Co-Founder & CEO
With nearly 40 years of experience in specialty finance, CRE, private equity, strategic leadership, and consulting, John has a proven track record of private business investing, and in leading such businesses to success and growth in value. Most recently, he was CEO of Commonwealth Ventures, where he led the successful and over-subscribed $29M growth capital seed round for CRDV, the national development arm of COhatch.
Prior to Commonwealth, John was the Chairman and CEO of The Garage Group, a boutique innovation consultancy to the F500 in the CPG, Food & Beverage and Financial Services industries, which was sold in a successful management buyout in June 2021.
His PE experience came as co-lead on a $40M raise of Fund II for Brixey & Meyer Capital, where he also served as Operating Partner for both Funds I and II, including leading the establishment of governance and strategic planning, and serving as Chairman on many of the boards. He was also an Operating Partner for a family office based in Cincinnati, as they started to build their specialty finance portfolio.
John won EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 1999 during his time as Founder, President, and CEO of The Vaughn Group, Inc., a Cincinnati-based commercial equipment finance company for which he raised multiple rounds of private and institutional capital and that he successfully exited to a public bank in 2003.
For over 20 years, John has and continues to serve on many for-profit and faith-based nonprofit governing and advisory boards.
CO-Founder & CHairman
Mike Humphrey’s career in private equity began as co-founder of Tanglewood Investments in 1997, a private equity firm focused on hands-on investing in the global manufacturing industry. Over 17 years Tanglewood acquired a dozen businesses that were assembled into five operating groups. These groups were re-envisioned, restored to profitability, and sold to long-term owners resulting in returns of 10x to Tanglewood’s founding investors.
Mike is also a partner in Socratic Ventures, an Austin-based EdTech venture firm founded in 2014 to earn market returns and drive impact by reducing the cost and time required to earn valuable education credentials. Mike is the anchor investor in Socratic Funds I and II and provided the seed capital to fund Acadeum, a rapidly growing consortium of 485 accredited Universities sharing online course capacity. Socratic Ventures’ work has resulted in the formation of four companies that have deployed over $50 million from the Socratic Funds and other strategic and venture partners.
Mike is also a long-time leader and past Board Chair of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. Over its 18-year history, more than 3,000 men have graduated PEP with only 8% recidivism, enjoying 100% employment within 90 days of release for ten years running, and over 600 small businesses have been formed. Following his fourteen-year Board service, Mike was appointed to lead the management team’s development of its post-Covid Ten Year Strategy that includes opening PEP’s new business incubator and future growth of PEP’s wholly-owned secured lender—Entre Capital.
Manager of operations
Sara joined Fieron Growth Partners in 2024 as the Manager of Operations and Communications.
Prior to joining Fieron, she worked for a global consulting firm managing a diverse portfolio of F500 and PE backed clients. Sara has a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Cincinnati and resides in Cincinnati with her family.
Please reach out for more information.