Ron Hodge

Ron Hodge joined Westbury Group in 2009 and serves as a Managing Director. He brings roughly 30 years of experience arranging, structuring, and investing in public and private company financings across nearly every industry sector and every level of the capital structure — debt, mezzanine, equity, and derivatives — with hands-on experience in growth capital, leveraged buyouts, venture capital, project finance, distressed restructurings, and M&A.

According to Westbury's team bio, the core of his earlier career was spent at J.P. Morgan, where he worked for approximately 18 years — first spending about six years as a banker covering the energy and utilities sectors, then roughly twelve years at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. In the asset-management role he ran two investment funds each exceeding $1 billion, responsible for deal sourcing, investment selection, and portfolio management. He subsequently was a Partner at Capital Crossover Partners, a long/short hedge fund, and a Managing Director at Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group (FBR), where he oversaw a financial-services-focused private equity fund and certain proprietary investments. (An earlier version of his bio also references him founding and leading Sage Group Holdings, a business advisory and merchant-banking group, around 2004.)

Hodge earned a BA from the University of North Carolina, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and an MBA from New York University's Executive Program, where he was elected class President. He holds Series 3, 7, 24, and 63 FINRA licenses.

At Westbury, Hodge functions as a senior deal principal on sell-side and capital-raising mandates for privately held companies. A representative recent engagement: he co-led (with partner Jonathan Rubin) Westbury's advisory to Q88 LLC, a maritime-transportation SaaS provider, on its 2022 acquisition by Veson Nautical.

• Operates as an M&A and capital-formation advisor / principal, not a fixed-thesis angel fund — engagements span sell-side M&A, growth-capital raises, recapitalizations, and restructurings.
• Comfortable across the entire capital structure: debt, mezzanine, equity, and derivatives — a distinguishing capability versus pure-equity investors.
• Sector reach is broad but weighted toward technology/SaaS, healthcare, advanced manufacturing, energy & utilities, and financial services, mirroring both Westbury's practice and his own energy/asset-management background.
• Values companies with defensible, workflow-embedded software or specialized industrial positioning (e.g., Q88's entrenched maritime SaaS platform) that attract strategic acquirers.
• Prior fund management (two $1B+ funds at JPMAM; an FBR financial-services PE fund) signals comfort with institutional-scale, later-stage, cash-flowing or clearly monetizable businesses rather than pre-revenue seed bets.