Peninsula Closes Fund, Invests in Marcus Thomas

Peninsula Capital Partners has made an investment in Marcus Thomas, a marketing communications agency.

Peninsula’s investment in Marcus Thomas was structured as a combination of subordinated debt and common equity with capital from the firm’s newest fund, Peninsula Fund VIII LP (Fund VIII), which closed with $400 million in capital in September 2025.

Marcus Thomas is a full-service advertising and digital marketing agency that provides creative development, media planning, public relations, and marketing automation services. The agency employs approximately 300 professionals across offices in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and internationally in Argentina and Chile.

Founded in 1937, Marcus Thomas has evolved through a series of mergers, most notably the 2011 combination with digital agency DigiKnow. The agency’s customers include the Ohio Lottery, KeyBank, Sherwin-Williams, and Stanley Black & Decker.

The current management team, led by chief executive officer Jim Nash and chief client officer Mark Bachmann, will continue to lead Marcus Thomas in partnership with Peninsula.

The investment in Marcus Thomas is one of seven platform investments already completed by Fund VIII which began investing in early 2024.

“We understood heading into Fund VIII’s fundraise that we would be facing headwinds such as we had never before experienced due to ultra-tight capital allocations among traditional mezzanine and growth equity fund investors, the result of several years of historically low PE-industry distributions,” said Scott Reilly, a managing partner at Peninsula. “We were able to overcome this due to the strong performance of our prior partnerships and having distributed record levels of capital back to our LPs over the last few years, which really served to differentiate us in the current marketplace.”

Peninsula Capital Partners provides junior capital, including subordinated debt, preferred stock or common stock, either as a minority or control investor, to non-sponsored and independently sponsored companies with at least $3 million of EBITDA. Sectors of interest include manufacturing, industrial services, distribution, and consumer product sectors. The firm is headquartered in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan.