NMS Capital Taps William Gonzalez for New Business Development Role

NMS Capital, the Miami-based private equity firm focused on middle-market companies across the Americas, has established a dedicated business development role and appointed William Gonzalez to the position, the firm announced Wednesday. The move marks a strategic shift for the firm as it looks to formalize deal origination at a time when competition for quality assets in the $10 million to $100 million EBITDA range has reached fever pitch.

Gonzalez joins NMS Capital from Banc of California, where he spent over three years as Vice President in the Commercial Banking division. Before that, he logged time at PNC Bank and cut his teeth in credit analysis at Wells Fargo. It's a traditional banking pedigree — relationship management, credit underwriting, client acquisition — now being redeployed toward the buy side.

What's notable isn't Gonzalez's résumé. It's that NMS felt the need to create the role at all.

Most middle-market PE firms this size — NMS Capital manages capital for family offices and institutional investors with a focus on control and growth equity stakes — rely on senior partners to source deals opportunistically or lean on intermediaries. Creating a standalone business development function signals that NMS is betting on proactive origination over reactive deal flow. In plain terms: they're done waiting for brokers to bring them opportunities everyone else has already seen.

The middle market has always been relationship-driven, but the playbook is changing. A PitchBook report from Q4 2024 found that intermediated deal processes now account for 68% of all U.S. middle-market transactions, up from 52% a decade ago. Translation: more auctions, tighter timelines, higher multiples.

Firms that want proprietary deal flow — the kind that doesn't come with 47 other bidders and a stapled financing package — need someone whose full-time job is finding it. That's what Gonzalez's role represents.

According to the announcement, Gonzalez will be responsible for "identifying and cultivating relationships with potential investment opportunities" and "supporting the firm's strategic growth initiatives." In less formal terms: he's building the Rolodex. Calling on business owners who haven't decided to sell yet. Attending industry conferences. Mapping sectors. Tracking bolt-on candidates for portfolio companies. The unglamorous work of staying top-of-mind so that when a founder finally decides it's time, NMS gets the call before the investment bank does.

This approach — hire someone from banking or lending, someone who already knows how to cold-call CEOs and structure conversations — has become standard practice at larger funds. Vista Equity Partners built an entire origination machine this way. So did Clearlake Capital. What's newer is seeing sub-$500 million funds adopt it.

NMS Capital's location isn't incidental. Miami has quietly become the private equity capital of Latin America — not just for LatAm-focused funds, but for U.S. firms that want a foothold in both markets. Blackstone, Advent International, and Warburg Pincus all have Miami offices now. It's where you base a team if you're serious about dealmaking in São Paulo, Mexico City, Bogotá, and Santiago — but don't want to actually live there full-time.

For a firm like NMS, that geographic positioning creates both opportunity and pressure. Opportunity because there's still less institutional capital chasing middle-market deals in Latin America compared to the U.S. Pressure because every other Miami-based fund sees the same opening. According to LAVCA (the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America), PE and VC fundraising in the region hit $18.2 billion in 2023 — a record, but still a fraction of the $1.2 trillion raised globally.

The math is simple: limited capital, growing economies, rising middle class, regulatory complexity that keeps the megafunds at bay. It's exactly the kind of market where relationships matter more than brand name. And where having someone whose job is just building those relationships — not juggling deal execution or portfolio management — starts to make economic sense.

Source: LAVCA, PitchBook, Preqin (2023 data)

Gonzalez's background in commercial banking is worth unpacking. At Banc of California, he would have been calling on privately held companies with $10 million to $250 million in revenue — the exact profile NMS targets for equity investments. He was pitching credit facilities, cash management, treasury services. Which means he was already having the "how fast are you growing, where's the working capital stress, who's on your board" conversations that precede every PE deal.

To understand why NMS is hiring for business development now, it helps to know what the firm actually does. NMS Capital describes itself as focused on "operational value creation" in middle-market companies — the kind of language every PE firm uses, but which in practice means they're looking for decent businesses that can get better with the right capital structure, management team, and strategic roadmap.

The firm doesn't disclose fund size publicly, but based on the deal profiles and team size, it's likely managing somewhere between $200 million and $500 million in committed capital. That puts them in the lower-middle to core middle market: equity checks of $10 million to $50 million, enterprise values of $50 million to $300 million, companies with $25 million to $150 million in revenue.

At that size, you're not buying household names. You're buying the largest HVAC distributor in the Southeast, or the third-largest packaging supplier to the food industry in Mexico, or a healthcare IT company serving regional hospital networks. Solid, boring, profitable — and invisible to the Wall Street Journal until the day they get sold.

Which is exactly the problem. How do you find these companies? The owners aren't tweeting about growth metrics. They're not raising VC rounds covered by TechCrunch. Many of them have never taken outside capital. The only way in is through direct relationships — accountants, lawyers, industry consultants, former executives, bankers who've worked with the company for 15 years.

That's the network Gonzalez is being hired to build and activate.

Why now? NMS has been around for years. Presumably they've closed deals before without a dedicated business development hire. What changed?

Two things, most likely. First, the intermediated market got too expensive. When every deal is an auction and every auction has 12 credible bidders, your win rate craters and your returns compress. Firms that want to stay in the game either move upmarket (which requires raising a bigger fund) or find deals off-market (which requires hiring someone like Gonzalez).

Here's the uncomfortable truth about business development in private equity: most of the work produces nothing. You can spend six months building a relationship with a business owner who decides not to sell. Or who sells to a competitor. Or who dies and whose kids take the company public. The hit rate on proprietary sourcing is abysmal compared to responding to banker processes.

