Justin Hillenbrand and the case for staying in the middle

A bigger fund can look like the obvious next step. More capital, larger transactions, a new rung on the ladder. Justin Hillenbrand’s founding story turns on a different choice. He and Dan Collin had spent years getting to know the middle market. When their employer began looking further up the size scale, they decided that the work they had already done was worth building a business around.

Monomoy Capital Partners opened in 2005. The decision to start it had a practical foundation: a network, a market and experience they wanted to keep using. There is something pleasingly unfashionable about that origin. Finance is full of invitations to move up. Hillenbrand and Collin saw an opportunity to stay close to companies they understood.

Twenty-one years later, Hillenbrand remains a founding partner and co-chief executive officer. The firm reported more than $5.3 billion in assets under management in October 2026. Its territory includes manufacturing, distribution and services, with an emphasis on North America. The organization has grown considerably. The original question still has work to do: what can an investor contribute to a business beyond the money required to buy it?

A lender’s first question

Hillenbrand’s career began with lending. After Boston College, he worked at Prudential Capital Group’s mezzanine lending platform, then moved to KPS Capital Partners as an investment professional. His education was in finance. His early work put that education in contact with businesses that had to generate cash.

Lending gives the word “eventually” a rather strict deadline. An ambitious plan may be persuasive, but a payment comes due on a date. In his reflections on his first job, Hillenbrand emphasized what he learned about a company’s ability to produce cash and the difference investment resources could make when directed toward useful strategic work.

That perspective helps explain the kinds of companies Monomoy pursues. They make, distribute or supply things. Their operations have consequences that extend beyond an investment presentation. A customer needs a product; a business needs the resources to deliver it. The investor’s assessment must reach into those relationships and routines.

The attraction of operational improvement is straightforward. A business can have customers and useful products while still having substantial room to improve how it works. The opportunity depends on understanding the gap between what exists and what could function better. It also depends on finding people capable of doing the work after a transaction closes.

The market they chose to keep

Before Monomoy, Hillenbrand and Collin were developing a deal-sourcing network for a middle-market-sized fund at another private equity firm. As that firm pursued a substantially larger fund, its direction was moving away from the market they had been cultivating. They decided to continue with that market themselves.

It was a choice about where their knowledge would remain useful. Relationships take time to establish. Familiarity with companies and sectors accumulates unevenly, through conversations, transactions and opportunities that never become transactions. Starting again with a larger pool of capital can mean starting again with part of that knowledge, too.

Monomoy’s subsequent growth gives the founding decision an interesting second act. By June 2016, the firm had closed its third fund with approximately $767 million in commitments, exceeding a $650 million target. It had grown from three founders into a larger organization. A business established to keep working in a particular market was becoming a substantial institution in its own right.

In July 2024, Fund V closed at $2.25 billion, including a $250 million general partner commitment. Its limited partner allocation was filled within eight weeks of launch, and the final close took five months. Those are fundraising measures. They describe the resources entrusted to the firm, rather than the eventual results of putting those resources to work.

The distinction matters to Hillenbrand’s story. Fundraising creates another set of obligations for a founder. The organization must have the people, information and judgment to match its new capacity. A larger fund can be announced in a paragraph. The daily arrangements needed to manage it deserve rather more space.

Giving the firm a memory

One of Monomoy’s arrangements is Beacon, its proprietary sourcing engine. Hillenbrand helped develop it from the firm’s emphasis on deal origination. A sourcing network is valuable while its knowledge remains accessible. Beacon gives that knowledge a place to live beyond individual recollection.

Renn Iaboni, a Monomoy managing director, has described a system built on DealCloud that tracks deals, contacts, themes and outcomes. In his account, more than fifteen years of proprietary information is available across the organization. Business development, investment and credit teams can consult the same body of work rather than repeatedly begin from an empty page.

The underlying problem is familiar in almost any workplace. Someone knows why a decision was made, but that person is away. A promising conversation occurred, but its context lives in somebody’s inbox. A company has been studied before, but the next team has to reconstruct the work. A shared system can preserve some of what would otherwise disappear.

