JOHN W. RUTLEDGE
       Founder, Chairman, President and CEO

A hotel/real-estate entrepreneur and private equity investor, Mr. Rutledge co-founded Oxford Capital Partners, Inc. during his second year of business school while simultaneously completing an extended internship at the Wall Street mergers & acquisitions and merchant banking firm of Wasserstein Perella & Co. Oxford Capital Group, LLC, a successor company to Oxford Capital Partners, Inc., is a real estate, private equity, asset management and investment holding company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

Mr. Rutledge initially co-founded Oxford Capital as a platform to take advantage of what Mr. Rutledge and a partner felt was a compelling secular arbitrage opportunity resulting from the dramatic overbuilding in the nation's property markets, particularly the lodging sector, in the early to mid-1990's.  Since that time Oxford, its affiliates and principals have successfully sponsored, co-sponsored and/or participated in an investment-acquisition-roll-up strategy, primarily in the lodging sector, with an aggregate value of approximately $2.5 billion representing approximately $500 million in annualized revenues across approximately 15,000 hotel rooms and approximately 5,000 employees.

Mr. Rutledge was voted one of Crain's Chicago Business' "40 under 40", a select group of rising young Chicago area leaders.  He has been a guest judge at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business New Venture Challenge and a guest speaker at Northwestern's J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management.  Mr. Rutledge is a member of: the advisory board (and a founding investor) of Metropolitan Capital Bank Corporation; the Young Presidents' Organization (YPO); the Economic Club of Chicago; the Auxiliary Board of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Advisory Board for the Polsky Center of Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business; the board of the HomeMade Pizza Company; The Urban Land Institute (ULI); the board of The Inner City Teaching Corp.; and the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago.  A native of Wilmette, Illinois, and a graduate of New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, Mr. Rutledge graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with a bachelors degree in Economics and an emphasis in real estate.  He received his MBA from the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business with an emphasis in international finance and economics.  He has also studied at Northwestern University and Oxford University (Christchurch) in England.

Prior to business school and Oxford Capital, Mr. Rutledge had been the co-founder (at age 24) of Oxford Advisors (which ultimately merged into Lincoln Property Company) and had worked at a predecessor company, both corporate real estate investment, development and corporate services firms.  In the real estate sector, he and/or Oxford's projects have been nominated for awards by Crain's Chicago Business, Chicago Sun Times and Lodging Hospitality including twice being a finalist (at ages 26 and 28) for "Chicago Real Estate Intermediary of the Year", being a finalist for "Downtown Chicago Office Development of the Year" (project co-developed between the ages of 26-28), and being both a winner and a finalist for "Downtown Chicago Redevelopment of the Year". Two of Oxford's New York City projects were also three time winners in category in the national publication, Lodging Hospitality Magazine.

A voracious reader, he is also a lover of military, political, social, architectural, business and biographical history, geneology, art, cinema, classic boats, architecture, sports of all kinds including: triathlons, sailing, helicopter skiing, barefoot waterskiing, tennis and platform tennis, squash, golf, swimming, scuba diving and world (and often adventure) travel, with highlights including a trip to the North Pole, scuba diving off the great barrier reef of Australia, elephant trekking in the jungles of Thailand and Africa, skydiving in New Zealand, helicopter skiing in the Rockies and a "trip around the world" just before business school.

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