ECI Partners is marking its 50th anniversary in June 2026. Founded in 1976, when there were fewer than ten private equity firms operating in the UK, ECI has grown to become one of the longest-established names in the industry.
Over five decades, ECI’s approach has been built on a disciplined investment strategy, a succession model designed for longevity, and a consistent track record of being first to identify origination and value creation opportunities.
As the industry enters a new phase shaped by AI, ECI continues to invest in the capabilities it offers management teams, in its origination and deal-winning capacity, and in the results it delivers for investors.
ECI at 50: The transcript
Tom Wrenn: Building successful businesses for 50 years. What’s not to like about that?
Chris Watt: 50 years of ECI, I thought it would be good to get together as you know the four current Managing Partners in the business to reflect on the 50 years that we’ve had, what’s made ECI the business that it is over that time and what we’re excited about for the next 50 years.
David Ewing: 1976 was a long time ago, and it’s a fantastic achievement.
Tom Wrenn: I feel like I’ve been doing this for some time and yet ECI was founded before I was even born.
Ken Landsberg: So I joined ECI in 1984, which was just eight years after it had been formed. The opportunities were sourced in a somewhat disorganised manner. Some were from phone calls from the street for the automatic bed making machine or the flying car. Seriously.
Tom Wrenn: When you think of the 50 years we’ve been around, we were founded before personal computing even existed. The iPhone was only 2007.
In the context of the 50 years ECI’s been around, is phenomenal to think how the world has changed. You can’t survive in private equity for 50 years by doing what everyone else does.
You’ve got to innovate, you’ve got to evolve, you’ve got to think ahead of what other people are doing and I think that’s why we’ve been in business for so long.
George Moss: Many of our LPs date back to the 90s, and actually having investors who’ve backed us through multiple funds over several decades does give us a sort of sure footing.
Building our succession model
Sean Whelan: I’ve always felt that ECI’s succession model really makes us stand out in the private equity industry. When did it all start?
Ken Landsberg: It was around 1990. We had one Managing Director, Tony Lorenz, and the team felt, in a sense, there was too much risk you know in one person. The Managing Director functions were spread amongst 3-4 people.
Chris Watt: There’s four of us typically Managing Partners at any point, and we will make typically one change to that group each fund cycle. It means there’s no single individual that is running the business, it’s a collaborative enterprise. It works very well for us, and it’s something that we’ve evolved over the years, and I think adds great strength and resilience to the business.
David Ewing: It is going to be owned by other people in the future and our job is to hand over that shirt in a better place than it was when we inherited it.
Building the commercial team
David Ewing: We do have the largest single strategy team in the UK. You know we’ve got a big team of people and we’ve been doing this for a long time. You know 50 years.
Sean Whelan: What we found was that great management teams have a lot of ideas but they don’t often have the capability or luxury of having people sitting around that can actually take some of those ideas and turn them into a plan and execute on them. We decided to have some internal resource that we call our commercial team that would help those management teams.
Lewis Bantin: We were actually the first private equity firm to set up a dedicated value creation team here in the mid market in the UK and it’s all about starting in the commercial diligence when we make an investment carrying that commercial insight into post deal when we’re working with the team to help them grow their business. And that means we move faster, we build relationships quicker, we deliver faster and ultimately that should drive and has proven to drive better outcomes for investors.
Sean Whelan: So when I look back at my career at ECI I’ve always been very proud of what the commercial team has achieved.
Lewis Bantin: It was a critical design choice that we made all those moons ago and it’s helped in a number of ways. It’s helped us to win the best deals, it’s helped us at times to say no to deals that we shouldn’t do. We’re now able to draw on five or six different points of specialist expertise as and when the companies need them.
Building the origination team
Suzanne Pike: To win in today’s markets you need to get many relationships right. That might be management teams, founders,advisors, subsector experts and you need to make the best of your data and that has always been a real strength of ECI’s.
We first implemented a CRM system over 35 years ago that had firm wide adoption and I think that’s before many other private equity firms even came into existence.We know which businesses we want to back. We build the relationships around those really early. We used to wait for a business to come to market before meeting the management team now on average we are meeting those teams four and a half years ahead of a transaction.
Ken Landsberg: The origination team is a professionalisation of our investment sourcing. It’s systemised, it’s data-driven and now it’s AI-driven as well.
Suzanne Pike: We began with machine learning and then we’ve continued to evolve to adopt deep research and Agentic systems and the new advancements in AI. We have the best AI origination platform in the market: Amplifind™. Once we saw the benefit of Amplifind™ in our own business, we wanted to make sure that the portfolio had access to that as well so we launched Amplifind™360. We are the only private equity firm in the mid market to offer a solution like Amplifind™ to our portfolio companies.
Chris Watt: Looking back on our track record that we’ve built over the years, it’s something that we’re really proud of here at ECI. Five of the last seven funds that we’ve had have delivered a net return of either 2x money or 20% IRR or better. That’s a fantastic consistent track record that we built there.
David Ewing: We’re here to build successful businesses, I mean that’s our kind of strap line that we’ve had since you know 50 years ago.
Building an exceptional team
Lewis Bantin: The team makes all the difference at ECI. We have an exceptional team of real talent,
real depth, from a real diversity of backgrounds, all working together to deliver great outcomes for our investors.
Keith Landsberg: One can’t overlook the team that’s been built and many of the people in this company have been here for decades.
George Moss: That does feed into the heart of our culture I think and actually those long term relationships we have internally within the firm are a key part of that.
Chris Watt: I think it’s telling that the the longest serving employee we have at ECI is Brenda, our receptionist who’s infamous around the industry for the warm welcome that everybody receives when they walk through the door. I think it says a lot about the firm, that our longest serving employee is in fact our front-of-house person.
David Ewing: We think very carefully about our values at ECI. You know we are ambitious, and we’re considered, and we’re collaborative.
Tom Wrenn: We’ve always had a great collaborative spirit at ECI, and that’s why I think we’ve endured for so long. The sum of the parts is way more than each individual person brings to the business.
Building another 50 years
Chris Watt: I’m looking forward to the next 50 years. There’ll be plenty of challenges and opportunities available to us. Even looking back on just the last 12 months, we’ve raised our first continuation vehicle, we’ve also backed our first European platform deal, and that’s what makes it so exciting being here. There’s always the next chance, the next opportunity to look forward to.
David Ewing: Let’s look forward to in 50 further years time there will be four other people sitting around this table.
Tom Wrenn: When I think about the next 50 years, what gets me excited is what’s the next great business we are going to back, who’s that next management team, founder, CEO that we’re going to partner with. Businesses like CarTrawler, Wireless Logic, MiQ, the current portfolio that we’ve got that’s doing great things. That’s what makes us all excited about what we do and that’s why we hope to be here for many years to come.
