About

Sterling Partners is a diversified investment management platform founded in 1983 and based in Chicago.

The firm started with four young entrepreneurs investing in companies with capital raised from friends and family.  With early success, the founders of the firm started raising institutional funds in 2000. Sterling’s institutional fund practice focused primarily on control investments in founder-run, middle market companies in the healthcare services, education, and business services sectors. Sterling continues to manage a portfolio of companies across its funds, leveraging the firm’s deep domain expertise, focus on transformational growth, entrepreneurial roots, and access to world-class human capital to add value.

In 2015, Sterling partnered with Strada Education Network to establish the Sterling Partners Education Opportunity Fund (EOF).  With a separate investment team and shared operations, EOF represented an expansion of Sterling’s activity set into single industry investment strategies.   Not long thereafter, Sterling formed Sterling Partners Equity Advisors (SPEA) and Sterling Partners Quantitative Investments (SPQI) with established veterans in a variety of liquid market investment strategies.

For its new investment activities outside of EOF, in 2017, the firm shifted from the blind-pool, non-industry specific, middle market fund business into a multi-asset investment management platform investing across a variety of strategies. Today, Sterling invests internal and third party capital on a deal-by-deal basis across a variety of industries, growth stages, and structures, and backs managers across an array of asset classes. We look to invest in a wide variety of companies in various stages of growth – from early stage, high growth businesses to mature, profitable companies – across several industries.  We make control, non-control, and preferred equity investments with both internal and outside capital.

Sterling is an investor in Speedwagon, which operates independently.

What We Look For

Our Team

  • Strategies:
  • All
  • Sterling Partners Quantitative Investments
  • Sterling Partners Private Equity
  • Education Opportunity Fund
  • Sterling Partners Equity Advisors
  • '87
  • Title:
  • All
  • Managing Director
  • Operating Partners & Advisors
  • Principal
  • Vice President
  • Director
  • Senior Associate
  • Associate

Operating partners are independent contractors and are not employees of Sterling Fund Management, LLC or its affiliates and are therefore not part of Sterling’s compliance program.  Operating partners are engaged to provide operational support, specialized operations, and consulting services to or in connection with funds managed by Sterling or portfolio companies in connection with the identification, acquisition, holding, improvement and disposition of such portfolio companies.  These services may include support to single investment vehicles, Sterling managed funds or their portfolio companies regarding, among other things, the portfolio company’s management, supply chain, revenue, finance, human capital management, IT, regulatory matters, and similar operational matters.

’87 team members are employees or independent contractors of Sterling Direct LLC and are not employees of Sterling Fund Management, LLC or its affiliates and are therefore not part of Sterling’s compliance program. ’87 team members are engaged to provide operational support, specialized operations, and consulting services primarily to or in connection with portfolio companies that are deemed not to be clients for regulatory purposes, though they may also provide services to portfolio companies of funds managed by Sterling. These services may include branding and marketing, supply chain, revenue, and human capital management.

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