Iaboni’s example involves Waupaca, the iron foundry business. Monomoy first learned about the opportunity at a trade show in 2019. Over subsequent years, the firm recorded further conversations and related sector opportunities. By the time the acquisition process arrived, it had accumulated a history to consult. The example is about preparation over time, rather than a sudden flash of recognition.

For Hillenbrand, the implications reach into his own working day. He has described analyzing Beacon information alongside recruiting questions and economic research. The co-CEO’s attention moves between potential investments and the organization that evaluates them. A founder who once built a network now helps maintain the habits that allow a larger team to use it.

What the companies actually do

Thetford offers a useful view of the businesses behind the financial vocabulary. Monomoy acquired it in 2021, and Hillenbrand is listed on its investment team alongside Drew Davis, Danny Kaplan and Ryan Curtis. Ben Humphreys and Dan Gustafson are listed on the operating team. The division of work is visible in the names, not just in a statement of strategy.

The company supplies recreational vehicle and manufactured housing markets. Its products cover sanitation, plumbing, refrigeration, cooking and electrical needs. Its footprint extends across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, with headquarters listed in Etten-Leur in the Netherlands and Goshen, Indiana. These are the components that make outdoor living rather more comfortable than the phrase might suggest.

Thetford’s 2025 acquisition of Dave Carter & Associates added distribution capabilities in electrical, plumbing and building supplies. The example places Monomoy’s work inside an existing chain of manufacturers, dealers and customers. Growth can involve adding capabilities to a business already serving that chain, with the practical questions that combination brings.

The firm’s newest announced investment, on October 8, 2026, was Creedence Energy Services. Founded in North Dakota in 2014, Creedence provides chemical solutions for energy infrastructure. Its existing leadership team will continue to guide the company, and co-founder and CEO Kevin Black retains a significant ownership interest.

Creedence adds a current example to the firm he co-leads: an established company with technical work, customer relationships and a founder remaining involved. The announced plans include geographic expansion and development of products and services. They are plans for the business ahead, which will require work from the people operating it.

Choosing a different answer

When Hillenbrand reflected on consequential decisions in his career, he singled out partnering with Collin. His explanation rested on complementary perspectives. Choosing a familiar person to start a business can feel comfortable, but he put value on the diversity of thought a partnership brings.

Two people sharing responsibility must still reach decisions. Different perspectives can sharpen an assessment, provided the disagreement has somewhere useful to go. In Hillenbrand’s account, partnership is part of the firm’s construction, as consequential as the market it selected. The choice of colleagues affects what an organization notices and what it is prepared to question.

His approach to improvement also turns inward. The organization buying businesses needs to examine its own decisions. His advice is direct:

“Understand your mistakes, share them openly”

Justin Hillenbrand · 2025

The next step in his account is to establish processes that prevent repetition. Acknowledgment alone leaves the next person to make the same error. A useful lesson has to change something: the information collected, the conversation held or the way a decision is reviewed.

Hillenbrand has also emphasized recruiting people with stronger capabilities than his own and building a team environment around humility and accountability. Those priorities suggest an expanding definition of a founder’s job. Individual judgment remains necessary. So does creating conditions in which other people can contribute judgment worth hearing.

The next country on the map

Outside the investment work, Hillenbrand’s connection to Boston College has continued. A member of the class of 1998 with a B.S. in finance, he appears on the university’s 2026–2027 Board of Trustees. The link stretches from undergraduate education to responsibility for an institution he once attended.

His personal ambitions have a different geography. He wants to visit every country in the world with his two daughters. It is an ambitious family project on its own terms, with a map large enough to keep everyone occupied.

There are smaller details, too: affection for chocolate chip cookies, an aversion to neckties, and a family habit of choosing destinations they have not visited before. The traveler seeks another place to explore. The investor has spent decades developing knowledge of a particular market. Both pursuits require time, but only one comes with the reasonable hope of a better hotel view.

Hillenbrand’s career began with a question about cash and acquired a second question about where to build. The answers gave Monomoy its starting point. Keeping the firm useful as it grows has become the continuing assignment: choosing colleagues, retaining knowledge and helping businesses improve. The next destination may change. There is still plenty to do in the middle.