Our Goal.
Buy, run, and grow a business in Northern New England.
Mila Ridge is a partnership between two longtime entrepreneurs and friends – James Burgess and Andrew Noh. We founded Mila Ridge with 15 years of shared personal and professional experiences as cofounders, teammates, classmates, and business-owners. After successfully exiting our last venture, we are focused on investing our own capital by purchasing a privately-held business.
We are keen on finding a business that enables us to invest in our community, both by serving our customers and providing livelihoods to our team. Our approach to business management is rooted in mutually-developed values and a focus on local community.
Our Team.
We share over a decade in partnership as owner-operators, sharing business experiences, setbacks, and successes.
James Burgess
My first business was refurbishing used minifridges in college. It was dirty work, but I loved the feeling of independence and solving multi-faceted challenges like logistics, marketing, and customer service. After school I did corporate consulting work, which provided a superb education, but never quite matched the thrill of running my own business selling fridges.
I returned to entrepreneurship by dropping out of my MBA program to co-found OpenBiome, a healthcare nonprofit. We grew rapidly to become a national supplier to healthcare providers, at peak delivering life-saving treatments for over 10,000 patients per year. I served as Executive Director, bearing responsibility for building up the company to support our team of 50+ employees with nearly $15M annual revenues.
My next venture was co-founding Finch Therapeutics, a biotech company. At Finch, I led Business Development, Licensing, and Marketing teams, and was principally responsible for negotiating and closing a series of transactions to acquire critical assets and technology. After raising $117M in private investments, we took Finch public, debuting on Nasdaq in 2021.
I received my BA in Mathematics from Princeton University and am a proud MBA dropout. I live in Stowe, VT with my wife, our daughter Lyla (age 2 going on 30) and our dog Josie.
Andrew Noh
The first half of my professional path felt well-worn and traditional, having started my career in banking at J.P. Morgan and in consulting at Bain & Company. That changed abruptly a decade ago when I moved to Boston to attend the MIT Sloan School of Management. Within months, I met James and a team who inspired me to take a leap of faith by dropping out and taught me that successful entrepreneurship had less to do with the riskiness of a business and everything to do with the strength of the people I partnered with.
Together, we co-founded OpenBiome (a healthcare nonprofit) and Finch (a biotechnology company developing microbial therapies). At Finch, I served as Chief Operating Officer seeing Finch through its initial public offering in 2021 with a $1B peak market cap and managing a variety of functions, including HR/People Operations, Finance, IT, Program Management, and Research, Engineering, and Development.
While I never completed that MBA, I received my BBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Currently residing in Cambridge, MA with my wife, our son Miles (newborn), and our half-dog, half-Muppet Mazie, you’ll often find us in Middlebury, VT visiting family and getting Mazie’s zoomies out in open fields.
Our Approach.
Why partner with Mila Ridge? Because we’ve been in your shoes before, navigating similar decisions and opportunities.
We know what it’s like to own and run a company — sweating the details, building the right team, persevering through setbacks, and briefly enjoying the victories before diving back in.
As entrepreneurs, we know what it feels like to build a company that has value — for your employees, your customers, your community, and most importantly, for you and your family’s legacy. We understand that finding the right partner for the next chapter means finding someone who will recognize and build on the valuable legacy that you’ve created.
What makes us different from other buyers?
We are experienced businessowners
We have founded, run, and grown companies together:
We’ve owned companies of various kinds and through various lifecycles, from a financially self-sustaining non-profit, to a startup hoping its idea is compelling enough to attract its first hires, to a publicly-traded enterprise listed on Nasdaq
We’ve worked in a variety of industries like biotech, airlines, snack foods, toilets and more. This breadth of experience teaches us that all industries are complex, challenging, and also exciting and rewarding in their own ways.
As people managers, we have practical experience leading employees with highly diverse roles, skills, and educations, covering functions like Sales, Manufacturing, Research, Engineering, Finance, HR and beyond.
We have the capital and autonomy to close a deal quickly and flexibly
Independent Capital: We do not rely on outside investors, and so we can make investment decisions quickly and transparently.
Transaction Experience: We have the experience and skills to efficiently close on a transaction. We also know how to be flexible in crafting a deal to create win-win scenarios.
Long-term orientation: We seek a business that provides us with engaging and rewarding challenges for the long-term. We’re not looking for a ‘quick flip’ and don’t need to engage in complex financial engineering to rationalize a deal.
We work with shared values formed by mutual experience
A job can be more than transactional – we strive to build a workplace that provides meaningful livelihoods but also provides a community that supports employees both in and outside the workplace
While sometimes intangible, preserving and evolving a great organizational culture – internally with employees and externally with vendors, clients, and customers – is integral to success and part of a business’s commitment to its community
Our Criteria.
We look for businesses that we can own and operate for the next 30 years.
Established business with at least 10 years of operating history
$3M or more in annual revenues
Consistent or growing profit margins over the last 3 years
Located in Northern New England
Business Profile
Selling a majority stake (75-100%) of your business
Looking to preserve and grow your people, reputation, and legacy while maximizing your exit value in the sale of your company
Seller Profile
Connect with us.
Whether you are an entrepreneur and proprietor seeking to sell your business, a trade association or community organization, or an individual eager to make a connection and grab a coffee, we would love to hear from you.
Use this form. Or feel free to reach out directly at info@milaridge.com or 802.505.9123.