The Story: Twenty Years Built, One Decision That Changed Everything
Dusty DeVore started Core Roofing Systems out of Alpharetta, Georgia in 2002 with a ladder, a phone, and a conviction that commercial property owners deserved a roofing partner who showed up the same way every single time. For two decades, he built exactly that. By late 2022, Core Roofing had grown to more than 180 employees, serving commercial and industrial property owners across Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia — a business with a reputation that opened doors long before the first cold call.
But twenty years of compounding a business creates a specific and uncomfortable tension that every successful founder eventually faces: your entire net worth is trapped inside a single, illiquid asset. Every dollar of equity you have built — every roof replaced, every client retained, every employee trained — sits locked inside the company’s balance sheet. You cannot diversify it. You cannot spend it. You cannot protect it from a single bad year.
The conventional answer to that tension is a sale. Take the check, sign the non-compete, and watch someone else run the business you built. For some founders, that is the right move. For DeVore, it was not. He was not done building. The Southeast had been conquered; a national platform was the next chapter. The question was not whether to grow — it was how to fund that growth while also getting some financial security today.
That is the exact problem a well-structured leveraged recapitalization is designed to solve. And in November 2022, DeVore executed one.
The Decision: Recap Over Full Sale — And Why It Mattered
DeVore’s options were familiar to any founder at his stage. He could pursue a full sale — hire a banker, run a process, maximize headline valuation, and exit completely. He could raise growth equity, dilute meaningfully but stay in control. Or he could execute a recapitalization: take on structured debt and a minority or majority equity partner, extract partial liquidity, and continue running the business with a meaningful ownership stake intact.
He chose the third path, partnering with Shoreline Equity Partners, a Jacksonville-based lower middle market private equity firm. Shoreline made a recapitalization investment to support Core Roofing’s growth plan — including both organic initiatives and add-on acquisitions — while DeVore retained a significant ownership stake and continued to lead the company as Founder and CEO.
The structure was deliberate. Shoreline’s mandate targets businesses with enterprise values between $25 million and $250 million, investing up to $100 million per transaction out of its inaugural fund. The firm explicitly positions itself around incentive alignment — publicly stating it believes in “creating bigger, better businesses without relying on financial engineering or cost cutting to generate returns.” That philosophy matters enormously when a founder is evaluating partners: a PE sponsor who extracts value by cutting headcount and squeezing margins is antithetical to what DeVore had spent twenty years building.
Critically, the deal structure itself was built around a shared growth thesis. The recapitalization provided Core Roofing with both acquisition experience and access to capital to partner with other commercial roofing businesses across the U.S. DeVore got partial liquidity — meaningful personal financial security — without surrendering the company or his operating authority. The leverage was put to work for growth, not to cash out an exiting owner and leave debt service as a burden on a leaderless business.
“It was incredibly important that we found a partner that aligned with our values. Core Roofing was built on the strength of the relationships with our customers, suppliers, employees, and the community at large.”
— Dusty DeVore, Founder & CEO, Core Roofing Systems (November 2022)
The Outcome: From Southeast Platform to National Acquirer
What happened after the recap is instructive in ways that a simple liquidity-at-exit story never could be. DeVore did not step back. He stepped on the gas.
Within roughly 18 months of the Shoreline partnership, Core Roofing executed multiple add-on acquisitions, beginning with McCurdy-Walden in Florida in late 2023, accelerating its penetration of the Southeast market. In June 2024, Core announced a partnership with PB Roofing (Peck Brothers, LLC) — a 17-year-old Northeast and Mid-Atlantic operator — extending Core’s geographic footprint dramatically outside its home region. PB Roofing’s management team reinvested a meaningful portion of their proceeds and continued to lead their business as a regional sub-platform within Core. By the time of the PB Roofing deal, Core had grown to approximately 275 employees across offices in Georgia, Florida, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
By early 2026, Core announced a further partnership with Norman Roofing, and DeVore remained visibly in the CEO seat, publicly setting the growth agenda for the year ahead. The business had transformed from a respected Southeast operator into a multi-regional commercial roofing platform executing a deliberate buy-and-build strategy — the kind of trajectory that dramatically compounds the value of the equity DeVore retained at the time of the original recap.
Consider the counterfactual. Had DeVore sold the business outright in November 2022, he would have received a single check reflecting the value of a 180-person Southeast roofing company. Instead, by retaining a significant stake through the recap, he is a meaningful equity holder in a platform that now spans four geographic markets, has completed multiple acquisitions, and sits on a trajectory toward a far larger exit valuation. The liquidity he extracted at recap was real money in his pocket today — but the equity he kept is worth considerably more than it was in 2022.
This is the core math of the leveraged recap done right: partial liquidity now, amplified equity value later.
The Broader Context: Why Recap Volume Is at Record Levels
The Core Roofing story is not an outlier. The leveraged recap and dividend recap markets have exploded in recent years for structural reasons that are worth understanding.