But the one deal you do close off-market — the one where you're the only bidder, where the seller trusts you because you spent two years staying in touch, where the price is 5.5x EBITDA instead of 8.2x — that one deal can make up for 24 months of unproductive coffees and conference calls.

So what does success look like for Gonzalez in year one? Probably not a closed deal. More likely: a pipeline of 50-75 tracked companies, 10-15 active conversations with business owners or their advisors, and 2-3 opportunities that reach the LOI stage. If one of those closes in year two, the role pays for itself. If two close, it's a home run.

The firms that do this well don't measure business development by deals closed. They measure it by pipeline quality, relationship depth, and whether the firm is seeing opportunities six months before they hit the market.

Gonzalez's hire fits a pattern that's been accelerating since 2020: private equity firms hiring commercial bankers, corporate development professionals, and former consultants into non-investment roles that support deal origination, portfolio operations, or sector specialization.

It's part of the maturation — or depending on your perspective, the bureaucratization — of an industry that used to run lean. Twenty years ago, a middle-market PE firm was five people: two senior partners who sourced and closed deals, two associates who built models and wrote memos, and an admin who kept the lights on. Now it's 15 people: the same investment team, plus an operating partner, a CFO, a talent recruiter, a marketing lead, and someone doing business development.

NMS Capital operates in one of the most crowded segments of the private equity market. According to Preqin, there are over 2,800 active middle-market PE firms globally, with roughly 650 of those focused on North America and Latin America. In Miami alone, there are at least two dozen firms targeting similar deal profiles.

That's a lot of capital chasing a finite number of quality assets. The median middle-market buyout in the U.S. now trades at 7.8x EBITDA, up from 6.2x five years ago. In Latin America, multiples have risen too, though they still lag U.S. comps by 1-2 turns on average due to perceived regulatory and currency risk.

For NMS, the challenge is differentiation. What do you offer that 649 other firms don't? If the answer is "we have deep relationships in sectors X and Y," then you need someone whose job is to deepen those relationships and build new ones. That's Gonzalez.

The other strategic advantage is speed. A firm with a dedicated origination function can move faster on opportunities that fit their mandate because they've already done the sector mapping, already know the players, already have a thesis. When a target becomes available, they're not starting from scratch.

Creating a business development role doesn't guarantee better deal flow. In fact, it can backfire if the person in the role doesn't have the credibility or sector knowledge to command attention from business owners and intermediaries. A 35-year-old former VP from a regional bank is not going to get the same audience with a third-generation manufacturing company CEO as a 55-year-old senior partner would.

Which means Gonzalez's success depends heavily on how NMS positions him. Is he empowered to bring senior partners into early conversations? Does he have a clear mandate on which sectors and geographies to prioritize? Is there a compensation structure that rewards pipeline quality, not just closed deals?

Another question: how does this role interface with the investment team? Business development can become a bottleneck if it's seen as a gatekeeper rather than a pipeline accelerator. The best firms treat BD as a force multiplier — feeding opportunities to deal teams who then take over once there's mutual interest.

The worst firms create territorial conflicts where BD wants credit for deals they introduced but didn't close, or where investment teams ignore BD-sourced opportunities because they prefer broker processes where the work is already done.

The establishment of this role — not just the hire, but the decision to create the function in the first place — tells you that NMS is planning to be more active. Either they're preparing to deploy a new fund, or they've identified specific sectors where they want to build density and need someone to systematically map the landscape.

It also suggests they're confident enough in their platform to support non-investment headcount. In private equity, every hire that doesn't directly close deals is a bet that the indirect value (better sourcing, faster execution, stronger portfolio support) justifies the cost. Smaller firms often can't make that math work. If NMS is making it, it means they're either managing more capital than they were three years ago, or they've decided that the next fund won't get raised without a differentiated sourcing strategy.

The timing — January 2025 — is also worth noting. Most PE firms do strategic hires in Q4 (before the new fiscal year) or Q2 (after bonuses are paid and people are willing to move). A January hire suggests this was either opportunistic (Gonzalez became available and they moved quickly) or urgent (they needed the role filled to support a near-term initiative).

Either way, it's a vote of confidence in a market that's been anything but easy for middle-market firms. Exit activity has been sluggish since rates rose. Fundraising has been difficult. And yet NMS is adding to the team. That's a signal.

Zoom out, and the Gonzalez hire is a data point in a larger trend: the middle market is starting to look more like the large-cap market. Dedicated origination teams. Sector specialists. Operating partners. Marketing departments. IR functions. Compliance officers.

Some of this is regulation-driven. Some of it is competition-driven. But a lot of it is just the natural evolution of an industry that has professionalized rapidly over the past 15 years. The scrappy, opportunistic, relationship-driven firms of the 1990s and 2000s are being replaced — or at least supplemented — by institutionalized platforms with formal processes and specialized roles.

Is that good or bad? Depends on who you ask. LPs like it because it reduces key-person risk and makes firms more scalable. Sellers like it because it signals that the firm is serious and well-resourced. But some senior partners miss the old days when you could run a $300 million fund with a Bloomberg terminal and a Rolodex.

For NMS Capital, the question is whether this move helps them win better deals or just makes them look more like everyone else. If Gonzalez can consistently deliver proprietary opportunities that wouldn't have surfaced otherwise, the role is a strategic asset. If he ends up spending most of his time attending the same conferences and calling the same intermediaries as every other BD hire, it's just overhead.