Private equity firms don’t usually last three decades under the same founder. Partners leave to start their own shops. Succession disputes fracture the senior team. Returns slip, fundraising stalls, and the brand fades. The median life of a PE firm is shorter than the hold period on some of its investments.
Reeve Waud founded Waud Capital Partners in 1993 in Lake Forest, Illinois. He was 29 years old, working alone, and funding the operation himself. Thirty years later, the firm has nearly 70 professionals on staff, manages approximately $4.6 billion in assets, and has completed more than 450 investments across healthcare and software.
The Arc From Lake Forest to LaSalle Street
WCP raised its first institutional fund in 1998, five years after Waud started the firm. A decade later, the team relocated to downtown Chicago. Fund III closed at $487 million in 2011. Fund IV more than doubled that number, reaching $1.05 billion in 2016. Each fund was larger than the last. And each reflected returns that gave investors a reason to re-up.
“The beginning days were far from glamorous, and the future was entirely uncertain, but I had confidence in the opportunity to partner with exceptional executives and build exciting and profitable companies,”Reeve Waud said at the firm’s 30th anniversary.
That quote lands differently when you look at what followed. Acadia Healthcare, founded through WCP in 2005, went public six years later and became one of the largest behavioral health systems in the country. GI Alliance, formed in 2018, reached a $2.2 billion valuation by 2022. iOFFICE, a small SaaS business when WCP acquired it, quintupled its revenue in two and a half years before selling to Thoma Bravo.
What Three Decades Produced
Matt Clary, a long-time WCP Partner, offered his own read on the milestone: “I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited for the future as I am now. The last few years have brought some very meaningful exits for us, the last four of which were iOffice, Ivy Rehab, GI Alliance, and, most recently, IPS”.
Clary also pointed to new platform investments – Fusion Healthcare and PharmAlliance – as reasons for optimism. For a firm that has already returned capital across multiple fund cycles, the fact that its senior partners are talking about the future rather than the past says something about how the organization was built.
Longevity in private equity isn’t guaranteed by early success. Plenty of firms have had strong first funds and then declined. What separates Waud Capital Partners is that it kept doing the same thing – healthcare and software, buy-and-build, operator-led growth. It did so long enough and consistently enough that the track record became its own recruiting tool, for both investors and executives.