Total institutional leveraged loan dividend recap volume reached $81 billion in 2024 — up more than 300% from 2023 and falling just short of the all-time record of $82 billion set in 2021. In the first half of 2025 alone, dividend recap volumes reached $35 billion, continuing the pace of one of the most active periods in the instrument’s history. This surge is being driven by a credit market environment that is unusually favorable for borrowers: average new issue spreads for single-B issuers hit their lowest levels in at least seven years in Q1 2025, and the persistent supply-demand imbalance in private credit has kept pricing compressed even through periods of macroeconomic turbulence.
The private credit market itself has grown from $2 trillion in 2020 to $3 trillion by the start of 2025, with projections pointing toward $5 trillion by 2029. Private credit lenders remain the preferred solution for true middle market and lower middle market borrowers — exactly the segment DeVore’s Core Roofing occupies. In a landscape where traditional banks have tightened credit standards and venture capital has become more selective, private credit has stepped up to offer businesses faster execution, flexible structuring, and a non-dilutive path to capital.
For founders specifically, the message from the market is clear: the capital is there, the terms are favorable, and the structure exists to take money off the table without selling your company.
The Lessons: A Framework for Founders Facing the Same Decision
The Core Roofing recap encodes several principles that translate directly to any founder or business owner evaluating a similar capital decision.
1. The Recap Is Not a Consolation Prize — It Is Often the Optimal Structure
Many founders view a leveraged recapitalization as what you do when you cannot get a full exit done. That framing is wrong. For a founder who still has meaningful operating runway — who genuinely believes the best years of value creation are ahead — the recap preserves the most value. You receive partial liquidity and keep the upside of the continued growth you are uniquely positioned to drive. Selling 100% to crystallize today’s value is often the lower expected value choice for a confident, capable operator.
2. Partner Selection Is the Most Important Variable
The structure of the recap only works if the equity partner you bring in shares your operating philosophy. DeVore explicitly cited values alignment as the defining criterion for choosing Shoreline. A PE sponsor who will slash costs, impose aggressive debt service, or push toward a premature exit does not just create friction — it can destroy the business you built and eliminate the equity value you were supposed to retain. Founders should interrogate a partner’s track record on founder retention, hold period expectations, and how they have treated management teams in prior portfolio companies before signing anything.
3. Leverage Deployed for Growth Compounds Differently Than Leverage Deployed for Extraction
Not all leveraged recaps are created equal. The capital Shoreline and Core deployed went directly into M&A — acquiring PB Roofing, McCurdy-Walden, Norman Roofing, and building a national platform. The debt service is funded by the expanded cash flows of a larger, better-diversified business. Contrast this with a PE sponsor who loads a business with debt primarily to extract a dividend, leaving an over-leveraged balance sheet with no incremental growth capability. The former compounds. The latter extracts. Know which structure you are being offered before you sign.
4. The Market Timing for Recaps Is Currently Favorable — With a Caveat
The current credit environment remains broadly favorable for founder-owned businesses with reliable cash flows. Private credit lenders are actively competing for deals, spreads remain near multi-year lows, and the borrower-friendly environment has allowed companies to structure transactions on attractive terms. However, early 2026 has brought some widening in credit spreads, increased lender caution, and greater bifurcation between high-quality borrowers and challenged credits. Founders with strong EBITDA and clean balance sheets remain well-positioned; those with irregular cash flows or higher operating risk may find terms less accommodating than they would have seen in 2024.
5. Retained Equity in a Growing Platform Is Worth More Than a Single Exit Check
This is the most important lesson from the Core Roofing story. DeVore’s retained equity stake is not worth what it was at the 2022 recap — it is worth what a national commercial roofing platform with 285+ employees, multi-regional operations, and a proven acquisition track record commands at a future exit. The founder who takes a full exit in Year 1 gets one check. The founder who takes partial liquidity and retains meaningful equity through a growth cycle may receive a far larger total payout across two events — with full operational control of the value creation between them.
Key Insights
- Liquidity and ownership are not mutually exclusive. A well-structured leveraged recapitalization allows founders to extract real, diversified wealth today while retaining meaningful upside exposure to the company’s next phase of growth — no full sale required.
- The recap market is at historically favorable levels for qualified borrowers. With $81 billion in dividend recap volume in 2024 and spreads near multi-year lows, the structural environment supports founders who want to access this tool — though early 2026 signals selective tightening ahead.
- Alignment with your capital partner is everything. The leverage structure matters less than the partner behind it. A PE sponsor who prioritizes financial engineering over operational value creation will undermine the very equity you retained.
- Retained equity in a growing platform compounds the total payout. The partial liquidity at recap is real money. But the equity retained through a subsequent acquisition-driven growth cycle — at a higher multiple on a larger business — is often where the real wealth is made.
- Private credit has become the default engine for founder-led recaps. As private credit assets approach $3 trillion and continue scaling toward $5 trillion by 2029, the capital supply for middle market founder recaps is deep, competitive, and increasingly accessible to businesses with $5M–$30M in EBITDA.
