Grounded Wealth

Michael Ryan, the firm's founder, serves as Chief Investment Officer and makes all portfolio allocation and deal-level decisions. He built the firm in 2013 after an institutional real asset career and operates without a traditional investment committee layer. Day-to-day asset management is delegated to specialist operating partners, but origination and structural terms remain centralized with Ryan.

Grounded Wealth is structured as a multi-family office serving a small number of wealthy families, all of whom invest through separately managed accounts or single-purpose vehicles rather than commingled funds. The firm deliberately caps its client count to maintain portfolio concentration and tax-customization. Each family's capital is run on a dedicated basis, reflecting the permanent-capital discipline of a single-family office but applied across multiple balance sheets.

Deal flow comes through Ryan's long-standing relationships with regional property operators, developers, and independent power producers, primarily in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast. The firm does not participate in broad auction processes. Sourcing relies on bilateral negotiations and operator-led opportunities where Grounded Wealth can provide structured capital — often preferred equity or senior credit — that a conventional fund would find too small or too bespoke.

The firm invests almost exclusively through direct deals and privately negotiated credit instruments. It does not market itself as a fund-of-funds allocator. Occasionally, Grounded Wealth may partner with a specialized operating company through a joint-venture vehicle, but those structures are created deal-by-deal and do not resemble blind-pool fund commitments.

The firm explicitly avoids venture capital, growth equity, public securities, and development-stage technology exposure. Even within its energy transition focus, Grounded Wealth targets operating assets with contracted revenue rather than pre-revenue or demonstration-phase projects. Pure financial leverage plays and distressed trading strategies are also outside the mandate.

Tax-awareness is embedded in the investment structure rather than treated as a post-hoc overlay. Because each family's capital sits in dedicated accounts or vehicles, asset placement, depreciation capture, and exit timing can be tailored to the individual family's estate plan and intergenerational transfer strategy. Grounded Wealth coordinates with each family's existing tax and legal counsel but does not provide in-house estate-planning services.

Grounded Wealth frequently co-invests alongside other single-family offices and regional operating partners, particularly in real estate and energy transactions where the combined capital stack benefits from multiple like-minded, long-duration participants. The firm has also accepted institutional co-investment from insurance-company separate accounts on a deal-by-deal basis when the asset scale warranted it, but such arrangements remain opportunistic rather than programmatic.