Deals of the Year for 2022

Building garage doors isn’t the sexiest vocation on earth, unless you work for a company that makes them and then rewards you with more money than you’ve ever seen before. That’s exactly what happened when KKR exited its investment with portfolio company CHI Overhead Doors, and it’s one of the reasons why we’re crowning that transaction as overall Deal of the Year, leading off our annual awards issue, which crowns private equity firms for the best exits made in 2022.

In addition to the overall Deal of the Year, we salute winners in these categories. They are: Large Market, for Greenbriar’s exit of Radwell International, a specialist in industrial components; Mid-Market, for Francisco’s creation from scratch of Trellis Rx; Small Market, for Blackford Capital’s exit of Quality Aluminum Products; International, for JC Flowers’ rejuvenation of Interactive Investor; and Secondaries, for KKR’s work with Internet Brands (yes, KKR gets two trophies this year – the rich get richer).

For those of you who want to look under the hood: our criteria for picking winners include metrics such as multiples on invested capital, internal rates of return, EBITDA, employee retention and expansion, portfolio company growth and organic growth of companies. We also look at investment rationale and plans as well as methods of growth and how exits were made.