Our Team

Stuart Gelb, Founder and President

Stuart Gelb can best be described as a serial entrepreneur and renaissance businessman. As the son of a small business owner, he learned the ins and outs of running a business at a very early age. By the time he was in high school, he was working regular shifts at his father’s wholesale food business. While earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Business from The Ohio State University, he continued to hone his business management skills there. Upon graduating, Gelb moved to New York City where he held positions in sales and management with a national wholesale food distributor.

In 1975, Gelb accepted a position with a women’s retail apparel company in New York where he held a variety of management-level positions. In 1985, he co-founded Coolwear, Inc., a clothing company that quickly established itself as a key player in the volatile and highly competitive junior apparel market. Within 10 years, Coolwear had grown into a $50 million company with a ‘who’s who’ client roster that included retail industry giants like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s as well as a variety of specialty retailers nationwide. For more than 22 years Gelb served as Coolwear’s president and chief financial officer. Although he and shared responsibility for operational and management-related activities, Gelb alone was responsible for the company’s finances, including the development of operating budgets, establishment and management of countless banking relationships nationwide, negotiation of financial agreements and preparation of financial reports.

In the early 2000s, Gelb began to dabble in real estate on the side, buying and managing several residential properties in New York City. In 2005 he assembled a group of investors in an effort to expand the venture. He left Coolwear the following year to focus on evaluating and negotiating transactions. During this time, Gelb produced countless complex financial models and pro forma analyses.

Never one to sit idle, Gelb began to consider his next business venture as the real estate market began to show signs of slowing in 2008. With the precipitously declining economic environment, the impending bank crisis and the associated credit crunch, Gelb’s vision became clear: it would become increasingly difficult for businesses to access capital to fund their operations, much less to fund growth. Sourcing capital would become a full-time job for business owners and chief financial officers, forcing them to neglect their day-to-day responsibilities.

With more than 40 years of experience in small business operations and management, Gelb understood how a lack of access to capital could make or break a business. He also understood that business owners had neither the time nor the desire to spend hours and hours researching and evaluating funding options. Thus, The Liquidity Source was established in 2009 to help businesses evaluate options and secure financing for a variety of purposes, including acquisition and development loans, construction loans, bridge loans, working capital and equipment financing.