I recently spoke to Glenn Oken with Mangrove Equity Partners in Tampa, Florida. With some minor edits, the transcription below captures our conversation surrounding private equity investing and his firm. (Italics text are Glenn’s words.)

Glenn Oken – Mangrove Equity
Introduction
Mangrove Equity Partners is a lower middle market private equity fund headquartered in Tampa, Florida. The team has always been keenly focused on the lower middle market, which I will define as investing in privately held companies making between $2 – $10 million of EBITDA. We invest in companies throughout the United States and Canada. We can invest overseas, but other than Canada, it’s reserved for add-on acquisitions.
The team has completed roughly 138 deals in 60 industries. A lot of our brethren who have that type of experience and have had the returns that we have migrate into larger funds. This categorically means that they have to invest in larger companies. But we are smaller deal guys. We really enjoy working with family businesses and entrepreneurs.