesis concerned the smaller end of the middle market, where businesses needing turnaround expertise could have difficulty finding willing capital. In an early account of the firm, Collin described demand exceeding the founders’ expectations. Kurz-Kasch, an example discussed at the time, combined a strong position in its product niche with a need for financial and operational restructuring. The attraction lay in the possibility of improving an existing business.

That is a useful distinction for understanding his career. A company can possess something customers value while still operating badly. Conversely, a handsome acquisition presentation can conceal an ordinary business. Deciding which situation is which is part of the investor’s work. Ownership then brings a second question: can the buyer and the management team actually deliver the changes they have imagined?

An older Monomoy biography described Collin’s competitive temperament and analytical strength. It also listed board responsibilities at HTPG, Kurz-Kasch and MPI, where he was chairman. These were concrete obligations inside the portfolio, beyond the search for another acquisition. The picture is of a financier whose professional life repeatedly returns to the businesses behind the numbers.

A boating retailer, far from the spreadsheet

In September 2017, Monomoy completed its approximately $337 million take-private acquisition of West Marine. The business had more than 249 stores across 37 states and Puerto Rico, an online and mail-order presence, and more than 4,000 employees. Its merchandise stretched from rope to marine electronics. The deal was made through Monomoy’s third fund, which had closed in 2016 with $767 million.

West Marine supplied a particularly tangible expression of the strategy. Here was a retailer with customers who needed real things for real boats, an extensive product assortment and a management team already running the operation. Collin’s announcement emphasized working with that team and the value the company provided to its customers and employees. The language of partnership had an identifiable counterpart across the table.

For a reader outside private equity, deals like this make the occupation easier to see. A fund buys an interest in an enterprise whose day continues after the press release: customers shop, employees work, suppliers deliver. The purchase price establishes the terms of entry. The subsequent decisions determine what ownership amounts to. Collin’s industrial and restructuring background belongs in that second part of the story.

The work after the handshake

Monomoy’s current approach brings its investment and operating professionals together from diligence through exit. The firm organizes its improvement plans around business foundations, cash generation, earnings expansion and strategic growth. Governance and reporting sit alongside working capital, product mix and expansion opportunities. It is an agenda with less glamour than a signing ceremony and rather more bearing on what happens afterward.

Consider the range of questions contained in that agenda. How much cash is tied up in the business? Which products contribute to earnings? What information reaches the people making decisions? These are explanatory examples of the operating problems such a plan addresses. They show why an investor needs colleagues who can work beyond the transaction model, and why company managers remain essential to the process.

The firm’s careers material makes the division of labor explicit. Senior operators bring experience in manufacturing, supply chains, pricing, general management or finance. Operating associates analyze products, customers and markets and help manage projects on site. Investment associates follow transactions through the ownership period. Different skills meet around the same company, which is a more practical proposition than expecting one spreadsheet to answer every question.

Across Monomoy’s private equity strategy, the firm says it has invested in more than 70 companies. Its active portfolio includes businesses in packaging, foundry work, automotive services and other industrial and consumer fields. The variety explains the importance of sharing experience across management teams. A lesson becomes more useful when someone besides its original student can apply it.

The capital grew; the obligations followed

On July 9, 2024, Monomoy announced the close of Fund V at $2.25 billion, including a $250 million general partner commitment. Its original target had been $1.6 billion. The limited partner allocation reached its hard cap within eight weeks, and the fundraising took five months overall. The previous private equity fund had closed in late 2021 at more than $1.1 billion.

These figures describe capital commitments to investment funds. They give the scale of the organization Collin helps lead. They also imply a larger task: finding and managing investments consistent with the approach that persuaded institutions to commit in the first place. A bigger fund supplies more resources; it also gives the investment process more to account for.

The firm’s review of 2024 recorded four platform investments, one portfolio company exit, eleven hires and eleven promotions. Set beside the fundraising, those smaller counts give a different view of expansion. Teams have to absorb new colleagues, assign responsibility and preserve working relationships while the capital base changes. Growth arrives in individual jobs as well as in a large number on a fundraising announcement.

The credit business added another chapter in November 2025. Monomoy’s third Credit Opportunities Fund closed above $500 million after reaching its target in ten months. Led by partner and head of credit strategies David Robbins, that strategy invests in senior secured debt in the firm’s familiar middle-market sectors. Equity ownership and lending bring different claims on a business, while both require an understanding of its operations and ability to generate cash.

The purple belt belongs in the biography

Away from the office, Collin trains at Greenwich Jiu Jitsu Academy, a partner gym of the nonprofit Guardian Project. In a public post about earning his purple belt, he emphasized the community around the achievement and the years it took. He described learning through challenge and through helping others advance. His emphasis was on what the community had taught him.

The belt is a useful counterweight to the executive title. A professional hierarchy can make it easy to spend a day surrounded by people waiting for your decision. Training offers another arrangement: progress depends on practice, instruction and other participants. In Collin’s own account, the community occupies the center of the milestone. The individual achievement comes with a roll call of gratitude.

His firm also places humility among its stated values, alongside teamwork, accountability, leadership, excellence and continuous improvement. It supports those ambitions with onboarding, mentorship, learning opportunities and team gatherings. The interesting connection is the repeated attention to other people: the portfolio manager, the colleague, the training partner. Each appears in a different setting, with something to teach.

“The real value comes from what I’ve learned about community.”Daniel Collin, on earning his purple belt

Still a student, twenty-one years in

At Monomoy’s twentieth-anniversary leadership discussion in 2025, Collin acknowledged investment mistakes and described becoming more supportive as a leader. He connected that change to jiu-jitsu. He also offered his younger self two reminders: scrutinize adjusted earnings and communicate clearly. “First, don’t believe EBITDA adjustments.” It is an unusually compact anniversary souvenir. Most firms order a commemorative pen.

The present-day firm provides plenty of opportunities to put those lessons to work. On July 1, 2026, Monomoy completed its acquisition of Jiffy Lube from a Shell subsidiary for approximately $1.3 billion. Jiffy Lube served about 19 million customers annually through more than 2,000 North American service centers. Its activities include oil changes, brakes, batteries and tires. The transaction brought a familiar consumer name into a portfolio built around operating businesses.

The contrast with a college summer is striking: a sales-floor encounter at one end, a nationwide service network at the other. Yet customer service remains an intelligible concern at either scale. Ownership of such a network introduces a host of relationships with franchisees and customers. The business cannot be understood solely through the headline price, however convenient that number may be.

A September 2026 account of Monomoy’s mid-year gathering described more than eighty colleagues coming together, with over ten leading discussions about transactions, applications for AI and future priorities. The day ended with basketball and bucket golf. There is something pleasingly ordinary about that final detail. A firm that manages institutional capital can still require an afternoon when colleagues catch up and somebody keeps score.

Collin has a wife and three sons. In reflecting on legacy, he placed family ahead of the firm. That preference changes the ending of the career story. The fund sizes remain, the deals remain, and the operating responsibilities remain. Alongside them is a person who still attends training, thanks the people helping him progress and has revised his approach to leadership. Twenty-one years after Monomoy began, the education continues.