JOHN W. RUTLEDGE
       Founder, President & CEO

A hotel-real estate entrepreneur and private equity investor, Mr. Rutledge co-founded his first company, Oxford Realty Corporation in 1987 at age 24.  He co-founded his second company, Oxford Capital Partners, Inc., during his second year of business school in 1994 while simultaneously completing an extended internship at the Wall Street mergers & acquisitions and merchant banking firm of Wasserstein Perella & Co. His third company, Oxford Capital Group, LLC was founded during the 2004/2005/2006 timeframe and is a successor company to Oxford Capital Partners, Inc. Oxford Capital Group, LLC is a national 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 he 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, in two major contrarian buying waves, starting during the RTC crisis in the early 90's and again after the dotcom bubble burst/September 11^th, 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. The aggregate value of this strategy is estimated at $2.5 billion representing approximately $650 million in annualized revenues across approximately 12,000 hotel rooms and approximately 5,000 employees.

In addition to other awards, Mr. Rutledge was a 2009 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award Finalist and was previously 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); and the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago.  A graduate of New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, Mr. Rutledge graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with a bachelor’s 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 (Christ Church) in England.

A voracious reader, he is also a lover of military, political, social, architectural, business and biographical history, genealogy, art, cinema, classic boats, architecture, sports of all kinds including: triathlons, sailing, helicopter skiing, barefoot waterskiing, tennis and platform tennis, squash (a little), golf (not very often or very well and thus least proficient sport), 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.