When John Frank, founder and CEO of Third Road Management, decided to drop a few zeroes from his salary and swap a New York corporate finance job to run day-to-day operations for a nonprofit in Bloomingdale, Illinois, he had no idea where the road would take him.
Now over a decade later, his company Third Road Management, a Chicago fractional financial services business that he came up with while in Bloomingdale, has grown by three times in the past year. The firm also recently added Chicago tech veterans including Desiree Vargas Wrigley, founding general partner of Velocity Catalyst, and Haven Allen, co-founder and CEO of mHub, to a new advisory board to help expand the business’ reach to Chicago startups.
Frank said when he was deciding whether to launch Third Road Management, the “aha moment” came when he realized how valuable the services he was providing to the Bloomingdale nonprofit were, and he soon added two more businesses to his portfolio.
“It came to me that I was essentially doing the same thing for all three of these seemingly disparate, small to midsize businesses, which was helping them lead strategically, financially and operationally,” he told Chicago Inno. “The thing that rang in my head was there are businesses like these everywhere.”
Third Road Management estimates there are more than 1 million organizations with revenues under $100 million that could use its services to develop a sustainable and scalable path toward continued growth.
Frank said his company has tripled its revenue in the last year and has grown its staff by 120% to more than 20 people.
He called the addition of the advisory board a “pivotal moment” for the company.
“In some ways it elevates our ability to stand out in a crowd,” Frank said. “It’s really important for us, as we’re scaling and growing, to surround ourselves with wise people that can give authentic guidance.”
The four-team advisory board also includes Greg Hedges, president and CEO of the National Association of Corporate Directors Chicago Chapter, and Laura McNaughton, managing director in the Chicago office of Kroll Securities LLC. They’ll all help introduce Third Road’s reimagined CFO services to more Chicago startups.
Frank said that while tech and venture capital-backed startups have only been a small sliver of what Third Road has done over its run, he thinks the company’s is a model that can be applied to more local tech firms.