Operators first.
Investors second.
The pattern recognition that drives every Silver Field decision comes from a decade and a half of doing the work — buying, integrating, scaling, and exiting founder-led businesses across the lower middle market.
Shamus Hines
Shamus founded Silver Field to do at the firm level what he spent fifteen years doing at the company level: acquire undervalued, founder-led businesses in overlooked markets and build them into great companies that endure.
His operating career began in institutional investment management — first at UBS, then at Morningstar — where he spent nearly a decade in analytical and strategic growth roles supporting the wealth management industry. He left to pursue an MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, graduating with honors, with a clear intention: to own and operate businesses.
What followed was more than a decade of hands-on company building — acquiring a founder-led lower middle market business and executing a buy-and-build strategy across multiple acquisitions, a major transformative merger, and two institutional recapitalizations with growth equity partners. Shamus has led or co-led the acquisition, integration, and scaling of multiple companies, grown a small software business into a global leader in its category, and developed a repeatable playbook for what it actually takes to compound enterprise value in founder-led businesses.
He continues to serve on the board of the company he built and brings that operating experience — not just pattern recognition, but the scar tissue — to every Silver Field investment.
Shamus is a graduate of the University of Michigan and holds an MBA with honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is based in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his wife Meg and their family. He coaches youth baseball, is active in his faith community, and believes West Michigan is one of the most underestimated pools of quietly great companies in the country.
John Rietema
John's career in real estate investment spans acquisitions, asset management, and investor relations. His experience in both the corporate and nonprofit sectors has given him a hands-on understanding of what it takes to own and operate.
John graduated from Grand Valley State University with degrees in economics and finance and began his career in Liberty University's real estate department. There, he analyzed acquisitions and worked to maximize returns across the university's portfolio. Beyond the deals, he implemented new commercial real estate and accounting software, giving leadership a clearer, faster view of how the university's assets were performing.
He then joined Oxford's asset management team, where he oversaw portfolio returns and served as a point of contact for investors. In that role, John sharpened his ability to translate property-level performance into actionable insight for the people whose capital was on the line. He and his team managed one of the largest office syndications in Ann Arbor.
Most recently, John has served as the Michigan Equity Analyst at Cinnaire, a leading low-income housing tax credit syndicator. There, he vets equity placements for affordable housing developments across the state, evaluating complex, multi-party transactions that must work for investors, lenders, developers, and the communities they serve.
Across each of these roles, John has built deep expertise in financial modeling, acquisition due diligence, and investor relations.