A Better Path for Owners of Small, Well-Built Businesses
We provide stability, leadership continuity, and patient capital that respects your legacy.
For Business Owners
You have decided it is time to move into your next chapter. But you have also spent decades investing in the people who helped you build your business – your team, your customers, your suppliers, and your community. Your employees feel like family and your company has become part of the fabric of where you live.
We understand that responsibility. Our approach is to partner with owners on a thoughtful, responsible transition that protects what you have built and carries your legacy forward.
There are plenty of buy-grow-exit private equity groups focused on quickly stripping out costs, pushing short-term numbers, and moving on. That is not us. We bring long-term, patient capital – and a commitment to strengthening companies, supporting their people, and investing in the communities they anchor.
Our focus is deliberately narrow.
We acquire small manufacturing and service businesses — roughly $2 million to $8 million in revenue — one at a time, with capital raised for each individual transaction. Rawhide Capital is not a fund. There is no pool of committed capital and no mandate to deploy it, which means we are never buying anything because a clock is running.
We buy businesses we have a personal reason to care about. A component manufacturer whose product I use. An FBO I want to fly out of. A flight school worth keeping in the air. That is a genuine filter, and it rules out far more than it lets in.
A note on Rawhide Executive Solutions
I also run a separate advisory practice, Rawhide Executive Solutions, for owner-led companies in the $20–75 million range preparing for a transition.
The two do not overlap, and one is not a path to the other. Those companies are several times larger than anything Rawhide Capital buys. Companies I work with through the advisory practice — and any company reviewed through advisory work — are not acquisition candidates for Rawhide Capital, during the engagement or after it, and advisory information is never used for acquisition sourcing. That boundary is written into every advisory engagement.
Matt Gillespie
Managing Partner
I have spent my career leading and strengthening small and mid-sized businesses – the kind that anchor communities and create real opportunity. For eight years as CEO of a single-family office, I oversaw a portfolio of more than a dozen operating companies and 100+ commercial properties — manufacturing, service, a national consumer brand, and commercial real estate, working closely with founders and leadership teams to preserve what made their businesses special while positioning them for long-term success. Before that, as COO, I led the turnaround and rapid scaling of a multi-division manufacturing and service company, giving me the firsthand experience in the operational, financial, and people challenges owners face.
I founded Rawhide Capital to provide a better path for owners ready for their next chapter – one grounded in the stewardship, continuity, and deep respect for the legacy they have built. My approach blends operational discipline with patient capital to strengthen companies, support their people, and invest in the communities they call home.
