NextGen Growth Partners Adds Three Executives in Expansion Push

NextGen Growth Partners, a Miami-based private equity firm focused on lower-middle-market service businesses, has added three senior executives to its team—a move that signals the firm's push to scale operational infrastructure alongside a growing portfolio. The hires include a Chief Financial Officer, a Vice President of Finance, and a Vice President tasked with deal execution and portfolio support.

The additions come as NextGen's portfolio has expanded to more than 15 active platform companies across professional services, residential services, and logistics. For a firm that's been steadily building a reputation in the fragmented services sector, the staffing moves aren't just about headcount—they're about creating the operational depth required to manage multiple buy-and-build strategies simultaneously.

David Hirsch joins as CFO, bringing two decades of private equity finance experience from firms including The Riverside Company and Gryphon Investors. At NextGen, he'll oversee financial operations, treasury, and investor reporting. Christopher Mele steps in as Vice President of Finance, moving over from Frontenac, where he spent three years supporting portfolio company operations. And Michael Garofalo joins as Vice President, arriving from Plexus Capital, a middle-market lender where he focused on sponsor-backed transactions.

The firm isn't disclosing the size of its current fund or total assets under management, but the executive buildout suggests NextGen is positioning for a higher deal cadence. In the lower-middle-market PE world, adding dedicated finance and deal professionals typically precedes—not follows—a ramp-up in transaction volume.

NextGen Growth Partners, founded in 2015, operates in the lower-middle-market sweet spot: businesses doing $5 million to $50 million in revenue, often in industries where consolidation is still in early innings. The firm's strategy centers on acquiring founder-owned service companies and building them through a mix of organic growth and tuck-in acquisitions—what's known in the industry as a buy-and-build or roll-up strategy.

The firm's portfolio includes companies in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, business consulting, and logistics. These aren't businesses that make headlines. But they're profitable, recurring-revenue operations in markets where scale matters and private equity has been pouring capital for the better part of a decade. According to PitchBook data, private equity deal activity in residential and commercial services has remained resilient even as broader M&A volumes have declined, with roll-up strategies continuing to attract investor interest.

What differentiates NextGen from larger competitors—think ServiceMaster Brands or Wrench Group—is its focus on earlier-stage platforms. The firm isn't buying national franchises. It's backing regional operators with strong unit economics and adding infrastructure: finance teams, marketing capacity, standardized tech stacks, and bolt-on acquisitions to densify geographic footprints.

That model requires a specific kind of operational support. You can't just buy 15 HVAC companies and expect them to integrate themselves. You need people who can build budgets, model acquisitions, manage cash flow across a portfolio, and keep reporting clean for LPs. That's where the new hires come in.

David Hirsch's arrival as CFO is the headline move. Hirsch spent time at both The Riverside Company and Gryphon Investors, two well-regarded middle-market firms with deep benches in operational finance. At Riverside, he worked across the firm's lower-middle-market funds, which focus heavily on services and industrials. At Gryphon, he helped manage portfolio-level finance operations during a period when the firm was actively building out its platform strategy in home services and healthcare.

In other words, Hirsch has done this before—at firms with more resources and bigger teams. His move to NextGen suggests the firm is maturing past the stage where the founding partners can handle finance themselves. It's professionalizing.

Christopher Mele, the new VP of Finance, comes from Frontenac, a Chicago-based firm known for its focus on growth equity in services and tech-enabled businesses. Mele's role will center on portfolio company finance—budgeting, forecasting, and performance tracking across NextGen's platforms. That's a function that becomes critical once a firm has more than a handful of active investments and needs to monitor cash burn, margin performance, and covenant compliance in real time.

Michael Garofalo's hire is equally telling. He's coming from Plexus Capital, a direct lender that specializes in sponsor-backed middle-market deals. Garofalo's experience sits at the intersection of deal execution and financing—he knows how to structure transactions, negotiate with lenders, and navigate the debt markets that fuel buyout activity. At NextGen, he'll work on both new platform acquisitions and add-ons, which means the firm is likely planning to stay active on both fronts.

