Nearly a year after his mentor’s death, Mark Sotir is mulling a fundamental change to family-financed Equity Group Investments.. It’s likely those two businesses will only be mentioned in the same breath when reciting the roster of the 19 portfolio companies owned by Equity Group Investments, the private equity firm that Zell founded in 1968 and Sotir now runs. EGI’s portfolio also includes a hospital chain, a John Deere dealership group, trucking and logistics businesses and a fracker.
“Sam was nudging me to explore raising capital,” Sotir says. “The family’s money will be the vast majority of what we deploy, but he liked the idea of maybe having a couple partners where we would raise some version of a fund.” EGI prides itself on transforming the businesses it buys. Sotir says its hospital chain, Ardent Health Services, had revenue of roughly $2 billion when EGI bought it in 2015. Today, Sotir says, revenue is $6 billion., which arranges thousands of overnight deliveries of car and agricultural-equipment parts. Since EGI bought control, Sotir says, Lanter’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization have quadrupled. Now the Missouri-based company is poised to expand into Canada.