Corporate Repair and Growth Strategies, Inc. is a boutique special situations investment manager and advisory firm built on three decades of institutional experience — and a conviction that most troubled assets fail not because recovery is impossible, but because the right expertise is rarely deployed to pursue it.
CRAGSI exists to recover intrinsic value from assets that conventional markets, processes, and advisors simply aren't able to understand, price, or exit at fair value. We believe that patience, integrated expertise, and aligned incentives — not speed-to-liquidation — are the hallmarks of genuine special situations practice.
Our mandate is to serve institutional asset holders, corporate executives, and founders with the same institutional-grade discipline that has characterized our team's work across three decades and multiple market cycles — from the S&L crisis through the housing bubble, COVID, and the current distressed VC ecosystem.
We have made careers out of getting paid for patience. Distressed situations that resist quick resolution are precisely where our integrated platform creates the most value — and where we are most differentiated.
Every engagement is conducted with the full weight of fiduciary obligation. We do not take shortcuts, manage to optics, or pursue outcomes that serve our interests at the expense of our clients'.
Legal, financial, regulatory, and operational disciplines under one roof. The best special situations outcomes are never the product of a single dimension of expertise — they require all of them, simultaneously, without institutional lag.
We don't take on what we don't believe we can execute and win. We will tell you directly — at the outset — whether CRAGSI is the right firm for your situation.
CRAGSI was not born from a single moment — it was the natural evolution of decades of parallel work. David Groshoff began his career at Pacholder Associates in 1997, joining one of the most respected high yield, distressed debt, and special situations investment management platforms in the country. When JPMorgan acquired Pacholder in 2005, David continued as Special Situations Portfolio Manager, deepening an institutional practice that included direct management of assets for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (“PBGC”) and high-profile financial advisory services to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”).
After David left JPMorgan for Boston in mid-2008, Scott took over as the full-time Special Situations Portfolio Manager on the Fixed Income platform's High Yield and Distressed Debt Desk.
Meanwhile, David pursued a path that was anything but conventional. He entered academia — teaching corporate finance, law, and business ethics at institutions including Western State College of Law (where the Class of 2014 voted him Professor of the Year), Providence College’s School of Law, and at another private religious institution in Los Angeles, where he ultimately would become Dean of the Business School. Throughout those years, his research was extensively published, and his scholarship has been cited hundreds of times across law reviews (including the Harvard Business Law Review and the Delaware Journal of Corporate Law), practitioner guides, international academic journals, and books published by Oxford University Press, Stanford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and others — in languages including Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Polish, and Greek.
But consulting and advising never stopped. Throughout his academic career, David maintained an active special situations and advisory practice through BXLNT, LLC, with clients continuing to include high-profile government agencies and Wall Street firms. He also served as Chief Legal Officer for several Boston startups co-founded by a former E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year, along with VC-backed biotech startups, including Boston’s Ayana Bio and the Bay Area’s widely recognized Shiru, where he served as Head of Corporate Strategy in addition to CLO.
In late 2024 and early 2025 — the same year David earned Emeritus Professor status at the university that had granted him tenure — Scott and David co-founded CRAGSI, rolling up David's consulting practice and combining it with Scott's institutional investment management expertise. CRAGSI also was co-founded by the law firm of Groshoff and Urien, LLP, allowing some clients to choose seamless coverage of client matters ranging from finance to strategy to bankruptcy reorganization and privileged conversations across entities. CRAGSI was incorporated as a Delaware corporation on April 25, 2025.
Under a year later, CRAGSI was selected by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation as its Special Situations Investment Manager — succeeding J.P. Morgan Investment Management — with full discretionary authority over PBGC's special situations portfolio, effective March 1, 2026. Later that month, Turnarounds and Workouts named David among its "People to Watch — 2026." These data points help validate what the co-founders have built: an independent boutique with the institutional depth to be trusted with one of the most consequential special situations mandates in the country, a team that people are paying attention to already, excited to see the results they deliver.
PBGC Special Situations Investment Manager
Selected to succeed J.P. Morgan Investment Management as PBGC's Special Situations Investment Manager, effective March 1, 2026 — with full discretionary authority over a diverse alternatives portfolio.
Pacholder → JPMorgan → CRAGSI
CRAGSI's co-founding Managing Directors are independent and in their combined seventh decade of continuous special situations expertise — the deepest institutional lineage of any boutique in the space.
PBGC Relationship Since 1997
CRAGSI team members have managed assets for and alongside PBGC continuously since 1997 — including Cyndi Lanning, CRAGSI's Chief Compliance Officer, who began working with special situations assets including the PBGC portfolio in 1994.
Initial consultations are free and confidential (and in some situations, also legally privileged!). No obligation. Really!
We'll tell you honestly whether CRAGSI is the right firm for your situation, and if your situation is the right one for us. We don't take on what we don't believe we can execute and win!
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