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Australian‑headquartered
Founded and operated here. Bonus points for boring industries the rest of the market overlooks.
About · Iron Cove Partners
A small firm with a long view, run from Sydney.
Iron Cove was founded to give great Australian businesses a permanent home — capital that doesn’t need to leave, run by someone you can ring directly.
Founder
Sam Koch, CFA
Sam founded Iron Cove Partners in 2025 after the better part of a decade in Sydney’s listed equities market — most recently as an analyst covering small‑to‑mid‑cap industrials. He grew up around small business, and has been writing about compounding capital and patient ownership since university.
He started Iron Cove for a simple reason: the businesses he admired most as an investor were almost never the ones being bought by traditional funds. They were profitable, family‑built, and a long way from finished — and they deserved a buyer who didn’t need to sell them again in five years.
Sam holds the CFA Charter and is based in Sydney’s inner west, a few minutes’ walk from the cove the firm is named after.
Our approach
Patient capital, built to outlast the deal.
Australian-owned
Permanent hold
Founder-led
Most private equity in this country runs on a five‑to‑seven year clock. Buy, lever, optimise, sell. It can work for the right business at the right moment — but it’s a poor home for the kind of company we admire most: profitable, family‑built, deeply embedded in its customers, and a long way from finished.
Iron Cove is built to be a permanent owner. Our capital comes from a small group of patient backers who measure performance in decades, not quarters. We hold every business on a single balance sheet, with no obligation to sell it back into the market. Where founders want a full exit, we provide one. Where they want to roll equity and stay on, we welcome it — and we mean it.
We aren’t empire builders and we aren’t consolidators. We don’t need a portfolio of fifty. We’d rather own a small number of extraordinary Australian businesses, support the people running them, and let compounding do its quiet work.
What we look for
A short list, strictly applied.
If most of these sound like your business, we’d like a yarn.
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$2m – $15m EBITDA
Established earnings, ideally with a multi‑year track record through a cycle. Not a turnaround.
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Founder or family ownership
Owners considering a transition — full sale, partial liquidity, or succession over time.
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Sticky customers
Recurring revenue, repeat trade, or a reason customers keep choosing you that isn’t just price.
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Capital‑light economics
High return on invested capital. Cash that comes back to the business rather than feeding the machine.
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Team that wants to stay
A management group with another chapter in them. We’re partners, not replacements.
Sectors we lean into: industrials & manufacturing, distribution, business services, consumer staples, regulated trades, and software with offline DNA.