Pacific Lake Partners

Jim Southern

Co-Founder & Managing Member, Pacific Lake Partners

Jim Southern is a Co-Founder and Managing Member of Pacific Lake Partners and a successful Search Fund entrepreneur. Once himself a beneficiary of the model, Jim launched the first Search Fund in 1984 under the mentorship of then Harvard Business School professor H. Irving Grousbeck. This fund resulted in the acquisition of Uniform Printing, a $43 million printer of specialty insurance documents. Jim served as the company’s CEO and Chairman for 10 years. Investor returns under Jim's tenure as CEO were 24x the acquisition capital. 

Jim has invested in over 75 Search Funds as an individual investor and with Pacific Lake. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of AlphaCredit, Raptor Technologies, FastSpring, Developerprogram.com, Little Sprouts, Vector Disease Control, Scottish American, Arizona College and Boca Executive Realty. He is often a guest speaker on the Search Fund model at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School and is the subject of an HBS case on his first Search Fund acquisition. Jim holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence, and resides in Wolfeboro, NH, and Boston, MA.

Coley Andrews

Co-Founder & Managing Member, Pacific Lake Partners

Coley Andrews is a Co-Founder and Managing Member of Pacific Lake Partners. Since co-founding the firm with Jim Southern in 2009, Coley has worked with over 50 Search Funds. He currently serves as a Director at Inspired eLearning, Aquavita, dESCO, and Data Fusion Technologies and as a Board Visitor at AlphaCredit, Raptor Technologies, Scottish American, Arizona College, and Vector Disease Control International.

Prior to forming Pacific Lake, Coley worked at Tech For Less, a Colorado Springs-based distributor of new and refurbished consumer and enterprise electronics owned by two successful Search Fund entrepreneurs. Coley was also an Associate at Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm based in San Francisco, after beginning his career at The Parthenon Group, an international strategic consulting firm.

Coley graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in history and earned his MBA at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Coley, his wife Alisa, and their four children reside outside Boston, MA.