Two practices for companies in motion. Selective by design.
9990 Partners is a senior-operator advisory firm.
Most integration work either airlifts an army of consultants who leave nothing behind, or hands over a deck and walks away. We direct the integration end-to-end - designing the plan, sequencing the work, and driving the execution. Where a seat needs filling and your team can't fill it, we can pull in the right operator from the network. Then we leave the operating machine in place so your next deal lands faster, on your team's own steam.
Most spend-optimization work bends the cost line and stops there. We treat the stack as an EBITDA lever - through four levers, not one.
9990 Partners is led by Dave DeMarco - thirty-plus years leading enterprise software delivery, M&A integration, operational turnarounds, and business technology at scale, backed by a hand-picked network of independent senior operators the firm draws on as the work demands.
Most recently eight years at Carta, joining in 2018 as VP of Delivery & Business Systems and promoted to SVP of Business Technology, Service Delivery & M&A Integration - part of the VP-level team that scaled Delivery Services from $30M to $500M+ ARR and drove an eleven-month Fund Administration operations turnaround, while owning M&A integration on the buy side (up to three concurrently through close and post-close) and running vendor portfolio management across the business, consistently taking significant cost out of the enterprise software stack versus initial vendor proposals.
Before Carta, a sequence of senior leadership roles that built the range a senior-operator practice requires - Xant (InsideSales.com) (VP of Technology, then multiple concurrent VP roles across Professional Services, Product Engineering, and Internal Business Applications), eBay Enterprise (Head of Webstore Product Development, Head of Omnichannel Fulfillment, R&D Chief of Staff for a 275-person organization), SunGard Availability Services (VP Product Development), an independent business technology consulting practice, and ten years at Accenture from campus hire to Senior Manager leading project teams of 50-100 across the US, Europe, and Asia.
The thread is range - delivery, engineering, product, business technology, fund operations, M&A integration, vendor portfolio management. Enough time operating across each to run an integration without needing a translator in every functional conversation. When work crosses six or eight domains in three months, that's what it actually takes.
The fixed-fee philosophy is deliberate. Hourly billing caps the upside of AI-leverage and invites line-by-line scope scrutiny. Fixed-fee, phase-gated, with exit clauses between phases - gives the CFO an easy yes and a clean exit, and gives the operating partner clean numbers to underwrite. Where we refer operators into seats, that economics is disclosed up front, you contract with them directly, and every engagement is yours to approve.
Senior-led by design. Every engagement is run by a senior operator, not staffed down a pyramid - the person in the room is the person doing the thinking. When a roll-up needs more hands than one, we scale with vetted independent operators who run the same playbook, not with junior leverage. A senior-operator firm works differently from a consultancy. That's the point.
We take a select number of engagements at a time, by design. If you have a company in motion - approaching or past a deal, running a platform and a string of add-ons, or with a technology stack that's leaving EBITDA on the table - start a conversation.