Leadership.
Russ Rosenzweig named Executive Director of the Institute
Russ Rosenzweig was named Executive Director of the Business Acquisitions Institute in August 2026.
He founded a professional services firm in 1993 and led it for three decades, which makes him a member of the audience this Institute is built for rather than an observer of it: the owner of a private company, working through the same questions about growth, valuation and succession that the site covers.
His career has been spent on a version of the problem at the center of an acquisition, which is finding the one specialist who actually fits a situation and knowing how to tell. Over three decades he connected thousands of attorneys, insurers and companies with the experts their matters turned on, for clients including most of the largest law firms in the United States. Advisor selection is the same discipline pointed at a different problem.
B.A., Northwestern University · M.B.A., University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Anthony Donofrio named Director of the Institute
Anthony Donofrio was named Director of the Business Acquisitions Institute in September 2026, working alongside Executive Director Russ Rosenzweig.
He spent sixteen years as a Managing Director at Hamilton Lane, the NASDAQ-listed global private markets firm with more than a trillion dollars in assets under advisement, management and supervision. He served as Chief Operating Officer of the firm’s five billion dollar co-investment program and sat on its Co-Investment Valuation Committee, and as Head of Transactions for the legal group he led and negotiated hundreds of primary, secondary and co-investment transactions across private equity and private credit. Before Hamilton Lane he spent seven years as a transactional attorney in the Corporate and Securities Group at Drinker Biddle & Reath, now Faegre Drinker, structuring and executing mergers, acquisitions and private equity investments.
That is the other side of the table this Institute writes about: the professionals an owner meets once and they meet every month. He brings that experience to the Institute’s educational work and to helping owners evaluate and choose the advisors a transaction requires. He continues to lead his own advisory practice, AJD PE Consulting, which is separate from the Institute, serves on the Board of Advisors of Delta Capital Management Partners, and teaches as an Adjunct Professor at Villanova University’s Charles Widger School of Law and as a Professional-in-Residence at Fairfield University’s Dolan School of Business.
J.D., Northwestern University School of Law · B.A., cum laude, Business Administration-Finance, Villanova University
Executive Director Russ Rosenzweig on why the Institute exists, how it is paid, and how the free concierge works (7 minutes).
Read the full transcript
Lightly edited for readability.
My name is Russ Rosenzweig, and I am proudly the Executive Director of the Business Acquisitions Institute. Welcome. Why the heck did I agree to become the Executive Director of the Business Acquisitions Institute? And what is this institute?
A little background. I started a company in college. It was in 1994 that I launched it, and we're still doing it 32 years later. I'm still running the same company. During that time, boy, I did a lot from a capital point of view. I raised capital. I grew the company. I, if I may say, ran the company into the ground during the dot-com era. Then I resuscitated it. I built it up again. I sold it to a public company. I bought a few more companies using other people's money, the best kind. And then a few years later, I bought my original company back from them for pennies on the dollar.
So I've been on a wild business journey. These days, private equity companies call us seemingly every week, along with the investment bankers and other vendors who want us to sell our company again. I accidentally said yes to one of them recently, and it led to months and months of so-called due diligence that was so stressful, so depressing and so disheartening. And the price on the LOI never stays what everybody agrees. I'm so glad we pulled out of it.
So when I talk about owning a private company, about thinking about buying one, or wondering what happens if I actually want to sell my company again, I'm really telling you about my life's journey. For 30 years I've been on a really cool business journey, a really fun entrepreneurial journey that's relevant to this institute, because my whole life's work has been finding experts and specialists. Thousands of times, month after month, year after year, for most of the largest law firms in the country, I've been an advisor helping them find the best and most qualified expert. My whole job, my whole life's work, was connecting leaders who have very complex disputes or business situations with the exact right, perfect experts.
And when it comes to buying and selling your company, it's kind of the same job. You've got to pick the exact best and most appropriate experts and advisors. Here is what I have watched happen over and over again over the course of my very long career: you buy or you sell a company maybe once or twice in your whole career. But the people across the table do it every month, and so does everyone they bring with them. And so do all of your advisors. That's the gap. That's why we created this institute.
Nearly everyone who helps you, my fellow entrepreneur and business owner, gets paid for an acquisition only when the deal closes. It's not a conspiracy, it's just how the industry is built. But it means almost nobody in the room is paid to tell you to slow down or to walk away. I'm so glad that I walked away from my last acquisition opportunity a couple of years ago, because it was totally the wrong move. But even my advisors couldn't tell me that, because they'd be so well paid if the deal closed.
So that's why we created this institute. We don't take commissions. We don't take percentages. We don't take success fees. We accept nothing from any advisor. Our fee is modest, and it's the same whether you're buying, whether you're selling, or whether we tell you to wait or to pull out.
The only thing we do here at the Institute is give you guidance on whether and how to buy or sell your company or other companies. It has been probably the most fun project I've ever worked on, because we get to work with business owners on the buy side and on the sell side, we get to be candid, and we get to bring them the best and most qualified experts. We help them put together the best and most suitable deal team, rather than going with the investment banker you happen to know or who was recommended to you by a friend or colleague. That's what the Institute is all about.
I encourage you to start with our concierge, which we're very proud of, and it's quite brilliant. Our AI concierge is far better than any chatbot you've ever engaged with. It knows everything there is to know about buying and selling companies. It's free. It's private. It will tell you where you are, what you should be asking, and what kinds of experts you actually need. You'll have an opportunity to engage with our concierge for honest answers to questions like: is it too early to consider buying or selling? Is the valuation not going to be compelling enough? Is it even worthwhile to embark upon the journey? And if it is, the Institute can help you put together a really great team to evaluate your situation, the best and most suitable project team.
So tell us what you're weighing. Tell us what you're contemplating. It's been our life's work to engage in our own M&A and to help others think through the pros and cons of mergers and acquisitions. Enjoy the Institute.