An Investor, Not an Exit: How DuraBrake’s Second Generation Found a Partner to Fuel Its Growth

A family-run brake manufacturer growing faster than its resources could support, a family determined to keep running it, and an investor whose model is growing businesses and people — the transaction that made DuraBrake a platform. Hart Marx Advisors represented DuraBrake.

Sell-Side Advisory

DuraBrake

Tiger Lily Holdings

Most M&A conversations assume the owner wants out. But many of the strongest family businesses face the opposite situation: the next generation is capable, committed, and already leading — and the business is growing so fast that capital, systems, and expertise, not ambition, are the constraints. For those owners, the conventional menu looks wrong. Selling to a strategic acquirer means handing over the keys. A traditional buyout can mean the same thing on a different schedule. What the family actually needs is a third option: a partner who invests in the business and the people running it, and helps them build something bigger.

DuraBrake's partnership with Tiger Lily Holdings is that third option executed well — and a template for growing family businesses across the heavy-duty aftermarket.

Santa Clara, California-based DuraBrake has spent more than 25 years building one of the most respected names in heavy-duty braking. The company manufactures and distributes aftermarket brake drums, rotors, hubs, and calipers for medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles and off-highway equipment, serving customers across the United States and Canada. Its differentiation is earned the hard way: consistent quality, innovative design, short lead times, and a rare willingness to produce specialty, custom, and OEM-discontinued parts that larger suppliers won't touch.

The operating model matches the culture — nimble and efficient, with direct shipments and third-party distribution warehouses keeping operating costs low and service levels high. Under the leadership of the family's second generation, the company had built real momentum: rapid response to emerging sales opportunities, aggressive supply chain management, and best-in-class customer service were driving sustained growth, with a clear growth plan already being executed. The leadership team wasn't looking for an exit. It was looking for the resources and expertise to support what it had already set in motion.

Tiger Lily Holdings, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is an independent investment firm that partners with owners of small businesses on succession planning, growth, and preserving their legacies. Tiger Lily’s Managing Member brings more than 20 years of experience as an equity and credit investor — and an investment philosophy that distinguishes Tiger Lily from conventional buyers: a genuine passion for growing both businesses and the people who run them.

That philosophy mattered more than the capital. Plenty of investors could fund DuraBrake's growth. The family needed one who would back their continued leadership, strengthen the company's foundation, and bring the next level of transactional and operational expertise.

The family stays — as owners and leaders. The family remains meaningful equity holders and continues to lead DuraBrake's senior management team. The second generation got what it actually wanted: not liquidity and a goodbye, but a stronger balance sheet behind the company they intend to keep building.

Resources to support growth already underway. The investment funds faster execution of DuraBrake's existing growth plan — new products, new markets, new geographies — rather than a new strategy imposed from outside. The plan was the family's; the fuel is the partnership's.

Expertise that strengthens the foundation. Rapid growth stresses systems, processes, and people. Tiger Lily's experience helps DuraBrake reinforce its operational and financial foundation so the growth it has earned is growth it can sustain — and so the organization is ready for what comes next.

A platform built for acquisitions. DuraBrake now serves as the platform for future strategic acquisitions in the braking and wheel-end market. That is where the new expertise compounds: identifying the right targets, integrating them well, and maximizing what each acquisition adds — capabilities an investor with deep transactional experience brings to a family company stepping into the acquirer's role for the first time.

“We are excited to partner with Tiger Lily.” — Neil Shroff, DuraBrake

“We see the opportunity to support the continued expansion of the business through growth in new products... We will also be opportunistic in further expediting growth through strategic acquisitions.” — Scott Cullerton, Managing Member, Tiger Lily Holdings

Hart Marx Advisors represented DuraBrake, managing the process from confidential marketing through closing. An engagement like this one is defined by what the client is not willing to trade away: the family's continued leadership, meaningful ownership, and the company's identity were requirements, not preferences. That changes the buyer universe entirely — the process has to find investors whose model is partnership, screen for philosophy as rigorously as for capital, and negotiate a structure that funds growth while protecting what the family built.

Finding Tiger Lily took the combination that defines the Hart Marx practice: deep relationships across the heavy-duty aftermarket and the investor community around it, partners who conduct every conversation directly, and the judgment to recognize when an investor's philosophy genuinely matches a family's goals — not just when the numbers work.

Owners of growing family businesses often delay M&A conversations because they assume a transaction means leaving. The DuraBrake partnership demonstrates the opposite: wanting to stay and keep building is simply a different set of search criteria, and the right advisor treats it that way. There are experienced investors who want exactly what the family offered — a respected brand, a committed next generation, and a growth plan already working — and who bring the capital and expertise to turn a strong regional manufacturer into an acquisition platform. The transaction isn't the end of the family's story. It's the chapter where the story accelerates.