Pacific Ridge Capital Partners

Brian Cheney serves as Chief Investment Officer and is the primary decision-maker for the firm's micro-cap value strategy, supported by Portfolio Manager Mike Manion. Cheney founded the firm in 2007 after earlier roles that immersed him in small-cap fundamental research. The concentrated investment team structure means the two named portfolio managers directly conduct company due diligence and make all buy-sell decisions without a top-heavy analyst layer.

Pacific Ridge targets US-listed equities with market capitalizations generally below $500 million, a space the firm believes is structurally underserved by sell-side research and institutional capital. This micro-cap segment tends to exhibit wider valuation dispersions and longer re-pricing lags, which a patient fundamental manager can exploit. The firm's thesis is that buying quality micro-cap businesses at deep discounts to intrinsic value and holding them for three to five years generates alpha that is hard to replicate in more efficient small-cap and large-cap markets.

No. Pacific Ridge is a public-equities-only manager. The firm runs concentrated, long-only portfolios of US micro-cap stocks and does not allocate to private equity, venture capital, direct real estate, or private credit vehicles. This purity of mandate is central to its pitch to institutional clients seeking dedicated, unhedged micro-cap equity exposure without asset-class drift.

Pacific Ridge has a documented history of closing its micro-cap strategy to new investors when it determines that additional assets would compromise its ability to trade in illiquid names. The firm does not launch adjacent mid-cap or all-cap strategies to accommodate overflow capital. This capacity discipline — returning capital or closing the strategy rather than diluting the investable universe — is a structural feature that separates Pacific Ridge from managers who allow strategy drift as AUM grows.

The key difference is client structure and time-horizon mechanics. A family office with micro-cap exposure typically runs a permanent-capital balance sheet and can hold positions indefinitely without worrying about quarterly redemptions. Pacific Ridge is an institutional asset manager, meaning it must manage client liquidity while still executing a buy-and-hold micro-cap strategy. It bridges this gap by maintaining concentrated portfolios, aligning client bases with long-duration institutions, and closing the strategy when it reaches an internal capacity ceiling.

Pacific Ridge does not publish formal sector exclusions, but the micro-cap value strategy's emphasis on tangible assets, recurring cash flows, and balance-sheet quality has historically resulted in low exposure to pre-revenue biotech, speculative resource exploration, and concept-stage technology firms. The firm's value tilt means it typically avoids asset-light sectors whose micro-cap constituents lack the financial durability required to survive the extended holding periods Pacific Ridge targets.

Since its 2007 inception, Pacific Ridge's flagship micro-cap value strategy has produced annualized net returns that have materially outperformed the Russell Microcap Index over full market cycles, according to the firm's public communications. The firm benchmarks itself against the Russell Microcap Index and the Russell 2000 Index but emphasizes absolute, cycle-adjusted returns over relative performance in any single year. Individual yearly return dispersion can be wide given the concentrated portfolio construction and the illiquidity of underlying holdings.