Stirling Heights

Stirling Heights

Stirling Heights was launched by Danny Payne and Matt Jacobs, two Bank of America Merrill Lynch alumni whose careers converged in Salt Lake City’s lower-middle-market private equity ecosystem. Payne previously co-founded Northrim Horizon, a buy-and-build platform that raised $50 million and completed roll-ups in apartment services, commercial landscaping, and early childhood education. Jacobs arrived from Ultra Clean Express, a Lindsay Goldberg-backed car wash platform where he led M&A and greenfield development across six direct-to-seller transactions. Their shared history is one of executing proprietary, non-discretionary service acquisitions outside auction processes. The firm concentrates on consumer and business service companies generating $1–5 million in EBITDA. Its capital is permanent — Stirling faces no fund-life pressure to exit, which permits multi-decade holds. The portfolio illustrates a thematic bias toward essential, recurring-revenue services: Great Beginnings Academy, a Salt Lake County early childhood education provider acquired in 2024, and Alliance Exterior Solutions, a Baltimore-based commercial exterior services business purchased in 2025. Both deals were direct-to-owner transactions, consistent with the firm’s stated preference for negotiated, non-intermediated acquisitions. The geographic footprint currently spans the Intermountain West and Mid-Atlantic, and the underlying sectors — education services, facility maintenance — share high fragmentation and low cyclicality. A four-person investment and operating team anchors the firm. Senior Operating Partner Curtis Oscarson brings board-level experience from EPIS, Inc., a simulation software platform acquired by Riverside Partners and later by Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners, and from Medical Review Institute of America, a Summit Partners portfolio company. Operating Partner Casey Hubbell, a former Bain & Company manager and Lockheed Martin engineer, adds industrial-operations and commercial due-diligence depth. The group’s collective transactional record exceeds 50 closed partnerships, a figure the firm publicizes as signaling execution certainty for sellers. In 2025, Stirling completed its acquisition of Alliance Exterior Solutions, expanding the portfolio into Mid-Atlantic commercial exterior services. Stirling Heights operates with the governance of a permanent holding vehicle but the sourcing tactics of an independent sponsor. The firm raises committed deal-by-deal capital rather than managing a blind-pool fund, a structure that aligns incentives with co-investors on a per-transaction basis and avoids the deployment pressure of a traditional drawdown fund. That architecture, combined with a stated long-hold mandate, creates a capital base that sellers and operators can structure against without the clock of a fund maturity driving a forced liquidity event.