Together, these hires create a finance and deal infrastructure that can support a significantly larger portfolio. That's not a coincidence.

The broader context here is that lower-middle-market private equity has become intensely competitive. Deal multiples have crept up. Auction processes have become more sophisticated. And the bar for operational execution has risen. Firms that want to generate returns in this environment can't just rely on financial engineering—they have to build real operating capacity.

NextGen's core strategy is textbook buy-and-build: acquire a platform company with strong management and a defensible market position, then layer in add-on acquisitions to expand geography, service lines, or customer base. It's a model that's been running at scale in residential services for years, and it's proven highly effective when executed well.

But the playbook only works if the platform companies can actually integrate the add-ons. That requires systems: unified accounting, consistent KPI tracking, centralized procurement, and a finance function that can model acquisitions and track synergies. Without that infrastructure, you don't have a platform—you have a portfolio of subscale businesses that happen to share the same investor.

The hires NextGen just made are the building blocks of that infrastructure. Hirsch will ensure the firm's portfolio companies have clean financials and that investor reporting is tight. Mele will work inside the portfolio companies to build budgeting discipline and performance visibility. Garofalo will help source and execute the add-on deals that fuel platform growth.

In other words, these aren't back-office hires. They're the team that makes the strategy executable.

It's worth noting that NextGen is making these moves at a time when debt financing for add-on acquisitions remains accessible. While institutional buyout lending has tightened, the market for bolt-on financing—especially in cash-flowing services businesses—has stayed relatively open. That's created an opportunity for firms like NextGen to continue rolling up fragmented markets even as broader M&A activity has slowed.

To understand why NextGen's strategy has legs, it helps to understand just how fragmented its target markets are. Take HVAC, for example. The U.S. heating, ventilation, and air conditioning market is worth more than $30 billion annually, according to industry data, but the largest national players still hold less than 10% market share. The rest is split among tens of thousands of local operators—many of them still founder-owned, many without formal finance teams, and most without access to capital for growth.

That fragmentation creates opportunity for consolidators. A private equity-backed HVAC platform can offer smaller operators liquidity, operational support, and access to capital for organic growth—while the PE firm gets to buy EBITDA at reasonable multiples and build scale over time. The same dynamic plays out in plumbing, electrical, landscaping, and business consulting.

NextGen isn't the only firm running this playbook. The home services roll-up market is crowded. Wrench Group, backed by Gridiron Capital, has built a portfolio of plumbing, HVAC, and electrical businesses across more than 100 locations. Authority Brands, backed by Apax Partners, operates a similar model in home services and repair. And there are dozens of smaller regional platforms doing the same thing in their local markets.

What differentiates NextGen is its stage focus. The firm isn't competing with Wrench or Authority for large, established platforms. It's buying earlier—acquiring founder-owned businesses that are just beginning to professionalize, then building them up to the point where they can compete with the larger players. That means NextGen is playing in a different valuation band and targeting a different seller profile.

The trade-off is that earlier-stage platforms require more hands-on operational work. You can't just buy them and watch them grow. You have to build finance functions, install systems, and often replace or supplement management teams. That's where the new executive hires become essential—they're the ones doing the work that makes a $10 million HVAC company scalable.

It's also worth noting that NextGen operates out of Miami, which has become a growing hub for private equity and alternative asset management over the past five years. Firms like H.I.G. Capital, Thoma Bravo, and Insight Partners have all expanded their Miami presence, drawn by favorable tax treatment, access to Latin American deal flow, and a deepening talent pool. For a lower-middle-market firm like NextGen, being based in Miami offers geographic proximity to a growing universe of service businesses across the Southeast and Latin America.

The fact that NextGen is expanding its team now, in early 2026, is notable. The private equity fundraising environment has been challenging for the past 18 months, with LPs pulling back on commitments and focusing their capital on established managers. For a lower-middle-market firm to be hiring senior executives in this environment suggests one of two things: either the firm has recently closed a fund and is preparing to deploy capital, or it's generating enough carry and management fees from an existing portfolio to justify the investment in infrastructure.

