Before Tiffany Hagge kicked off her finance career with CPP Investments, followed by Goldman Sachs and BDT Capital Partners, she could be found on the ice. The co-founder of Dallas-based PE firm Citation Capital played hockey for the Ivy League’s Dartmouth College, then in the National Women’s Hockey League, and for the U.S. Women’s National Hockey Team. One of her favorite memories was playing in front of 17,000 fans at the 2007 IIHF Women’s World Championship against Canada.
“A lot of the qualities of a high-performance athlete translate into my career—team building, grit, perseverance, the willingness to do hard things outside of my comfort zone, and maximizing performance,” Hagge says.
Private equity is not filled with female-founded or led firms. At the end of 2022, according to McKinsey & Co., 48 percent of all entry-level roles in PE were held by women, but just 17 percent of C-level roles. Those stats did not deter Hagge, with an assist from co-founder Lydie B. Hudson, from establishing her middle market control buyout firm in 2023.
The company focuses on founder- and family-led businesses across the services, industrial, and select consumer sectors. Hagge says Citation’s investment strategy is to be the first outside institutional capital to come into the companies.
“We look for mature businesses,” she says. “Many of the businesses we invest in are doing things 70 to 80 percent right. It’s that 20 to 30 percent that we can come in and help them optimize and help them reach their full potential.”
Citation has added a few big wins to its resume this year closing on a deal to acquire a majority interest in smart snack manufacturer Cibo Vita and landing a majority stake in the third-largest residential pest control business on the continent, Aptive Environmental. In March, the company partnered with nonprofit Ownership Works to implement shared ownership programs to build employee engagement and portfolio profitability. This past July, Citation earned an investment of its own from Capital Constellation, a collaboration of the world’s premier institutional investors.
Working at major institutions gave Hagge a front-row view of what worked and what didn’t. “I think there’s a real opportunity to invest and bring all the institutional private equity capabilities to investing in founder and family businesses,” Hagge says, “but to do it in a way that’s more culturally accretive and that focuses on helping founders and families and the management teams achieve their visions for their business.”
Hagge and Hudson were introduced through a mutual friend. Hudson’s career includes stops with Lehman Bros. and Boston Consulting Group and a 13-year post as CEO of sustainability, research, and investment solutions with Credit Suisse. “We had quite different jobs, but we realized through our conversations that we had a really strong shared value system, and we also both had a vision of what type of business we want to build and how we would want to do that,” says Hagge, who serves as Citation’s managing partner while Hudson serves as president.
The region’s entrepreneurial spirit motivates Hagge, who moved to Dallas from New York City in 2021. She notes the city’s strength in arts, entertainment, and sports—she’s on the board of the Dallas Stars Ownership Advisory Group—as well as the character of its people as pillars of success. “This community is amazing in that everyone wants to grow the pie and wants to see Dallas, and the whole state, grow and be very successful,” Hagge says. “And the amount of smart people doing interesting things here who are also open and willing to share that with one another is unique. I’m proud now to be a Texan and a part of the Dallas community.”
