Meet the Best Friends Who Are Private Equity’s Newest Young Stars
Matt Perelman and Alex Sloane got their start buying up Burger King restaurants
They share an office with one big desk and one telephone. They often eat three meals a day together, and take all their meetings as a pair.
Matt Perelman and Alex Sloane’s relationship is an unusual one on Wall Street, where executives are better known for undercutting rivals to consolidate power. Their lifelong friendship helped build a private-equity firm that is drawing high-profile investors and a portfolio of regional restaurants that recently surpassed $1 billion in annual sales.
“It’s probably not the most efficient way to do things, but it’s worked for this long,“ said Perelman, 38 years old, about how he does just about everything with Sloane, 37.
Garnett Station Partners, which the duo started in their 20s, invests in everything from funeral homes to gyms and car washes. Whatever the business may be, the two apply the same strategy they honed buying up restaurants: finding promising local concepts, and scaling them.
The New York-based firm recently closed its fifth fund, netting about $1.2 billion in just four months and pushing the firm’s total assets under management to over $3.5 billion. That is even as a growing list of firms have struggled to raise capital.
“They’ve established themselves as the next generation of moneymakers,” said Marc Lasry, founder of private-equity shop Avenue Capital Group. Lasry, a mentor to the pair, said he rarely invests outside of his own firm but has put money into Garnett Station.
Other investors who have served as mentors include Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Howard Marks, Continental Grain Chairman and Chief Executive Paul Fribourg and 3G Capital Co-Managing Partner Daniel Schwartz.
Perelman and Sloane have known each other since they were toddlers, having grown up three blocks from each other on New York’s Upper East Side. They still live there today with their respective families (their wives are also best friends). The two see each other as brothers, sibling squabbles and all.
In 2023, for instance, they said they argued for weeks over whether to sell a collision-repair shop business. Perelman, who tends to be more skeptical and pessimistic, was pushing for a sale and ultimately prevailed, netting hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. Sloane, the more reliably upbeat of the two, said their dynamic is what helps them spot both the potential and risks in deals.
It is why they still take all their work trips together.
“It may be an unusual style, but it works,” said Royce Yudkoff, co-founder of Abry Partners, a private-equity firm based in Boston. (Yudkoff met the pair in 2014 while he was teaching a course at the Harvard Business School, and later invested in their firm.)
Garnett Station’s portfolio companies include a pet-services franchiser, a vacation-rental property manager and a business that offers disaster recovery help. But restaurants are where it all started.
“We love investing in businesses that do really well in their core market,” said Perelman. “What works in Ohio doesn’t necessarily work in Arizona.” The firm’s Primanti Bros, for instance, has a cult following in Pittsburgh for its massive sandwiches stuffed with french fries.
In 2013, Perelman and Sloane were still in business school at Harvard when they tried to strike their first deal, for a handful of Kentucky Fried Chicken locations. They were in their 20s at the time and rejected for lacking franchise experience. Perelman later gifted the original business plan in a leatherbound book for Sloane.
The following year, the duo spent the summer in North Carolina, doing diligence on nearly two dozen distressed Burger King restaurants. It was enough for them to clinch their first deal.
That Burger King portfolio eventually grew to more than 220 locations across the Southeast before it was sold in a stock deal in 2019 to Carrols Restaurant Group, the Whopper maker’s biggest U.S. franchisee. (Burger King parent Restaurant Brands International bought Carrols for $1 billion last year.)
Garnett Station launched Authentic Restaurant Brands in 2021. The restaurant holding company’s acquisitions have included a New Jersey and Pennsylvania sports-bar chain (PJ Whelihan’s), a Latin-inspired chain in Houston (Mambo Seafood) and the Pollo Tropical restaurant business.
The company’s latest purchase was Tavern in the Square, a sports-bar chain in the Boston area known for its fried pickle chips.
Sloane said other private-equity firms avoid starting out with smaller businesses because building the infrastructure for expansion can be challenging. “But once you do that, there will be a lot more buyers for that business than there were when you first found it,” he said.
The duo expect to sell Authentic Restaurant Brands within the next 12 to 18 months. A deal could fetch anywhere between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, going off of recent industry deal multiples. (They say they plan to do more restaurant deals in the future.)