MTS Adds Harvest Vet –

Former Harvest Partners Managing Director William Kane recently linked up with MTS Health Partners, making the switch to MTS after more than 17 years spent at Harvest. Kane joins MTS Founders Curtis Lane and Andrew Paul in directing MTS’s private equity investments, and will occupy the role of senior managing director, the same role he held at Harvest.

At Harvest, Kane also served as a special limited partner focused on healthcare deal generation, a position that should translate well at MTS, where the focus is exclusively healthcare. “I really like the strict healthcare focus,” Kane said. “In today’s competitive private equity environment, you really need to have some sort of niche, and healthcare is a good one to have.”

He went on to say, “From a private equity standpoint, there are a lot of points of entry into healthcare. MTS’s sweet spot is in the $25 million to $100 million enterprise value range. We primarily pursue sponsor deals where we’re the control investor, but for larger situations, we’ll make a co-investment with a larger [generalist] fund where we think we can add some value.”

MTS was founded in 2000 by Lane, who was the head of Bear, Stearns & Co.’s healthcare investment banking group, and Paul, who served as a general partner at Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe and co-led the firm’s healthcare investment activities. MTS effectively marries private equity investing with advisory services to create a merchant bank that can advise a business while it invests, a function that Kane cited as another plus in pursuing this job. “The merchant banking model gives us a broader reach than we would have otherwise, and the advisory side really gives us greater access to deal flow and we’ll also find that the larger funds will come to us to invest in deals in which we can offer some expertise.”

MTS currently operates one fund, MTS Health Partners LP, which was launched in 2000 and holds $80 million in committed capital. The firm primarily focuses on the areas of acute care, managed care and health benefits, medical devices and consumables, assisted living, generic and specialty pharmaceuticals, distribution, pharmaceutical services and outsourcing. The firm will pursue recapitalizations, LBOs and growth capital transactions, and generally looks to invest an equity stake of around $10 million. Representative holdings include investments in Housecall Medical Resources, Aerocare Holdings, Inc. and National MENTOR Holdings, among others.

“At MTS, there’s an ability to play in a lot of areas in healthcare where you won’t find other private firms working in… and we have experience in all of those areas, allowing us to take advantage of opportunities as they arise,” Lane said.