Either way, the hires signal confidence. Firms don't add CFOs and VPs unless they're planning to grow.

One underappreciated aspect of lower-middle-market private equity is how much the success of a platform depends on finance discipline. Founder-owned service businesses often lack formal budgeting processes, standardized reporting, or even clean financial statements. When a PE firm acquires a company like that, one of the first jobs is to professionalize the finance function—and that's harder than it sounds.

You need someone who can build a 13-week cash flow model. Someone who can track KPIs like gross margin by service line, labor efficiency, and customer acquisition cost. Someone who can model the accretion of an add-on acquisition and present clean numbers to lenders. That's not CFO-level work—it's portfolio finance work, and it's exactly what Christopher Mele will be doing at NextGen.

At scale, this function becomes the difference between a portfolio that generates consistent returns and one that struggles to hit budget. It's also the foundation for successful exits—because when it's time to sell a platform, buyers want to see clean financials, tight reporting, and a track record of hitting projections.

It's useful to compare NextGen's strategy to how larger home services platforms operate. Firms like Wrench Group or Authority Brands have built substantial infrastructure: centralized call centers, national marketing campaigns, proprietary technology platforms, and dedicated M&A teams. They're operating at a scale where brand recognition and operational efficiency create meaningful competitive advantages.

NextGen isn't there yet—and likely doesn't need to be. The firm is building platforms at a smaller scale, where the advantages come from local market density, operational improvement, and smart capital deployment rather than national brand power. That's a different game, and it requires a different kind of team.

What the table shows is that NextGen is playing in a different tier—one where operational discipline and smart add-on execution matter more than brand scale. That's where the new hires become critical.

It's also worth noting that NextGen's regional focus gives it an advantage in seller relationships. Founder-owned service businesses are often more comfortable selling to a local or regional buyer than to a national platform. That personal touch matters in negotiations, and it's one reason why lower-middle-market firms can still compete for deals even when larger players are circling.

NextGen's executive expansion isn't happening in a vacuum. Across the lower-middle-market PE landscape, firms are adding operational horsepower. The days of running a fund with a handful of deal professionals and outsourced back-office support are fading. LPs expect more rigor. Portfolio companies need more support. And the competitive intensity of the market demands more internal capacity.

That shift is being driven by several factors. First, the market for lower-middle-market deals has become more efficient. Sellers have access to more advisors, auction processes are more common, and valuations have risen. That means firms can't just rely on proprietary deal flow and cheap leverage to generate returns—they have to create value operationally.

Second, LPs are demanding more transparency and more frequent reporting. That requires dedicated finance professionals who can pull data from portfolio companies and package it in a way that satisfies LP reporting requirements. It's not glamorous work, but it's necessary infrastructure.

Third, the rise of operating partners and value creation teams at larger PE firms has trickled down to the lower-middle-market. Firms that used to rely on management teams to run their own companies are now embedding operational support—finance, HR, marketing, IT—at the portfolio level. NextGen's hires fit squarely into that trend.

The executive buildout at NextGen raises some obvious forward-looking questions. Is the firm planning to raise a new fund? Is it preparing to accelerate deal activity in the second half of 2026? Or is this simply about managing a growing portfolio more effectively?

The firm hasn't disclosed fund size or deployment pace, so it's hard to know for certain. But the timing and seniority of the hires suggest that NextGen is positioning for growth—not just managing existing assets. Bringing in a CFO from Riverside and a VP from Frontenac isn't a passive move. It's a signal that the firm expects to be busier in the coming quarters.

If that's the case, the markets to watch are the ones where NextGen has already built platforms: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, and business consulting. These are all sectors where consolidation is ongoing and where the firm likely has a pipeline of add-on targets. The question is whether NextGen will also pursue new platform investments in adjacent verticals—commercial services, facilities management, or even healthcare support services.

Another question worth tracking: will NextGen begin to exit any of its earlier platforms? With 15+ companies in the portfolio, some of those investments are likely mature enough for a sale process. And if the firm has built strong operational infrastructure—the kind that these new hires are supposed to deliver—those exits could set the stage for the next fund.