Frontenac
The Firm
Frontenac is one of Chicago's oldest private equity firms, founded in 1971, with thirteen funds, $3.8 billion committed, and 350 deals across its fifty-plus years. Since 2002 its identity has been CEO1ST: the firm selects an experienced operating executive first, builds an investment thesis with them, and then buys a company for them to run, pairing the operator with what it calls repeatable value-creation playbooks.
It targets growth buyouts of profitable, privately held lower-middle-market companies in consumer, industrial, and services, and specifically situations tangled in what it names complex transition issues, liquidity, management succession, growth planning, which is a precise description of the retiring-owner businesses a searcher hunts. Its Digs Dog Care platform had acquired seventeen pet resorts by August 2025, counting from its formation in 2024.
CEO1ST deserves a searcher's close attention because it is institutional search: an executive with a thesis, capital behind them, hunting owner-transition companies. The difference is the executive works for Frontenac's fund. Anyone interviewing there should know the 1971 founding, the CEO1ST mechanism and its 2002 launch, and the transition-issues language, because the whole firm is organized around that motion.
Read again in September 2026: the pet platform has announced nothing since it was named. The sponsor's portfolio page lists five 2025 add-ons by year with no date, which may or may not be among the seventeen the brand was formed from, so none is a row. The sponsor itself bought and sold steadily through 2026, none of it pet care. The whole newsroom opened that evening carries no Digs add-on, and the platform's own site lists eleven branded locations and a logo wall of partners with no dates; the sponsor's other platforms account for thirteen formations and forty-eight add-ons since 2022, a count here.
What It Buys
Chicago, Illinois. A lower-middle-market buyout firm pairing operating executives with fragmented trades; its Digs Dog Care platform had acquired seventeen pet resorts by August 2025.
Selling to them one day, or watching them as the other bidder? Track them in the Contact Book so the relationship has a next-touch date.
Confirmed Deals
1 deal traced to announcements by Frontenac, 2025, newest first. Firms that announce every deal show a fuller run here than firms that report acquisitions as quarterly counts, so read this as the evidence that clears the bar rather than as the firm's whole record.
Nothing newer has cleared the bar in 13 months, against a registry whose newest confirmed deal is September 30, 2026. A gap past 12 months can mean the firm has slowed, or that it has stopped announcing; treat it as a prompt to check its own newsroom before assuming either.
- Seventeen pet resorts (into Digs Dog Care) · August 12, 2025
Rebranded Digs locations and partner facilities nationwide, assembled in the platform's first year of buying.