Daily TribuneLifelong friendship and small-town franchises power Garnett Station Partners' rise to $3.5B AUM and a billion-dollar restaurant empire
Share
Matt Perelman and Alex Sloane, co-founders of Garnett Station Partners, at their shared office desk where they've built a multibillion-dollar private equity firm from the ground up.
Photo courtesy of Private Equity Insights website
On Wall Street, power pairs are rare. In an industry dominated by solo high-flyers and competitive hierarchies, childhood friends Matt Perelman and Alex Sloane are rewriting the rules—from a single desk, with one phone, and a $3.5 billion private equity firm to show for it.
Their New York-based company, Garnett Station Partners (GSP), recently closed its fifth fund at $1.2 billion in just four months, a stunning feat in a market where many peers are struggling to raise capital. And yet, their partnership feels more like a garage startup than a financial juggernaut. They eat most meals together, take meetings as a duo, and still live a few blocks from one another on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
This unorthodox working style has helped them build GSP into a formidable player focused on consumer-facing businesses with high brand potential—from pet grooming to gyms to their first love: restaurants.
It all began in 2013, when the duo, then in their twenties and still in business school at Harvard, were rejected by KFC for lacking franchise experience. Undeterred, they bought 23 distressed Burger King locations in North Carolina—a move that laid the foundation for GSP. They turned that modest deal into a booming enterprise of 220 Burger King locations, ultimately sold to Carrols Restaurant Group in 2019.
Since then, the firm has launched Authentic Restaurant Brands (ARB), a holding company that has quickly amassed a cult portfolio of regional chains including Pollo Tropical, PJ Whelihan’s, Mambo Seafood, and Tavern in the Square. ARB now surpasses $1 billion in annual sales, and GSP expects to sell it within 12 to 18 months in a deal that could hit $2 billion.
But GSP is more than restaurant rollups. It reflects the founders’ deeply personal approach to investing, grounded in humility, energy, and respect for founder-led businesses. "We know what we don’t know," said Perelman, whose self-described skeptical nature balances Sloane's optimism. Together, they say their arguments—including a long one over selling a collision-repair business—make their investment decisions stronger.
GSP’s success has attracted top-tier backers, including Avenue Capital Group’s Marc Lasry and Oaktree co-founder Howard Marks. But the duo’s real strength lies in their bottom-up approach: identifying promising, often overlooked local businesses and giving them the infrastructure and capital to scale nationwide.
"You don’t need to invent the next Apple or Google to create a billion-dollar business," Sloane noted. "We’re invested in what America eats, sleeps, and breathes."
As GSP pushes deeper into sectors like disaster recovery and property management, its founders remain focused on what brought them here: strong partnerships, operational discipline, and an almost familial bond that began when they were toddlers.
Their story proves that in a cutthroat industry, trust and shared values can be the ultimate investment strategy.
