Star Mountain Capital
John Polis is an entrepreneurial information management and business operations leader with a 25+ year track record of creating and enhancing technology enabled businesses and building platforms that allow for significant scale.
Prior to joining Star Mountain, Mr. Polis was COO and CTO for Guidepoint Global, a primary research firm and expert network serving the world’s leading Institutional Investors, Private Equity Firms, Consulting Organizations, and Corporations. Brought on in 2011 with a direct turnaround mandate, Mr. Polis changed the operating culture leading positive change in process and people management along with directing significant improvements to their information technology platform guiding the company back to profitability and significant double-digit growth.
Before Guidepoint, Mr. Polis served as COO and CTO for Coleman Research Group (CRG), also a primary research firm and expert network where he was recruited immediately after company secured financing. Without delay Mr. Polis led the product management and development effort on their custom built, Web based CRM, Recruiting, and Payment Processing platform – Knowledge Broker™ – while also being responsible for overseeing all operational areas of the company including research, relationship management, compliance, human resources, and data management. CRG also had a broker dealer arm, Coleman Brokerage Group, for which Mr. Polis served as compliance officer for. During his tenure Coleman Research scaled from 5 to 140 employees worldwide and in 2009 was voted one of Crain’s New York “Best Places to Work in New York City”.
Earlier in Mr. Polis’ career he served as a Co-founder and Executive Vice President Operations and CTO for Dotcom Distribution and Chief Information Officer for the GT Media family of companies.
Star Mountain Capital
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Star Mountain Capital ($1.5bn + AUM) has a differentiated business model and “Collaborative Ecosystem” including its three channel approach to investing into small and medium-sized businesses via Direct Investments, Strategic Primary Fund Investments and Secondary Fund Investments. Star Mountain invests: 1. As a strategic limited partner into other private equity and private credit fund managers focused on the lower-middle-market (including SBIC funds and as an anchor investor); 2. As a secondary investor providing liquidity to existing limited partner investors; and, 3. Directly into companies to help them grow (in the form of senior debt, mezzanine and/or equity investments). Star Mountain often partners with its portfolio of top performing fund managers to help "match" businesses with investment partners who are best suited to maximize value for business owners. Investing in the Growth Engine of America ® – Star Mountain is a specialized investor exclusively focused on providing capital to lower middle-market established small and medium-sized private U.S. businesses that have between $2 million and $20 million of EBITDA. Star Mountain’s data-driven approach, bringing large market expertise and resources to private equity and private credit investing is powered by its custom-built technology and its Collaborative Ecosystem ®. Star Mountain was recognized as one of the Best Places to Work by both Crain’s and Pensions & Investments. Crain’s two-part survey process consisted of evaluating each nominated company’s workplace policies, practices, philosophy, systems and demographics. The second part involved an employee survey to measure the employee experience. The combined scores determined the top companies and the final ranking. Detailed eligibility criteria can be found here: https://www.bestplacestoworknyc.com/eligibility-criteria P&I partners with a company called Best Companies Group on the survey that is behind the Best Places to Work program. P&I works with them to develop the parts of the questionnaires that are specific to money management. Beyond those questions, P&I’s survey partner develops and scores the surveys. P&I only sees anonymous responses to questions, identified only by the company name. If Best Companies determines that a firm scores above the threshold cutoff that they have set for a firm to be considered a Best Place to Work then P&I names them on their list. P&I uses the same cutoff for all firms but rank the firms against their peers by number of employees. P&I only ranks the top 5 firms per size category and then list the rest in alphabetical order. There is no fee to participate in the Best Places to Work in Money Management program. P&I’s partner, Best Companies Group, does offer some of the results of the surveys for sale to each participating company, but that has no influence on how a company is ranked or whether or not they are recognized as a best place to work. Detailed eligibility criteria can be found here: https://www.bestplacestoworkmm.com/eligibility-criteria