Marcelo Podesta
CEO-in-Residence, , B2B Distribution & Industrial
Private equity–backed CEO with decades of experience transforming founder-built distribution platforms — professionalizing their operations and preparing them for their next chapter.
Marcelo Podesta is a private equity–backed CEO with a career built on a single, repeatable discipline: taking founder-built and family-grown B2B distribution businesses and professionalizing them into institutional-grade platforms, without losing the culture and customer relationships that made them worth backing. He holds an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and has served as CEO across five companies and seven sectors, from office and workplace furniture to foodservice supplies, dental distribution, and industrial products.
As President & CEO of TAKKT America, Marcelo led a multi-brand portfolio of founder-era operating companies — including National Business Furniture, Hubert, Central Restaurant Products, and Displays2Go, which he grew in aggregate from approximately $520 million to $650 million in revenue while more than doubling EBITDA from roughly $28 million to $60 million. He drove that growth through a consistent operating playbook: digital transformation and webshop replatforms, CRM modernization, sales compensation redesign, and the build-out of true omnichannel models spanning field sales, inside sales, and eCommerce. He merged two of those businesses into a single $300 million platform, capturing cross-sell and back-office synergies, and rebuilt leadership teams while cultivating some of the most engaged cultures in their markets.
Most recently, as CEO of Safco Dental Supply, a PE-backed dental supplies distributor, Marcelo led a commercial and operational transformation, overhauling the technology stack, replatforming the webshop, rebuilding the sales organization, and strengthening pricing discipline, inventory efficiency, and net working capital to generate significant cash. Across his career, he has partnered closely with private equity sponsors, boards, and lenders, navigating complex, multi-stakeholder governance structures to upgrade leadership benches, install operating cadence, and complete five acquisitions and integrations end-to-end in preparation for successful exits.
Applying Distribution and Transformation Experience in Founder-Led Businesses
Marcelo has spent his career entering founder-built and family-owned businesses at the moment they outgrow how they were originally run — a new owner, a performance plateau, a generational handoff. He has stood in that situation repeatedly, inheriting companies built on a founder’s instinct and relationships and methodically building the commercial engines, systems, leadership teams, and operating discipline that allow them to scale, while protecting the people and culture that made them worth backing in the first place. That orientation — professionalizing without displacing what works — is central to how he partners with founders.
His command of how commercial strategy, pricing, technology, operations, and distribution interact at scale gives founders a partner who can quickly diagnose what needs to improve and execute it. At FCL, that experience is applied practically: helping founders and family owners modernize their go-to-market, evaluate and integrate add-on acquisitions, strengthen their leadership benches, and navigate the transition from founder-run to institutionally-supported — building the structure and discipline for long-term success without losing the values that made the business worth building.
Role at FCL Capital Partners
Marcelo serves as CEO-in-Residence for FCL’s B2B distribution and industrial investments. He works alongside founders and management teams on commercial acceleration, operational improvement, M&A integration, and post-transaction value creation, particularly in businesses navigating ownership transitions, performance inflection points, or growth acceleration. His focus is on delivering measurable results quickly while building the structure and discipline that position founder-led businesses for long-term success and a strong eventual exit.