Rodger Krouse (born 1961) is an American businessperson who co-founded
Sun Capital Partners, Inc., a global investment firm based in
Boca Raton
Boca Raton ( ; es, Boca Ratón, link=no, ) is a city in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. It was first incorporated on August 2, 1924, as "Bocaratone," and then incorporated as "Boca Raton" in 1925. The population was 97,422 in the ...
,
Florida
Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...
,
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
.
Early life and education
Krouse was born to a
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
family
[Jewish Daily Forward: "Romney PAC Attracts New Jewish Donors - Hedge Fund Managers and Developers Top List of Supporters" By Josh Nathan-Kazis]
March 12, 2012 in 1961
[Bloomberg: "Blackstone, Apollo Outshone as Sun Capital Buys Boston Market" By Kambiz Foroohar]
October 2, 2008 and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics
with a concentration in the
Chinese language
Chinese (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the wor ...
from The
Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ( ; also known as Wharton Business School, the Wharton School, Penn Wharton, and Wharton) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a Private university, private Ivy League rese ...
.
At Wharton, he was a close friend of his future business partner
Marc Leder.
[Private Equity International: "Rising Sun" by David Snow]
October 2006
Career
After he finished school, he worked at
Lehman Brothers
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. ( ) was an American global financial services firm founded in 1847. Before Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, filing for bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman was the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States (behind Gol ...
in their corporate investment banking unit
in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
eventually rising to the position of Senior Vice President.
In 1995, Krouse left the firm and co-founded the
private equity
In the field of finance, the term private equity (PE) refers to investment funds, usually limited partnerships (LP), which buy and restructure financially weak companies that produce goods and provide services. A private-equity fund is both a ty ...
firm,
Sun Capital Partners
Sun Capital Partners, Inc., is an American private equity firm specializing in leveraged buyouts. Sun Capital was founded in 1995 by Marc J. Leder and Rodger Krouse, former classmates at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and ...
with fellow University of Pennsylvania alumni and friend
Marc J. Leder
Marc J. Leder is an American businessman who is the co-founder of Sun Capital Partners, Inc., a private equity firm based in Boca Raton, Florida. He is also a limited partner of the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils.
Early life and educ ...
. With the goal of becoming a regional private equity firm,
they located their company in
Boca Raton, Florida
Boca Raton ( ; es, Boca Ratón, link=no, ) is a city in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. It was first incorporated on August 2, 1924, as "Bocaratone," and then incorporated as "Boca Raton" in 1925. The population was 97,422 in the ...
thinking that they would get advance notice of potential acquisitions in the Southeast before their competitors in New York.
[New York Times: "In a Romney Believer, Private Equity’s Risks and Rewards" by JULIE CRESWELL]
January 21, 2012 The location in Florida did not afford the advantage they expected and for the first two years were repeatedly outbid by large New York firms.
Although they did not complete any deals for the first two years, they were able to keep afloat thanks to established contacts at several large private equity groups from their time at Lehman Brothers, especially
Bain Capital
Bain Capital is an American private investment firm based in Boston. It specializes in private equity, venture capital, credit, public equity, impact investing, life sciences, and real estate. Bain Capital invests across a range of industry se ...
(which was then run by
Mitt Romney
Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American politician, businessman, and lawyer serving as the junior United States senator from Utah since January 2019, succeeding Orrin Hatch. He served as the 70th governor of Massachusetts f ...
).
[Wall Street Journal: "Buyout All-Stars Stumble" By PETER LATTMAN]
March 10, 2008 Their first acquisition was a distressed company called ''Atlas Papers'' and thereafter, the company focused on underperforming and distressed companies exclusively.
Sun Capital differentiated itself from other turnaround companies due to its resource intensive platform utilizing a comparatively larger pool of employed professionals to supervise and manage its acquisitions (although also charging a higher fee).
Following this strategy, the business reached $10 billion in assets and 165,000 employees in 2008 just before the
market crash
A stock market crash is a sudden dramatic decline of stock prices across a major cross-section of a stock market, resulting in a significant loss of paper wealth. Crashes are driven by panic selling and underlying economic factors. They often f ...
.
After seeing at least ten of their portfolio companies enter bankruptcy in 2009, they retrenched and as of July 2013, Sun Capital had $8 billion in invested assets.
Krouse served as co-CEO of Sun Mackie, LLC; vice president and director of
Catalina Lighting since July 2001; vice president and director of
One Price Clothing Stores since 2003; vice president and vice chairman of
Northland Cranberries since 2001; vice president and director of
Loud Technologies, Inc. since 2003; and director of SAN Holdings of Japan since 2003. In the past he served as co-chairman and director of
Labtec, Inc; as director of
World Air Holdings; as director of Nailite International; as director of Miles Kimball Company; and as director of
Celebrity, Inc.
