Founders Trust

Founders Trust

Founders Trust operates as a private investment group out of Naperville, Illinois, led by a ten-member team that includes Dr. Anthony Tedeschi, David A. Smith, and Patrick Schiele. The firm’s principal activity is acquiring and investing in North American middle-market and lower-middle-market businesses, with deal sizes cited up to $450 million. The group states its partners have logged over 83 years of C-level experience and served on 25 boards. The firm deploys capital through majority and minority investments, direct acquisitions, co-investments, and special-situation structuring. It pursues a concentrated set of industries it does not name publicly, under an evergreen mandate that eliminates the pressure of fund-cycle exits. Its advisory practice runs in parallel, providing asset management, turnaround, and confidential family-office advisory to private companies. Founders Trust reports $4 billion in total completed transactions and $1.2 billion in cumulative revenue from turnaround-advised companies. The team lists 10 named leaders on its website without detailing headcount or satellite offices. No adjacent philanthropic foundations or formal club memberships are disclosed. In its most recent positioning, the firm has marketed a proprietary “Frictionless Acquisition System” for owners seeking liquidity or partial exits, underscoring a process built for confidentiality and speed — Founders Trust’s website notes its location in Naperville, a Chicago suburb convenient to O’Hare and DuPage airports. Structurally, Founders Trust blends permanent, proprietary capital with an advisory practice that shares the same senior partners, creating an unusual dual revenue engine. That architecture allows the firm to act as either principal or confidential advisor to a family business, depending on what the situation demands. This dual posture — part operator, part outside consigliere — distinguishes it from both conventional fund managers and pure single-family offices.