Devin Fitzpatrick
Operator building toward ownership.
I've run operations for the last decade — enterprise project portfolios, operational-excellence functions, and the systems underneath them — across healthcare delivery, healthcare administration, founder-led manufacturing, and enterprise services. Capital projects in the eight-figure range, team builds, and recovery work on operations that had outgrown their systems.
Now I'm pursuing acquisition entrepreneurship — buying a durable business and running it as the owner. Not to advise, consult, or flip it, but to own it and be accountable for it. The recurring pattern in the work I've done is always the same: real demand, capable people, and messy operating memory, with the cadence, structure, and decision discipline that never caught up. That gap is exactly the work I want to own. Here is the shape of it, stated plainly so a seller, broker, lender, or investor can decide in a glance whether we should talk.
- Business type
- A healthy business doing real, tangible work — physical or human throughput, not a software bet. The kind a founder built into something good without ever installing the systems that would let it run without them.
- Sectors
- Healthcare services and administrative infrastructure, enterprise and managed services, light manufacturing, and facilities-heavy operations — roughly where I have spent my career.
- Geography
- San Antonio preferred. Dallas–Fort Worth seriously in play. Minneapolis–St. Paul where the business justifies it. Open to the right operation elsewhere.
- What I bring
- A decade running operations that had outgrown their systems — across healthcare delivery and administration, a founder-led manufacturer, and enterprise portfolios. Capital projects in the eight-figure range, team design, vendor management, and recovery work. I also build AI operating systems inside real organizations under real constraints.
- Post-close
- I run it, I don’t flip it. I build the cadence, decision discipline, reporting, and operating systems a founder-built company never had time to put in — while keeping the people and the demand that made it work.
- Buyer posture
- Disciplined and deliberate. I keep my day job and run a low-burn search that earns its way forward, only spending real diligence dollars when a specific business earns it. Not a tire-kicker, not a spray-and-pray fund.
How I'd operate it
The value in a founder-built business isn't in the org chart — it's in getting the operating reality and the business reality to line up so people will actually move. That's the work I've done my whole career: surfacing the real picture instead of the comfortable one, building the systems that keep the truth in front of the people making decisions, and doing it without breaking what already works. I'm not buying a business to extract it and sell the parts. I'm buying one to run, and to make more durable than I found it. The case studies are the evidence of how I operate; the essays are the reasoning behind it.
Where I am in the search
I'm running a disciplined, deliberate search rather than a frantic one. I've committed to it behaviorally — registered for SEETA in September and the Booth–Kellogg ETA Conference in October 2026, building the advisor bench, and screening real targets — while keeping my day job so the search funds its own optionality and no deal is forced. I'd rather pass on ten businesses than buy the wrong one, and I'll know the right one when the operating reality, the capital, and the people all line up.
Reaching me
If you sell businesses, broker them, lend against them, or back the operators who buy them, email me at 1857enterprises@gmail.com. The size, structure, and specifics get real in a conversation — but the shape above is honest, and it's where I'd start.