Over the past three decades, Jason Rager has transformed modest investments into multimillion-dollar businesses. He has founded new enterprises, acquired and sold other companies, and created software to help other entrepreneurs evaluate potential acquisitions. Jason has established a family-owned investment firm and generated funding for other nonprofits in his community. As a salesman, small business owner, philanthropist, and soon-to-be father, he lives a philosophy of bold risk-taking and generous giving.
Jason has been an entrepreneur since his youth. As a teen in the nineties, he built computers and sold them to customers on the Internet. Upon mastering the programming languages C++ and C#, he established an online bill payment service for homeowners’ associations, which he launched in 2002.
With those early financial successes, Jason went to Babson College, completing a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and exploring his growing fascination with ethical accounting and finance. Before leaving Babson, he purchased a chain of eight retail businesses in the Northeastern states and Rager Capital Partners was born.
In 2011, Jason published 13 Essential Steps for Evaluating a Franchise Opportunity, a book for other entrepreneurs. He also created Franchise Analyzer, a franchise evaluation software program, to help small business owners implement the book’s principal tenets.
Jason founded and acquired tech, digital advertising, and media companies in the following years. Today, he serves on the boards of many organizations and as the Chairman and CEO of The Rager Family Office, a successful (and now global) investment firm.
Jason attributes the success of the Rager Family Office to his investment philosophy, which is founded on ethical capitalism and the desire to find opportunities that others overlook.
“If you do what everyone else does, you will have quite ordinary results,” Jason explains. “So by definition, you must do things differently.”
The Rager Family Office definitely “does things differently”; rather than taking in external investments or outside capital, the firm focuses on acquiring companies with long-term growth potential and investing in high-conviction stocks. Jason prefers an indefinite holding period as a commitment to seeking enduring value and consistent growth. The office frequently invests in areas other firms shun, allowing for disproportionate rewards.
The firm has produced double-digit returns, which Jason and his family have reinvested not only back into the firm (which has grown to have a global presence, with offices in Wilmington, Delaware, and George Town, Cayman Islands) but also into philanthropy, especially locally in Delaware.
“We are convinced that wealth is not an end in and of itself, but an opportunity to improve the world of tomorrow,” Jason says.
Since 2021, the Rager Family Office has run the Rager Foundation, funding college merit-based scholarships and offering philanthropic support to other nonprofits serving education and promoting science in Delaware’s Brandywine Valley. The foundation has already seen a broad impact, supporting 74 families with children in college and over 1,000 other organizations.
Jason takes pride in the fact that almost all of the foundation’s dollars go directly to the community. The foundation has helped fund charter schools and has supported Jason’s fellow Eagle Scouts.
Now, with a daughter on the way (due in April), Jason is reflecting more than ever on the values that drive him. “I look forward to teaching my daughter the values and principles that will ultimately lead her to success and happiness,” Jason Rager shares, citing three values: relationships, professionalism, and philanthropy.
In Jason Rager’s view, you can develop mutually beneficial long-term relationships built on trust, uphold ethics and integrity in every business decision, and contribute to improving the world. In that case, you are leading a good and victorious life.
