The Reeve Waud Method: Hiring the CEO Before Buying the Company
Most acquirers buy a business first and worry about management later. Reeve Waud often reverses the order. He finds the executive, agrees to build something together, and then goes looking for the right company to buy.
This executive-partnership model is one of the more distinctive habits at Waud Capital Partners, the Chicago firm Waud founded in 1993 and still leads. The logic is simple. Waud has said, “Human capital is at the heart of everything we do at WCP,” and the firm backs that claim with a five-person in-house human capital team dedicated to finding and supporting leaders. People come before deals.
Partnering With Bill Mixon
The most recent example arrived on July 17, 2025. Waud Capital committed more than $100 million of equity to build a medical device and supply chain services platform with Bill Mixon at the helm. Mixon brought more than 30 years in medical device and specialty distribution to the partnership.
His track record explains the commitment. Under his leadership, Advanced Diabetes Supply reached roughly $1 billion in revenue and served nearly half a million patients a year before it was sold to Cardinal Health. Reeve Waud didn’t buy a company and hope to find a leader. He secured the leader, then set out to build around him. This order of operations lowers the risk on the biggest variable in any deal, which is who’s running the business.
The George Ahn Precedent
The same pattern shows up on the software side. In February 2025, Waud Capital announced the next chapter of its work with software veteran George Ahn, and the two set out to pursue a vertical application software platform. They had already worked together for nearly a decade.
Ahn’s earlier wins gave the partnership its foundation. He helped lead iOFFICE, which sold to Thoma Bravo and became part of Eptura, and he was behind IPS. Relationships like this one, built over years, are what let Reeve Waud act quickly once the right opportunity appears.
The habit isn’t new either. When he founded Acadia Healthcare in 2005, Waud leaned on strong operators to run the platform, and that early lesson about backing proven leaders still guides how the firm approaches every new partnership. It’s a reversal of the usual sequence, and it puts a lot of weight on judging people well. Reeve Waud has spent three decades getting reps at exactly that. The Mixon and Ahn deals are simply the latest evidence that the method still holds.
