# Frontenac

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.

- Website: https://frontenac.com/

## 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.

## In Its Trades

- Pet Boarding & Daycare: https://searchspheresource.com/guides/buying-a-pet-boarding-business

The other confirmed bidders: Access Holdings (https://searchspheresource.com/buyers/access-holdings), Trivest Partners (https://searchspheresource.com/buyers/trivest).

## Confirmed Deals

Deals traced to announcements, 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.

- Seventeen pet resorts (into Digs Dog Care) (2025-08-12): Rebranded Digs locations and partner facilities nationwide, assembled in the platform's first year of buying. Source: https://frontenac.com/new-pet-care-brand-digs-dog-care-redefines-the-future-of-pet-care/

Also on this site: https://searchspheresource.com/buyers
Source: https://searchspheresource.com/buyers/frontenac
Last checked: 2025-08-12

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt