Rutabaga Capital Management

Three portfolio managers jointly run the book: founder Peter Schliemann, lead partner Dennis Scannell, and Carter Newbold. Senior advisor Eugene Gardner—a former Babson colleague who also works at Gardner, Russo & Quinn—provides additional input. All four joined within the firm's first year of operation.

Rutabaga runs concentrated, long-only equity portfolios in US Small Cap Value and Micro Cap Value. The firm targets publicly traded companies with market capitalizations small enough to fall outside most institutional screens. It does not operate in private equity, venture, credit, or real assets.

Morningstar once described Peter Schliemann's Babson Enterprise Fund as unearthing rutabagas—uncommon, unloved stocks that are good for you. When Schliemann founded his own firm on the same philosophy in 1999, the name followed.

The firm openly acknowledges that its strategy requires tolerating illiquidity. Micro-cap names rarely have deep trading volume, which forces longer holding periods and makes third-party performance benchmarking difficult. Rutabaga presents this as a feature, not a bug, arguing that the best value emerges where coverage is thinnest.

Rutabaga Capital Management is a registered Investment Adviser, not a family office. It manages portfolios for external clients. The firm does not publicly disclose its assets under management, so the ownership of its capital base—whether institutional, high-net-worth, or founder-anchored—remains unclear from public filings alone.