July 2026
In 2025, private equity deals in the United States totaled a whopping $1.2 trillion in value, according to the financial data platform PitchBook. It was the second biggest year on record for private equity, trailing behind only the post-pandemic boom of 2021.
The rise in private equity activity nationwide, combined with Traverse City’s growth as a business hub and entrepreneurial ecosystem, means one thing: Private equity firms are eyeing the northern Michigan market like never before – and acquiring businesses here in virtually every industry sector.
Is this new type of attention good news or bad news for Traverse City? And how could it impact the status quo of a business scene that has long been characterized by mom-and-pop shops, family businesses, and local ownership?
The TCBN posed those questions and others to a pair of subject matter experts: Lowell Gruman, managing partner at the Traverse City-based venture capital firm Boomerang Catapult; and Andrew Nussbaum, managing director of Traverse City’s Golden Circle Investment Banking.
While Gruman doesn’t deal directly with private equity – “We are enablers and seed funders,” he said of Boomerang Catapult, versus the later-in-the-business-arc investments brought to bear by private equity – he’s well aware of its power and reach.
Nussbaum and Golden Circle, meanwhile, regularly help businesses court private equity investors.
A crash course in private equity
The Corporate Finance Institute defines private equity as “investment firms raising capital from institutional investors to acquire stakes in private companies or take public companies private.” From there, private equity firms will typically seek to achieve new operational efficiencies and improved performance metrics that translate to higher profitability. The goal is to grow the value of the business, often so that it can be sold again later at a profit.
GrumanAccording to Gruman, private equity is attractive for some investors because it offers more active participation and control than simply buying or selling the stocks of a publicly traded company. Almost all private equity firms, Gruman says, will execute their deals in such a way that they acquire majority or controlling stakes of the companies they are buying.
“They invest to control,” Gruman explained. “They often have provisions in the deal where they get to choose the CEO, so they can fire the current CEO if they want – who’s often the founder – and put their own person in charge. The idea is that, if they have control over the CEO, and if they control the board, they can instruct the company to do this or do that. They can bring new money in and ask the company to go in this direction rather than that one. With that level of control, private equity funds are in a position to take big swings, and what they’re looking for, always, is a big return.”
Private equity’s growth spurt
From 2017 to 2020, private equity deals in the U.S. ranged from $591 billion to $690 billion per year, per PitchBook. Coming out of the pandemic, though, that sector of the market got supercharged. A record-setting $1.268 trillion in private equity acquisitions occurred in 2021. Deal numbers fell back below $1 trillion – but stayed significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels – in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Then, they pushed back to 13-figure heights again last year.
Gruman says the stratospheric numbers are a result of market conditions elsewhere.
“We’re in a position at this moment in the American economy where there’s a lot of money looking for a better return than it’s getting elsewhere,” Gruman said. “We’re coming out of the low-interest rate environment. Things are nudging upward. But private equity is not looking for 7%, 10%, 12% return on investment; private equity is looking for the big bang. Investors are thinking, ‘My foundational money, I can put it in bonds and leave it there.’ But the speculative money is growing. It needs a home. And when you’ve got business confidence ticking upward, a lot of people will look at their investable resources and allocate more to the risky swaths of investing. That’s where private equity lives.”
While private equity investors are often portrayed as one-percenters, Gruman says the money fueling into these funds is far more diverse than most people realize.
Nussbaum“I was on the board for Interlochen Center for the Arts for nine years, and in managing our endowment fund, we would allocate 6% or 7% to private equity,” Gruman noted. “Most foundations will do something similar.”
More investor interest in private equity has meant more private equity firms, which has in turn equated to more private equity deals. It’s also led to a diversification in the private equity market, Gruman says. Investors aren’t just eyeing big metropolitan hubs anymore; they’re also looking seriously at smaller, lesser-known localities – and Traverse City has proven ripe for the harvest.
“There’s a lot of private equity speculation in the traditional centers in California and New York,” Gruman said, describing a riskier type of investing where private equity firms are buying up less proven companies in hopes they’ll land, say, the next tech giant. “But private equity in the Midwest is different. The private equity funds looking in this area, they want a proven track record, regular earnings – that kind of thing.”
“There are a lot of really small private equity funds popping up left and right every day, and these are not from the New Yorks and Chicagos of the world,” Nussbaum concurred. “What that ultimately means is there are a lot of people who see value in these small or well-run companies we have in Traverse City, and who know it’s a growing area.”
The Traverse City trendline
So, which northern Michigan businesses have sold to private equity? Examples from recent years abound, touching everything from manufacturing to automotive repair to food. Here are just a few:
- December 2019: The Troy, Michigan-based private equity firm Covington Capital announced the acquisition of Grand Traverse Plastics, a local manufacturer.
- March 2020: The Charter Growth Capital Fund, a “premier investment banking firm headquartered in Grand Rapids,” announced an investment in another northern Michigan manufacturer, Traverse City Products. Birmingham, Michigan-based private equity firm Colfax Creek Capital was identified as the lead investor.
- June 2021: News broke that Hillcrest Investment Partners, LLC, a private equity investment group based in Ann Arbor, had acquired Traverse City manufacturing giant Century, LLC. In a press release announcing the news, former Century owner and chairman Bill Janis touted the potential of Hillcrest “to leverage industry experience and continued investment in capabilities and technology” as a way of helping “accelerate Century’s growth trajectory and result in even better service for our customers.”
- September 2021: US LBM – a building materials distributor jointly owned by a pair of private equity firms, Bain Capital and Platinum Equity – announced the acquisition of Northern Building Supply, a northern Michigan construction materials company with a history dating back to 1904.
