Tarrus Richardson grew up above a dance floor. His father bought a bar in Bellwood, Illinois, outside Chicago, and the family lived in the apartment upstairs. On weekends, Tarrus and his brother Lyneir cleaned the bar and its parking lot. Business ownership arrived with chores attached. The view from upstairs was unusually instructive: downstairs was an enterprise that had to earn its living, one customer at a time.
In 1978, the purchase price was $120,000. His father had worked nights and weekends in a bar to learn the trade before buying one. He borrowed and gathered investment from other people to make the purchase possible. Richardson remembers the family enterprise as an early education in acquiring a business, then doing the work required to keep it going. There was little opportunity to confuse owning something with merely admiring it.
Years later, Richardson would build IMB Partners around buying and growing companies. The businesses became larger. The paperwork became more elaborate. Yet his beginning remains useful to the story because it makes the idea of acquisition pleasantly concrete. A seller, a buyer, borrowed money, and people prepared to show up: the mechanics were there before he had a finance degree.
A career discovered on the page
At 17, Richardson read a magazine article about Reginald Lewis buying and selling McCall Patterns. A Black businessman was making money through ownership on a scale far beyond the family enterprise. Richardson looked at his mother and saw a career worth pursuing.
“Now that looks like a good job,” he recalled saying. It is a wonderfully undressed reaction to a complicated profession. Before the acronyms, the recruiting process, and the investment committees, there was a teenager deciding that this particular adult seemed to have found interesting work.
Lewis’s example stayed with him. Buying businesses could produce wealth, and wealth could support a wider community. Richardson would later become connected to Lewis’s family: Loida Lewis was among IMB’s early investors, and he helped Christina Lewis establish All Star Code as its founding board chair. The example on a magazine page eventually became a set of working relationships.
“You can’t be what you can’t see.”
Tarrus Richardson, on Reginald Lewis’s influence
The sentence helps explain why Richardson also put money behind stories. He was a lead funder of BlackPurdue and Reginald Lewis - the Making of a Billion Dollar Empire. A documentary can introduce someone to a history they did not encounter in a classroom. For a teenager considering a future, the right example can make a profession visible enough to investigate.
Seventy percent, then the apprenticeship
At Purdue, Richardson studied accounting and participated in the Dr. Cornell Bell Business Opportunity Program. In 1990, he became the university’s first Black student body president. He and running mate Tina Mattingly won 70 percent of the vote. His campaign had reached across the student population; the result put him in a leadership role before his professional career began.
Graduating in 1991 gave him a degree. Finding his way into finance also involved people. Purdue alumnus Kelvin Pennington advised him to gain Wall Street experience. Bill Strong, a senior mergers and acquisitions executive at Salomon Brothers, helped him through the interview process. Richardson’s first analyst job followed. Pennington would eventually become a senior partner at IMB, giving an early introduction a remarkably long working life.
His route also led to Ghana, where he co-founded Gold Coast Securities. An investment bank in Accra offered a different setting for the practical questions he had begun learning in New York: how businesses raise money, how owners make decisions, and how capital gets organized around an opportunity. He then earned his MBA at Harvard Business School in 1996, where he was a Robert Toigo Fellow.
Richardson worked at JLL Partners before co-founding ICV Partners in 1998. The firm invested in smaller businesses and counted American Securities and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City among its founding supporters. By 2003, he was appearing in business coverage as a financier helping oversee a group of operating companies. The magazine reader had entered the industry he had chosen.
Leaving room for the owner’s next act
He founded IMB in 2010. For years, the firm operated as an independent sponsor, raising capital for individual transactions. That format required a company and its financing to come together deal by deal. Eventually, IMB completed eight platform investments through that approach before announcing its first institutional fund.
The focus settled on businesses serving utilities, infrastructure, and government agencies. These are enterprises with work to deliver and customers who need it done. Richardson’s firm looks for established relationships and visibility into recurring contracted revenue. A business can be unfamiliar to the general public and still occupy a consequential place in its customers’ operations.
IMB’s Two-Step Buyout gives an owner an upfront payment and the opportunity to retain equity and remain involved. A later sale or recapitalization can provide another financial realization. The structure leaves room for someone who has built a company to keep participating in its development, with additional capital and operating support alongside them.
An owner receives cash and can retain equity.
Management and IMB pursue growth and operating improvements.
A sale or recapitalization can deliver further proceeds.
The question becomes particularly interesting when the owners are still eager to work. In July 2023, IMB partnered with eTelligent Group. Its leaders, Rohit Aggarwal and Ritesh Bansal, had seen their business double in two years and wanted resources to sustain that growth. They were looking for help with the next stage of the company they already knew.
Their experience gives the partnership idea some practical detail. IMB developed a 100-day plan and helped add operational and financial support. Both parties were interested in the Entrepreneurial Operating System, a framework for aligning goals and accountability. For the company’s leaders, the appeal included a shared approach to how work would be organized after the transaction. The agreement had a calendar attached.
Richardson also returned to an earlier working relationship when Lenora Robinson Mills became IMB’s first chief operating officer in 2023. They had worked together at ICV between 2008 and 2010. Her return brought experience in operations, banking, and private equity into a firm that had crossed $1 billion in portfolio revenue in 2022. People he had worked with years earlier were helping shape its next phase.
The patient part of the arithmetic
By the end of 2024, IMB had closed its inaugural institutional fund with $125.5 million in committed capital against a $100 million target. The firm announced the close in February 2025. Its investor group numbered 100. Richardson described a demanding fundraising process in which the team kept taking meetings and welcomed accredited investors with smaller checks.
Elsewhere in the portfolio, the financial events followed years of operating work. IMB entered military food supply through Alder Foods in 2016, added Richmond Wholesale in 2020, and invested in Elite Brands in 2021. The three became Pro Food Solutions. In 2024, a $153 million debt financing included $130 million for existing debt repayment and a shareholder distribution. Those proceeds came after work on profitability, management, and the organization.
The e&e IT Consulting investment offers another view of the timetable. Its original vehicle dated to June 2014. Over the following years, the company expanded into the Philadelphia region and acquired E24x7 in Florida. In October 2025, IMB announced a continuation vehicle that let existing investors exit or carry their investment forward. Ownership could continue while individual investors made different decisions about their own timing.
More people in the picture
Richardson’s work outside transactions includes the Council of Urban Professionals, which he founded in 2007. The organization focuses on developing and connecting diverse leaders. His role at All Star Code brought him into a different setting, helping young men of color gain coding and entrepreneurial skills. The two organizations address different stages of a working life, from discovering a field to finding a professional network.
He also serves as a gubernatorial appointee on the Maryland State Retirement and Pension System’s board of trustees, including its investment committee. In 2024, he received the Reginald F. Lewis Lifetime Achievement Award. The award’s name connects neatly with the teenager who once looked up from an article and decided he wanted to learn the acquisition business.
There is room for less solemn interests, too. Richardson lists deep house music, salsa, and reggaeton among his preferences. Martha’s Vineyard and Miami are favorite vacation destinations. The music gives his biography a welcome change of tempo. A private equity career can contain a great deal of sitting; his stated tastes offer the reader permission to imagine a different soundtrack.
The work continues with businesses far from a dance floor. In July 2026, IMB announced its investment in Strategic Land Services, a Georgia contractor preparing sites for electric utility infrastructure. Its crews handle grading, clearing, drainage, access roads, and other civil work. It is a fitting current chapter for Richardson: an existing business, people who know their trade, and an ownership partnership intended to help them grow. Before anything can rise, someone has to prepare the ground.