Historical Funds

Scottish American Capital is part of a tradition of investment funds from the same funding family. The investors have consistently backed entrepreneurs who have grown companies, created tens of thousands of US jobs and continue to own and operate their purchased companies and play a significant role in the communities in which they operate. Scottish American Capital seeks to acquire a platform business and then expand both by organic growth and a significant number of future acquisitions.

The following companies share many of the same team of backers as Scottish American and give a flavor of the long term perspective, capital availability and commitment to growing sustainable American companies that Scottish American represents.

Founded by Jim Ellis and Kevin Taweel in 1995, Kevin Taweel remains the CEO today. The investor group acquired Road Rescue in Houston, Texas in 1995, a small roadside recovery business for $6m, when it had 45 employees. Through organic sales growth, mainly through cellphone customers, they grew the core business and then embarked on a series of acquisitions. In 1999 Jim and Kevin acquired Merrimac Group, in 2002 they created a wireless technology repair and reverse logistics center in Smyrna, TN. By 2004 they had grown the business to 2500 employees. In 2006 Asurion merged with lock\line, LLC headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri and in 2006 acquired Warranty Corporation and Lumitrend, Inc. In 2008 they merged with N.E.W. Customer Service Cos. Asurion is now a $2.5 billion company with 10,000 employees, more than 70 million wireless customers and a growing presence in Asia. Asurion demonstrates both the long term intentions of the investor group and the opportunity that is represented by a great business being given the capital and management resources to grow strongly. Their story is profiled in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/business/smallbusiness/12hunt.html.

Purchased by David Kennedy and Mike Smerklo in 2002, Mike remains the CEO. ServiceSource founded and leads the Service Performance Management industry focusing exclusively on growing service share – by increasing the number of customers who buy services and the amount they spend on those services. It serves technology and healthcare IT clients in over 110 countries and customers include Sun Microsystems, Aruba Network and Blue Coat. ServiceSource now has five global service centers, which demonstrates the investors commitment to capital investment required to grow businesses rapidly. The company manages more than 400,000 customer relationships, 40,000 partners annually, with over $4B currently under management, revenues passed $100m in 2008 and the company employs over 800 workers.

Uniform Printing
Jim Southern purchased Uniform Printing in 1984, in the first acquisition by the wider investment family. A niche printing business from with $43 million turnover it was the business forms division of a listed company focused on specialty insurance forms and documents. Jim acquired Uniform Printing and earned his investors a 59% IRR over the course of the ten years that he managed the company. He then repeated this success with Continental Fire Services whilst becoming one of the core investors in the investment group.

Kirk Riedinger and Jamie Turner purchased the Denver Institute of Technology in 1987, a business with $4m in sales. Jamie remains the Vice Chairman and Kirk operated the company as CEO for 20 years. Alta grew to be a system of higher education institutions that included Westwood College Online. Today, the 3,000 employee company owns, operates 17 campuses located in six states and runs operating under the name Westwood Schools and is the largest franchisee of the Princeton Review test program. These campuses along with Westwood College Online support more than 15,000 students.The revenue had reached $78 million by 2001.

Purchased by Dustin Sellers and Ben Godsey in October 2005, they remain the CEOs of the rapidly growing market leader in HR back office processing. When they bought the business in 2005, the outsourced employee administration industry, also known as the professional employer organization industry, was relatively new and often misunderstood. IAt the end of 2008 ProService had grown to 94 employees and five offices and had seen a 73 percent growth in revenue since 2005. Dustin summed up our investor group philosophy….. “We recognized if we just delivered on what we said we could deliver, we would win. We’re very pragmatic and we’re very good at blocking and tackling, one foot in front of the other, building blocks, and we recognized the business we bought had very good bones.”