Don Millen

Don Millen Jr. is the co-founder and a Managing Director of Dragonfly Capital, an investment banking and financial advisory firm he helped launch in 2000, with offices in Charlotte, NC and Charleston, SC. He has more than 30 years of experience advising and investing in high-growth private and public businesses. Before founding Dragonfly, he worked at Bowles Hollowell Conner & Co., a well-known Charlotte-based mergers-and-acquisitions boutique.

Earlier in his career, Millen worked in New York City at the investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ), where he advised private equity groups and management teams on financing and M&A situations. He also served as a Tax Manager at Arthur Andersen in Atlanta, giving him an accounting and tax foundation alongside his investment-banking experience.

Millen earned a BA in economics and a Master of Accounting degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was an academic All-ACC/All-American linebacker, and an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is active in the Charlotte business community, including involvement with the Rotary Club of Charlotte and the Charlotte chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), and he speaks periodically at UNC's Honors Carolina program. He is also a public advocate for teen mental health awareness in memory of his daughter.

At Dragonfly, Millen and his partners position the firm around helping business owners achieve liquidity (through a sale or recapitalization) and helping private-company management teams raise growth capital (debt or equity). Dragonfly is a registered broker-dealer with FINRA/SEC — a requirement to provide investment banking (M&A and capital-raise) services — which distinguishes his work from that of a pure venture-capital or angel fund.

• Focuses on founder-led and family-owned small and middle-market companies, historically those with roughly $10M–$35M in annual revenue.
• Firm-level transactions typically fall in the ~$5M–$150M range across M&A, recapitalizations, and debt/equity capital raises.
• Sector-agnostic in practice, but with notable activity in energy, manufacturing, business services, healthcare services, and tech-enabled services; the firm markets "a unique combination of skills across a broad range of industry sectors."
• Dual mandate: (1) advising owners seeking liquidity via a sale or recapitalization, and (2) helping management teams raise growth capital — plus selective principal/angel investing in high-growth private and public businesses.
• As a FINRA/SEC-registered broker-dealer, his engagements are transaction- and advisory-driven rather than fund-driven, so alignment tends to favor companies at or near a financing or exit event.