Robert Mccreary

Robert G. McCreary III is the founder and chairman of CapitalWorks, LLC, the Cleveland-based private equity firm that has since rebranded as CW Industrial Partners. He brings more than 35 years of transactional experience as an attorney, investment banker, and private equity fund manager, and has built his career around growing entrepreneurial organizations. He founded the firm in 1999 and today is responsible for developing and maintaining senior relationships with investors and investment intermediaries, fundraising, and portfolio governance; he also sits on the firm's Advisory Board.

Before founding CapitalWorks, McCreary was co-founder and president of Carleton, McCreary, Holmes & Co., a merchant/investment bank where he specialized in merger-and-acquisition strategies for public and private corporations. That firm was sold to KeyCorp in 1997, and McCreary continued as president of the successor firm, Key Capital Corporation, until 1999, when he left to launch CapitalWorks. Earlier in his career he worked in investment banking at Prescott, Ball & Turben and practiced as an attorney at the Cleveland law firm Calfee, Halter & Griswold LLP.

McCreary holds a J.D. from Case Western Reserve University School of Law and a B.A. in English, cum laude, from Amherst College. Under his leadership, CapitalWorks/CW Industrial Partners has positioned itself as a Midwestern, family-focused private equity firm whose limited partners are largely successful entrepreneurs and executives who contribute directly to the evaluation and investment process.

• Acquires lower-middle-market companies in manufacturing and industrial services and provides them "the capital, support and freedom to grow."
• Single, focused strategy: control investments in niche industrial businesses across aerospace & defense, material handling/automation, motion & flow control, engineered products, specialty chemicals/plastics, and value-added distribution.
• Family-backed capital model: investors are primarily successful entrepreneurs and executives who participate in evaluating deals — a long-hold, operator-oriented approach rather than short-cycle financial engineering.
• Emphasis on transformational growth of established (not startup-stage) industrial platforms, often followed by add-on acquisitions (e.g., Safe-Way Garage Doors acquiring 1st United Door Technologies).
• Note: while some investor databases tag McCreary personally as an "angel / seed" investor, his verifiable, primary activity is control-stage industrial private equity; treat the seed-stage label with caution.