Scott Steele

Scott Steele co-founded JMH Capital Partners, a Boston-based operationally oriented private equity firm, in 2003. He served as a partner running the firm's deal and portfolio activity for roughly 17 years before transitioning to a Senior Advisor role in January 2020. In that capacity he remains connected to JMH but no longer leads day-to-day investing, and he has since moved into education administration — he is currently Director of Finance and Operations at Beacon Academy, and previously served as CFO/COO of The Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, a Boston minority-serving technical college.

Before founding JMH, Steele built a career in leveraged and private equity investing. He was a Principal at Parthenon Capital in Boston and a Principal at Electra Investment Trust PLC (working out of the New York office of the London-based private investment firm). He began his career in the Leveraged Funding Group at Heller Financial in New York.

Steele holds a B.B.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.B.A. from the Stern School of Business at New York University.

At JMH, he was part of a team that pursues an "operationally-oriented" strategy: acquiring established lower-middle-market companies with strong niches but limited resources to scale, and then investing partner capital alongside institutional capital while taking a hands-on operational role to grow revenue and EBITDA and pursue add-on acquisitions.

• Invests in established, profitable lower-middle-market companies, not startups — targets of roughly $5–150M revenue and $1–15M EBITDA with defensible niche positions.
• Pursues control transactions: full buyouts, recapitalizations, corporate carve-outs, and management buyouts, with equity checks up to about $25–30M.
• Firm describes itself as an "operationally-oriented private equity firm dedicated to nurturing companies with excellent growth potential, but lacking the resources to double or triple their size."
• Emphasizes partners investing personal capital in every deal, collaborative partnership with management, and hands-on operational involvement plus buy-and-build add-on acquisitions.
• Sector appetite spans industrial products and services, business/technical services (engineering, environmental, testing), and consumer/food & franchise businesses.