[BusinessWeek: "Executive Profile - Rodger R. Krouse"]
retrieved July 7, 2013
Krouse believes that what differentiates Sun from other private equity firms is its focus on fixing a failed company's culture: "''Our revelation came in 2008, when all our companies were hit hard and we saw (that those) with strong cultures had the best financial results." "Businesses are a collection of assets...and people. Unify them with a common purpose and you get success.''" In 2013, he was one of the recipients of the 2013 Leadership Award for Outstanding Achievements in M&A by The M&A Advisor.
Political contributions
In 2012, Krouse personally donated $250,000 to ''
Restore Our Future
Restore Our Future is a political action committee (PAC) created to support Mitt Romney in the 2012 U.S. Presidential election. A so-called Super PAC, Restore Our Future is permitted to raise and spend unlimited amounts of corporate, union, and ...
'' and $60,800 to ''Romney Victory, Inc'', both PACs supporting
Mitt Romney
Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American politician, businessman, and lawyer serving as the junior United States senator from Utah since January 2019, succeeding Orrin Hatch. He served as the 70th governor of Massachusetts f ...
's run for president.
[Campaign Money.com: "Rodger Krouse Political Campaign Contributions"]
retrieved July 7, 2013 He served as a co-chair on Romney's Florida finance team. Krouse donated to many prominent Republicans running for office in 2012 including:
Connie Mack IV
Cornelius Harvey McGillicuddy (born August 12, 1967), popularly known as Connie Mack IV, is an American politician and lobbyist. He is the former U.S. Representative for , serving from 2005 to 2013. A Republican, he ran for the U.S. Senate in 20 ...
,
Adam Hasner,
Scott Brown Scott Brown may refer to:
Sportsmen
*Scott Brown (American football), American college football coach of Kentucky State
* Scott Brown (baseball) (born 1956), former Major League Baseball pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds
*Scott Brown (footballer, bor ...
,
Randy Altschuler
Randolph Brody Altschuler (born December 8, 1970) is an American businessman and politician. He was the Republican and Conservative Party candidate for Congress in New York's 1st Congressional District in 2010 and 2012. He is the co-founder and ...
,
Bob Corker
Robert Phillips Corker Jr. (born August 24, 1952) is an American businessman and politician who served as a United States Senator from Tennessee from 2007 to 2019. A member of the Republican Party, he served as Chair of the Senate Foreign Rela ...
,
Linda Lingle
Linda Lingle (''née'' Cutter; June 4, 1953) is an American politician, who was the sixth governor of Hawaii from 2002 until 2010. She was the first Republican governor of Hawaii since 1962. Lingle was also the state's first female and first Je ...
,
Jeff Flake
Jeffry Lane Flake (born December 31, 1962) is an American politician and diplomat who is the current U.S Ambassador to Turkey. A member of the Republican Party, Flake served in the United States House of Representatives from 2001 to 2013 and ...
,
Josh Mandel
Joshua Aaron Mandel (born September 27, 1977) is an American far-right politician who served as the 48th treasurer of Ohio from 2011 to 2019. A member of the Republican Party, he previously was the Ohio State Representative for the 17th distr ...
, and
Ted Deutch
Theodore Eliot Deutch ( ; born May 7, 1966) is an American lawyer and politician who served as the United States House of Representatives, U.S. representative from Florida's 22nd congressional district from 2010 to 2022. His district, numbered as ...
.
Personal life
In 1991, he married Hillary Kim Miller and has three sons.
Krouse lost an undisclosed sum of his own money that he had invested with
Bernard L. Madoff
Bernard Lawrence Madoff ( ; April 29, 1938April 14, 2021) was an American fraudster and financier who was the admitted mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, worth about $64.8 billion. He was at one time chairman of the NASDAQ s ...
.
He speaks Chinese.
The Deal Magazine: "Reading the face of failure" by Vyvyan Tenorio
October 24, 2008 The business partners are said to complement each other with Leder the outspoken optimist and Krouse the measured realist.
References
External links
CNBC interview with Rodger Krouse
July 2, 2012
MandA.TV Interviews: Rodger Krouse - Sun Capital Partners
May 28, 2013
ReutersVideo: Food services, construction to jumpstart US jobs - Interview with Rodger Krouse - Sun Capital Partners
July 11, 2011
Reuters Business News: Interview with Rodger Krouse: "Is America ready for a 'private-equity president'?"
July 8, 2011
{{DEFAULTSORT:Krouse, Rodger
Living people
20th-century American Jews
Lehman Brothers people
1961 births
Private equity and venture capital investors
Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania alumni
American chief executives of financial services companies
American corporate directors
21st-century American Jews