Bio

After the McNally family sold Rand McNally & Company, Ward spent 10 years supporting his own family’s direct private equity investing efforts, with a focus on partnering with other like-minded family investors. In 2008, Ward founded McNally Capital to continue his family’s legacy of owning and operating private companies. Since the founding, Ward has worked with hundreds of family offices and business owners, with the dedicated purpose of supporting their objectives to create long-term value through Direct Family Capital. Ward is currently the Chairman of FedData and Advanced Micro Instruments and sits on the boards of Orbis Operations and Altamira Technologies. He is the former Chairman of ITS Logistics and former board director at Genesys Aerosystems. He is also a member of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Visitors and a member of the Young President’s Organization. Prior to founding McNally Capital, Ward spent 10 years as a partner with private equity firms The Edgewater Funds and Hammond Kennedy Whitney & Company. Previously, he worked in banking and financial services at Benedetto, Gartland & Company, where he focused on private placements for private equity funds, and Caremark International’s Physician Resources Division, where he was a member of the M&A team. Ward started his career at Bank of America in their Financial Engineering and Risk Management Group. Ward has been a frequent speaker at family office, private wealth, and private equity conferences globally, including Citibank, UBS, and Campden, amongst many others. He has also been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The New York Times and Bloomberg, amongst many other media outlets. Ward holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a BA in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.