- March 2023: Petoskey-founded sweets chain Kilwins was acquired by Levine Leichtman Capital Partners (LLCP), a Los Angeles-based firm that describes itself as “an established middle market private equity firm with nearly four decades of successful U.S. and European Structured Private Equity investing.” The LLCP portfolio of business holdings includes numerous food companies with similar franchise-type business models as Kilwins, such as Tropical Smoothie Cafe, CiCi’s Pizza, Bertucci’s Italian Restaurant, Wetzel’s Pretzels, Mountain Mike’s Pizza and Nothing Bundt Cakes.
- March 2023: The Girrbach family – which founded Great Lakes Potato Chips in 2009 – announced it was selling a majority ownership stake of the business to a pair of Chicago private equity firms: LaSalle Capital and Lightspring Capital. Co-founder Chris Girrbach told TCBN sister publication The Ticker at the time that there was “only so much debt (our family) can bring on personally,” and that “it was always the plan to get the company to a level where we could bring on a strategic partner that could really help us continue to grow, help us keep rewarding the staff and just help us do all the things that businesses do.”
- April 2023: Precision Plumbing & Heating teamed up with The SEER Group, a private-equity-backed company based in Texas that purports to “invest in and partner with local HVAC, plumbing, and electrical companies” throughout the country.
- February 2024: US LBM – the same private equity-owned business that acquired Northern Building Supply in 2021 – came back to northern Michigan to buy Old Mission Windows.
- July 2024: Local law firm Kuhn Rogers shared the news that it had represented Traverse City manufacturer R.M. Young Company in the sale of the company’s equity to Benford Capital Partners, a Chicago-based private equity investment firm.
- July 2025: TC-based HVAC, electrical, and plumbing service provider Team Bob’s joined Precision Plumbing as a SEER Group partner.
- November 2025: CollisionRight – a Columbus, Ohio company powered by private equity money, announced the purchase of two Traverse City auto businesses: Sonny’s Body Shop and Traverse Body and Paint. CollisionRight has acquired more than 125 auto body collision repair shops around the U.S. since its formation in 2020.
Northern Building Supply was acquired by private equity in 2021.“Anything that’s doing $1 million in earnings and above is getting attention from private equity right now, but some sectors are more attractive than others,” Nussbaum said. “Landscaping, roofing, HVAC – really any type of residential home services business – those things are red hot, and those companies are getting a lot of attention from private equity up and down the size range. Wealth management companies are getting a lot of attention. Aerospace and defense companies are getting a lot of attention. Manufacturers are getting a lot of attention, depending on what sub sectors they’re in. The reality is, almost every industry has private equity behind it.”
Good news or bad?
Despite its scope and reach, private equity investing has a reputation for upending local economies.
The accusations against private equity are innumerable: that it downsizes vibrant companies, eliminates jobs, dilutes the quality of products or services, and enriches the wealthy at the expense of America’s middle class. Private equity skeptics have also blamed it for driving dozens of once-prominent American businesses into bankruptcy – a list that includes (but is not limited to) Toys R Us, Kmart, Big Lots, Jo-Ann Stores, Hooters, Sears, Payless, Red Lobster and RadioShack.
Both Gruman and Nussbaum admit private equity has a bad reputation for a reason, but insist the stigma often blots out a more nuanced perspective.
“Private equity would look at it a different way,” Gruman said. “They would say ‘We’re optimizing and removing unnecessary costs.’ Often, that means they’re coming in and saying, ‘Your overhead is ridiculously high, and we think Aunt Matilda doesn’t need to be on the payroll anymore.’ So, they do come in and strip things away; that reputation is well-deserved. But again, one man’s ‘trashing the local nature of the business’ is another man’s ‘making the company more efficient.’ In some cases, private equity will kill (the business), because the magic of the company drifts away with its local origins. But in other cases, private equity really can be a vehicle for growth.”
For his part, Nussbaum sees private equity as one possible answer to an increasingly common quandary in northern Michigan: How can a local company remain competitive in a rapidly changing and increasingly crowded business landscape?
“In Traverse City, you have a lot of business owners who have built their companies for 50 years,” Nussbaum explained. “They took all the risk, they put up all the capital to run the company, and their people have done a great job building that company with them. But then you get to a point where other folks are putting more capital into those industries and are trying to compete with Traverse City-based businesses. And the owner realizes, ‘Oh my goodness, I need a capital partner to go above and beyond for my people and keep this thing a going concern.’”
As an example, Nussbaum says Golden Circle recently represented “a distributor in the area,” which ended up seeking out private equity investment after realizing “their competitors were getting bought off left and right, with big capital partners behind them.”
Great Lakes Potato Chips sold to private equity investors in 2023.“We went out and found them a private equity partner that took a majority stake in the business, but kept all the people in place and created an environment where those people could actually benefit from ownership stakes in the company. And that really allowed the business to continue to thrive,” Nussbaum said. “So, a lot of these owners, instead of closing their doors or putting the company in a situation where it’s continually cash-strapped, they will go the private equity route. And private equity companies, if you pick the right one, they can be a force multiplier on growth for the business, but also for the employees’ growth. We’ve seen that quite a few times with the companies that we’ve represented in northern Michigan and around the country.”
More than just allowing local businesses to remain competitive, Gruman sees private equity and its interest in Traverse City as a sign that the northern Michigan business community is now well and truly on the map.
“Most of these transactions wouldn’t have existed 10 years ago when we started Boomerang Catapult,” Gruman said. “Our thought at the time was that we needed to move the conversation away from the seasonal economy so that we could grow our community and have jobs here that allow folks to raise a family, send their kids to school, buy a house. Private equity showing interest in Traverse City is a really positive signal that we’re now being seen as a place where that kind of economic growth is possible. If we were hostile to business – and some communities are – these funds wouldn’t be looking at us. But they are looking at us.”
