The Blue-Collar
Private Equity Firm.
We’re operators first — every business we buy is backed by a track record of building, fixing, and growing from the ground up, and we give it a long-term home.
Not a Financier
We buy manufacturing, distribution, and industrial businesses and give them a long-term home — led by someone who has actually run one from the shop floor up. Most private equity is built by financiers.
We hold for the long-term — not a three-year flip on a spreadsheet clock, but patient ownership that reinvests in the business and protects the people and legacy that made it worth buying. For an owner deciding who to sell to, that’s the real question: what happens to my company and my team after I’m gone? Blue Haven is built to be the right answer.
If you’re a business owner thinking about transition, a broker with quality deal flow, or an investor who wants to build alongside a real operator — you’re in the right place.
“The businesses we acquire need an owner who has actually built something — someone who understands the weight of payroll, the pride of a loyal team, and the discipline it takes to grow without losing what made the company great.”
— Dalton WayneDalton Wayne is something most buyers in this market are not: a financial engineer and an operator. The son of a blacksmith, he spent his childhood bent under horses at his father’s side, shoeing them by hand — and was forging horseshoes himself by middle school. From there it was scrubbing floors, construction sites, a sales route, a kill floor, and eventually the president’s chair. He’s done just about every job a business has, and none of what he learned is locked to one industry — it carries into any business he steps into.
Dalton specializes in walking into difficult situations, leading through the problem to the solution, and bridging the gap between vision-casting and boots-on-the-ground operations.
As an operator, Dalton rebuilt a struggling model into a 25-point EBITDA margin turnaround — taking margins from −5% to 20%. The low point came in a strong market; the peak came in a brutal one. The gains were operational, not circumstantial.
His new-school side was shaped by people who don’t mentor just anyone. A CEO who built a company that was Fortune 50 at the time — now a Fortune 10 — took him under his wing and showed him how the best operators think at scale. A former Enron auditor taught him to read a financial statement with a forensic eye: to find the truth behind the numbers, not the story they’re dressed up to tell. Backed by a Business & Finance degree from Liberty University and an MBA in progress at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business — both of which he put himself through — Dalton brings a level of financial discipline most lower-middle-market buyers simply don’t have.
But his real education came from the school of hard knocks. With no employees, customers, or budget in the startup years, Dalton went door to door selling — and learned lessons that have guided him ever since: every account is a person, and every person remembers how you treated them. Take care of your customers, keep your word, and protect the people who show up for you, and the business takes care of itself. That’s an old-school way of doing things — and it’s exactly how he intends to treat every company Blue Haven acquires.
He proved all of it at Seven Hills. Recruited by that same Fortune 50 mentor, Dalton took a condemned, century-old plant and built it into Virginia’s largest beef processing operation — driving over $100M in cumulative sales orders, supplying the White House, winning a Shark Tank-style competition, and securing $1.5M in federal grant funding along the way. New-school tools. Old-school heart. That’s what he brings to every deal.
Blue Haven was built from love.
In December of 2025, Dalton and Devan lost their son. Bennett Lee never came home — taken by late-term complications that no parent is ever prepared to face. He was their fourth child, deeply wanted, and deeply mourned. He always will be.
The name Blue Haven didn’t come from a branding session.
It came from grief, and from the quiet way that meaning finds you when you need it most. Bennett’s birthstone is blue topaz — the color of calm water and open sky. And Devan, whose greatest gift has always been creating warmth and safety for those she loves, found herself with a nursery she had prepared and a safe haven she never got to give him.
Somewhere in the weight of that season, the two pieces found each other. His color. Her haven. Blue Haven.
Every business Blue Haven touches will be, in its own way, a safe haven created in his memory — for all who are involved.
a Conversation?
Whether you are an investor, a business owner, or a broker with a deal — reach out directly. Every great partnership starts with an honest conversation, built on trust, transparency, and a long-term commitment to doing right by the people we work with.