There is a version of finance that gets all the attention: the funding rounds, the valuations, the founders on stage. Then there is the version that keeps the lights on in the rest of the economy - the landscaping company with 200 trucks, the accounting firm three partners are aging out of, the outpatient clinic that runs on paper. Liberty Partners built itself around the second one.
Founded in New York in 2019, Liberty Partners is a private equity firm that buys profitable, unglamorous companies in the lower middle market and grows them. Its offices are at 180 Maiden Lane in downtown Manhattan, and its investing thesis is unusually plain-spoken for the industry: the business is only as good as the person running it, so back the person. The firm concentrates on three sectors - healthcare, B2B services and financial services - and it reaches them through three different doors.
The ModelThree ways into the same kind of company
Most private equity firms have one motion. Liberty Partners runs three, and they are variations on a single idea: put an operator in charge and give them capital, not the other way around.
Liberty Search Ventures
Backs individual searchers - entrepreneurs who raise money to find and buy one company, then run it as CEO - alongside institutional investors.
OIR Program
Pairs the firm's capital and diligence with a seasoned operator who sources, acquires and personally runs the business.
Private Equity
Direct majority stakes and leveraged buyouts, grown through operational work and add-on acquisitions - the buy-and-build play.
The search fund is the oldest of the three, a model born decades ago at Stanford: one entrepreneur, one company, one long-term commitment to run it. Through Liberty Search Ventures, the firm invests in these searchers across the US, Mexico and Europe. The Operator-in-Residence program, formalized in 2024, is Liberty's own twist - instead of waiting for a searcher to appear, it recruits operators it already knows and builds deals around them. The third door is the most conventional: buy control of a good company outright, then make it bigger.
Creating great entrepreneurial stories by buying and building category-leading businesses alongside operators and entrepreneurs.
Liberty Partners, stated purposeThe OriginFrom fixing boilers to reading board decks
Liberty Partners did not start as investors who learned to operate. It started the other way around. The firm is an affiliate of Liberty One Group, which spent more than 20 years in real estate investing and, along the way, built and ran operating companies in facilities services, maintenance, construction, pest control and healthcare services. Two of the co-founders scaled those maintenance and construction affiliates to 350-400 employees before the fund existed.
That history shows up in how the partners describe their own work. Their range, in their words, runs "from fixing boilers to running a board meeting and executing M&A." It is a useful line because it draws the boundary of who they want to back: people comfortable at both ends of that sentence. Alon Amar, Daniel Turkel and Joe Rabinowitz co-founded the firm in 2019, moving deliberately from operating companies into what the industry calls entrepreneurship through acquisition.
The SectorsWhere the firm looks, and why
Liberty Partners keeps its focus narrow: healthcare, B2B services and financial services. None of it is fashionable, which is part of the point. These are fragmented industries full of profitable small companies whose owners are approaching retirement with no obvious successor - a gap the firm is built to fill. In healthcare, the interest sits in services rather than software: outpatient care networks, practice management, professional platforms. In B2B and facilities services, it is the kind of essential, repeatable work that does not go out of style.
The buy-and-build strategy is easiest to see in the portfolio. Raise Landscaping brings together some of Florida's top landscaping companies under one roof - a single platform assembled from category leaders, one acquisition at a time. Bridgepoint Alliance does the same in accounting and advisory. The pattern repeats: buy a strong first company, bolt on its neighbors, and let scale turn a collection of small operators into a category leader.
The DifferenceSkin in every game
Two things separate Liberty Partners from a standard buyout shop. The first is alignment: the partners invest their own capital alongside a select group of limited partners in every deal. That is a small phrase with large consequences - when the check is partly yours, the word "no" gets used more often, and the holding period tends to stretch. The firm talks about relationships that span "multiple decades and business ventures" rather than the three-to-five-year clock most funds run on.
The second is the operator. Private equity's oldest problem is the handoff: who actually runs the company after the deal closes? Liberty's answer is to solve that before the acquisition, not after. In the search fund, the searcher is the CEO from day one. In the Operator-in-Residence program, the operator is chosen first and the deal is built around them.
The firm's commitment to innovation and excellence in the healthcare and financial industries aligns perfectly with my passion for bringing small businesses together to build enduring companies.
Dan Astrachan · Operator-in-ResidenceThe OperatorsWho Liberty actually backs
In July 2024, Liberty Search Ventures announced a partnership with Dan Astrachan, an operator with more than a decade in healthcare and a background at Discover Health and Humana, to build outpatient care networks and professional service platforms across the medical and financial industries. Astrachan is also CEO of portfolio company Bridgepoint Alliance - a neat illustration of how the firm reuses the same people across roles.
He is not alone. Alec Atlas, a corporate development and M&A leader with a Kellogg MBA, focuses on food facility services, equipment maintenance and compliance testing. Sivu Mzamo, a CFA charterholder who spent five years in buyouts at Stone Point Capital, joined as an operator too. The through-line is a background that mixes finance with hands-on running of businesses - exactly the "both ends of the sentence" profile the founders describe.
Behind the operators sits a small, technical bench. Dan Bochner, a Principal who arrived in 2021 from Angelo Gordon, runs due diligence, searcher recruiting and the Operator-in-Residence program itself. Aakash Patel, a CFA charterholder and CPA, came from healthcare and SaaS M&A. Aryeh Mernick, the chief operations officer, has handled fund operations, accounting and investor reporting since 2016. It is a lean group by design - roughly two dozen people - and the structure mirrors the thesis: a compact investment team standing behind operators who carry the day-to-day weight.
Dan's expertise in integrating professional organizations to foster the growth of larger, more dynamic entities across medical and financial services enables him to focus on opportunities to develop outpatient care networks and professional service platforms.
Alon Amar · Co-Founder & GPThe MarketWhere it fits
Liberty Partners sits at the crossroads of two trends. One is the rise of the search fund and entrepreneurship-through-acquisition as a legitimate path - a corner of finance that has grown from an academic curiosity into a small industry, with dedicated backers like Pacific Lake and Anacapa. The other is the "silver tsunami" of retiring small-business owners looking for someone to hand the keys to. The firm's competitors range from search-fund specialists to independent sponsors and permanent-capital holding companies chasing the same fragmented, profitable targets.
What Liberty offers into that market is not scale - it is a roughly 23-person firm, deliberately small. It is a posture: operator-first, personally invested, patient. Whether that is enough to win the best deals is the open question every firm in this space faces. But the position is coherent, and in an industry that often sounds interchangeable, coherence is worth something.
The economics follow from the structure. Liberty raises from a select group of limited partners, commits its own capital beside them, and makes its returns the slow way - operational improvement and add-on acquisitions that compound over years, then an eventual exit. There is no shortcut baked into the model, which is arguably the point. Value that took a decade to build is harder to lose in a bad quarter, and a firm that plans to hold for "multiple decades" has to underwrite durability rather than momentum.
For an entrepreneur, the pitch is concrete: if you want to buy and run a company, Liberty is one of the firms that will fund the search and stand behind the operator, not just the spreadsheet. For a small-business owner ready to step back, it is a possible successor that plans to keep the thing running rather than flip it. And for anyone trying to understand where quiet money goes in the economy, Liberty Partners is a clean example - capital pointed at the businesses that rarely make headlines and rarely stop working.