The firm
Acquire.Operate.Hold long-term.
Saddle Hill Partners is a private search and hold fund. Our mandate is to assemble a portfolio of privately held operating companies. We identify and acquire established, profitable businesses. Thereafter we operate them, scale them, and retain them within the fund in perpetuity.
Investment thesis
What we acquire.
We are looking for companies resilient to artificial intelligence, with revenue diversified across customers and a long operating history. Businesses whose output is principally knowledge or digital content, such as law practices, financial advisers, tax-preparation firms and video production, fall outside the mandate.
A company that meets those criteria is assessed against three propositions: that its business model can be optimised, that the optimised model can be extended, and that demand for what it does will hold across the period we intend to own it.
Model optimisation
Companies where value can be created by optimising the business model. That opportunity typically sits in information spread across multiple systems, processes that remain manual, and pricing or capacity decisions taken on limited data.
Scalable
Businesses whose unit economics improve with scale and whose model can be extended once it has been optimised. Additional units, adjacent lines of revenue, new geographies, moving up the value chain and consolidating a fragmented sector are among the routes we consider.
Tech-disruption resilience
Demand that persists across a long holding period. Where value is delivered through physical execution and local presence, the position rests on capability that is costly to reproduce and does not transfer through information alone.
Portfolio
Two companies.
Names and locations are not disclosed.
Salon chain
Founded more than twenty years ago by a hair stylist, with one location. The founder’s son and daughter later joined and grew it to around eighteen locations, producing close to $10M in annual revenue. The family was approaching retirement. We acquired 100% in an all-cash transaction in November 2025.
In the first six months of our ownership the chain grew from eighteen locations to twenty-four. We opened a specialty format of high-end salons offering a deliberately narrow set of services, each run by a celebrity stylist who publishes their work on social media. In their first month they became the highest-grossing locations in the group.
We rebuilt the technology. The company ran on nine separate systems from nine vendors. We consolidated the data into a single client-centred view and have begun replacing the systems themselves with software built in-house using AI. We now employ our own development team.
Wholesale distribution
A consolidation. We acquired an anchor business and have been adding independent operations to it. Two so far. In each case we acquired the exclusive supply contracts, the customer base and the sales team.
Both were bought in decline. The first had been owned by someone running four other operations, with little oversight of this one; monthly sales had fallen to around $100,000 from roughly $250,000. The second had lost its head of sales and, with them, distribution of one of its principal brands; monthly sales had fallen to around $100,000 as well, against closer to $300,000 several years earlier.
We hired that former head of sales and are rebuilding the sales organisation, which now numbers close to twenty representatives. Two further operations are under consideration.
Team
Two partners.
Guillermo Aguilar
Partner
Guillermo began in management consulting and early-stage venture capital. He then spent twenty years as chief executive of a discount pharmacy chain, growing it from 17 locations to more than 500, with annual sales past US$1B and 7,000 employees. The chain sits within a privately held conglomerate operating in eleven markets across three continents, where he also helped build businesses in wholesaling, manufacturing and real estate.
Earlier he and Roger ran companies together at PuntoCom Holdings, a US$50M fund that bought and operated internet businesses in the first years of the commercial web. Before that he led divisions at CEMEX, Caterpillar and Vitro, where he and Roger first worked together.
He holds an engineering degree and an MBA from the Tecnológico de Monterrey.
Roger Duke
Partner
Roger began in management consulting and early-stage venture capital alongside Guillermo. He later moved to the United States for his MBA, then spent his career as an executive at large banks and investment firms—most recently Citi, Charles Schwab and First Republic Bank (now part of JPMorgan Chase)—where he headed divisions and ran large operating businesses.
Earlier he and Guillermo ran companies together at PuntoCom Holdings, a US$50M fund that bought and operated internet businesses in the first years of the commercial web.
Roger holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and an engineering degree from the Tecnológico de Monterrey. He lives in California with his wife and their three children.
Contact
Get in touch.
Enquiries go directly to the partners.