Jake Sloane and the art of selling without leaving

The founder sells most of the business. Then comes the less cinematic part: the founder goes back to work. The name can stay above the door. The team still has a leader it recognizes. Some of the equity stays local, too. This is the arrangement Jake Sloane keeps returning to, whether the business handles a building’s mechanical systems, a company’s accounts or an office’s IT. The closing dinner is allowed to end. The relationship is expected to continue.

For Sloane, that continuing relationship has become a career. He is the New York-based co-founder and co-CEO of Springdale Industries, which he leads with Frank Zhang. Their work addresses a familiar predicament for owners: years of value may be tied up in one business, yet selling it can feel like surrendering the thing they most want to keep building. A majority sale with a retained stake gives the next chapter a financial structure.

It also gives the buyer an obligation. If the founder stays, the new partner has to be useful. Capital helps. So can recruiting, financial support and better tools. The promise acquires substance in the everyday decisions that follow: which system to adopt, who to hire, how to grow without making a familiar company unrecognizable.

A partnership before a platform

Sloane and Zhang met as analysts at Blackstone. Sloane worked in mergers and acquisitions, with exposure to media, chemicals and financial services companies, before moving to Carlyle. His education followed another recognizable route through institutional America: a political science degree from Harvard, earned magna cum laude, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. The credentials were conventional. The businesses that would occupy him were rooted far beyond those institutions.

In 2016, the pair left Wall Street to build together. What followed has the geography of local enterprise: commercial services, residential services, accounting, youth enrichment and IT. The Springdale name reaches back to Arkansas and a formative partnership in the founders’ journey. It is an unusually specific name for a business whose ambitions spread across the country. A place can be a useful reminder of where an idea acquired customers.

By 2020, they had co-founded the commercial services business now called Crete United. In June 2022, Ridgemont Equity Partners supplied growth capital. The arrangement joined local brands through shared administrative support while preserving operating independence. It was a concrete version of the bargain Sloane would keep making: more resources behind the business, with local leadership still responsible for the work.

In January 2024, Crete had 40 businesses and reported annual revenue of $680 million. It covered commercial HVAC, electrical, plumbing and building automation. Those are services where execution happens in particular buildings, carried out by particular teams. A national organization can arrange the resources. The customer still needs someone to turn up and get the job done. Sloane’s model leaves room for both levels of responsibility.

The accountant’s name stays on the door

The move into accounting made the same bargain visible in another setting. Current, originally called Crete Professionals Alliance, began with RRBB in Somerset, New Jersey, in August 2023. RRBB had about $20 million in revenue. Two months later, it added Mendonca & Partners, bringing international tax expertise into the group. The first partnership was already becoming a base from which to build.

By June 2025, Current reported more than $300 million in annual revenue and over 20 firm partnerships. Those are platform figures, distinct from the revenue of the initial firm. The growth brought an operating question with it: how do you give established practices access to a larger organization while preserving the relationships that made clients choose them?

Larson Gross supplied a revealing example. When the Washington accounting firm announced its partnership in February 2025, it had a 75-year history and more than 200 employees. Its existing partners brought Crete Professionals Alliance into their partnership. The firm’s name and leadership would continue. Sloane’s pitch emphasized preserving autonomy while providing national resources. For a long-established practice, continuity was part of the proposition.

There is a pleasant absence of glamour in these details. Recruiting and administration rarely make a founder’s eyes light up. Yet removing some of that burden can give a firm room to grow. The arrangement puts a larger support structure behind the people clients already know. It asks the platform to earn its place through work that may be noticed most when it stops getting in the way.

In November 2025, Current announced its 30th firm partnership, with Accuity in Honolulu. In July 2026, RRBB announced its fifth additional firm since joining the platform. One detail moves the map outward; the other shows growth within the original partnership. Together, they describe two kinds of expansion Sloane’s work makes possible: adding partners and helping existing partners do more.

The speed of putting things together

A sentence from Sloane’s 2025 Forbes Iconoclast appearance gives the story its necessary friction. He identified integration speed as a constraint on growth. The panel concerned AI growth opportunities. His answer pointed toward the less photogenic work of making businesses function together. It is a useful admission from someone whose career involves building through partnerships.

“The biggest disruptor to our ability to grow faster is how fast can we integrate.”

Jake Sloane · Forbes Iconoclast Summit, 2025

Buying and integrating run on different schedules. Ownership can change on a date agreed by lawyers. People have to learn systems, reconcile habits and decide which decisions belong where. That observation is the practical tension in Sloane’s approach. The local operator is meant to retain agency; the national organization is meant to make shared resources useful. Both promises need to survive contact with the working week.

Shield Technology Partners brings that tension into IT. Its full public launch came in June 2025. Sloane described a model in which Shield acquires roughly 60 to 90 percent of an operator’s equity, with owners retaining a local stake. His shorthand was “local ownership, national capabilities.” The percentages give the phrase a consequence: the person running the business still has money invested in what happens next.

Sloane’s account of technology choices was equally revealing. New partners would not be required to move immediately onto one technology stack. Centralization would develop collaboratively over time. The financial logic of scale can make uniformity tempting. His description allowed a slower process in which operators helped work out what should be shared. Autonomy, in this telling, has to extend into decisions people actually make.

By February 2026, Shield had announced a $100 million investment from Thrive Holdings, with capital intended for product development and acquisitions. It reported nine partner firms and more than 1,500 customers. Technology added another layer to the familiar ownership bargain. The partner would gain both operating support and new tools; the platform would need to make those tools work across businesses with existing customers and routines.

The work behind the class

Rocket Youth offers a different view of the same idea. Sloane, Zhang and Eric Rapps founded the youth enrichment business, which launched in March 2024. By an early 2025 announcement, it had expanded into basketball, volleyball, lacrosse, swimming and gymnastics. Its offer to local operators included growth support and help with the administrative load behind a class, a practice or a program.

Payroll, accounting, marketing and expansion planning are a long way from the moment a coach helps a child learn a skill. They are nevertheless part of keeping the organization running. Rocket Youth’s partnership structure lets operators retain their brands and day-to-day control while drawing on shared support. Here, the work Sloane backs is performed in a setting where families encounter the local business directly.

That connection to young people also appears outside his ventures. Sloane serves on the board of the Heckscher Foundation for Children, alongside Zhang. He lives in New York with his wife, son and daughter. These are modest personal details, but they give a business career a wider setting: a hometown, a family and a board commitment beyond the next transaction.

A longer clock

Springdale Industries began operations in April 2025 as an internally managed permanent-capital vehicle. Sloane and Zhang also control ZBS Partners. Several earlier platforms, including Crete United, Current and Shield, are ZBS investments. The distinction matters to understanding Sloane’s career: years of work preceded the formation of Springdale, and the same founders connect separate organizations.

The permanent-capital structure expresses their current ambition to build with a longer horizon. Springdale presents partnerships in which founders keep meaningful ownership, with resources to support the business over time. That promise returns Sloane to the question running through his earlier work. What does a buyer owe an owner who has agreed to stay?

The answer has to arrive in useful increments. A hire. A system that works. Support that frees someone to spend more time with customers. A decision the local leader still gets to make. The financial transaction creates the relationship; those smaller acts give it value. For Sloane, the founder returning to work is the beginning of the story worth following. There is still a business to build in the morning.