While the headlines were busy chasing every company packing its bags out of Orange County, a Blue Owl-backed lender quietly did the opposite. Wingspire Equipment Finance doubled its Tustin headquarters and started hiring. That is the story that actually pays.
Here is what happened while nobody was looking. Wingspire Equipment Finance opened a new 15,000-square-foot corporate headquarters at Flight at Tustin Legacy, doubling its previous footprint. Not a lease renewal. Not a downsizing dressed up as a “reimagined workspace.” A real, deliberate expansion in the heart of Orange County.
The firm is the equipment financing arm of Wingspire Capital, a portfolio company of Blue Owl Capital (NYSE: OWL). It provides large-ticket equipment financing to middle-market and private-equity-backed companies nationwide. It has closed a $350 million credit facility backed by Bank of America and Wells Fargo, capital raised for one reason: to grow.
And grow it is. The company built the new space explicitly to hire across sales, credit, and operations, and the roles are still live. This is not a company managing decline. This is a company staffing up.
Moving into its new Orange County headquarters in October, that bet is already paying out. In early 2026, Wingspire reported a record 2025: $701.3 million in fundings, up 66% year over year, with the doubled Tustin headquarters cited as part of the expansion. The firm says 2026 is the focus. Translation: the growth that justified the bigger office is still compounding.
The Move That Contradicts the Narrative
The prevailing story about Orange County is departure. Anchor employers consolidating elsewhere, corporate teams heading up the freeway or out of state. And that story is partly true. But partly true is how smart people get fooled.
Because at the same time, a specialized finance platform looked at this exact market, with all its vacancy and all its uncertainty, and decided to plant a bigger flag in Tustin. When a PE-adjacent lender doubles its space in a soft market, that is not sentiment. That is conviction backed by a balance sheet.
Read both stories together and the picture sharpens. Orange County is not emptying out. It is rotating. Legacy corporate functions leave, and specialized, capital-rich, growth-stage platforms move in to take the oxygen. If you only read the departure headlines, you miss half the market, and it is the half that is hiring.
From Liberty Commercial to a Blue Owl Platform
Wingspire Equipment Finance did not appear overnight, and its backstory is the tell. The business launched as Liberty Commercial Finance, a Tustin-grown equipment finance shop. It was later acquired by Wingspire Capital and rebranded, plugging a scrappy local lender into a much larger institutional engine.
That engine is Blue Owl Capital, one of the largest alternative asset managers in the country. Being a Blue Owl portfolio company is not a logo on a slide. It is access to institutional capital, credibility with sponsors, and the kind of balance-sheet firepower that lets a lender write large tickets and scale a team without flinching. When a firm with that backing doubles its Orange County footprint, it is telling you where it expects the growth to be.
CEO Eric Freeman has been explicit that the expansion is about people: building a home that reflects a high-performing culture and gives the company room to add headcount across every function. The real estate is downstream of the hiring plan, not the other way around. That order matters, because it separates a company growing into space from a company shrinking to fit it.
Follow the Capital, Not the Headlines
Wingspire’s clientele tells you everything about where OC’s finance economy is heading: middle-market and private-equity-backed companies. That is the same buyer pool driving demand for sharp CFOs, controllers, and finance operators across Southern California right now, the same private capital reshaping the OC and LA money map and turning Newport Beach family offices into aggressive hirers.
The $350 million credit facility is the part most people skim past, and it is the most important number in the story. Two of the largest banks in the country, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, extended that capacity so Wingspire could write more and bigger deals. Capital like that does not get deployed by a skeleton crew. It gets deployed by underwriters, credit analysts, originators, and operations staff, the exact roles the firm is hiring.
This is the equipment finance and private credit boom showing up locally. As traditional banks pulled back from certain kinds of lending, specialized platforms and private credit shops moved in to fill the gap, and they have been on a multi-year hiring run to do it. Orange County, with its dense base of middle-market and sponsor-backed companies, is exactly where that demand concentrates. When institutional capital flows into a platform like this, jobs follow the money. They always do.
What “Hiring Across Sales, Credit, and Operations” Really Means
Break down what Wingspire is actually building and you see the shape of a growth-stage finance platform. Sales and origination: the people who source deals and own client relationships. Credit and underwriting: the analysts and underwriters who assess risk and structure transactions, the intellectual core of any lender. Operations: the team that funds, documents, and services the book once the deals close.
These are specialized, well-paid, relationship-driven roles, and they do not fill from a job board. A strong underwriter with sponsor relationships and large-ticket experience is one of the most sought-after profiles in commercial finance right now. Firms compete hard for them, and the best ones rarely make a move without being approached directly.
For a candidate, joining a platform at this stage is a specific kind of bet. You are trading the stability of a legacy institution for equity in momentum: a growing book, an expanding team, a backer with deep pockets, and the chance to build something rather than maintain it. For the right operator, that is the most valuable seat in the market, and it almost never gets advertised.
Why Equipment Finance Is Quietly One of the Hottest Talent Markets
Equipment finance rarely makes the front page, and that is exactly why the talent story here is so overlooked. It is not flashy. It is not consumer-facing. It is the plumbing of the real economy: the capital that lets middle-market and sponsor-backed companies buy the machines, fleets, and systems they need to grow. Boring on the surface. Enormous underneath.
And right now, that quiet corner of finance is on a hiring tear. The pullback of traditional banks from certain lending created an opening, and specialized platforms and private credit shops rushed to fill it. That expansion runs on people, specifically on underwriters, credit analysts, originators, and portfolio managers who understand how to structure and manage large-ticket deals. Demand for those profiles has outrun supply for a few years now, and Orange County sits right in the middle of it.
The compensation reflects the scarcity. A seasoned underwriter with sponsor relationships and large-ticket experience can write their own ticket in this market, and the strongest originators are courted constantly. These are not commodity roles. They are specialized, judgment-heavy, relationship-dependent seats, the kind where a single great hire changes a firm’s trajectory and a single bad one costs real money.
That is why a firm like Wingspire builds a bigger office before it builds a bigger book. It is competing for a thin pool of specialized talent against every other platform on the same hiring run, and it needs a home, a culture, and a story compelling enough to win them. The real estate is a recruiting tool. The doubled footprint is a signal to candidates as much as to clients: this is a place that is going somewhere, come build it with us.
For the operators in that pool, the message is simple. You are in one of the most in-demand niches in commercial finance, whether you have fully priced that or not. The firms that need you are not always the ones advertising. They are the ones quietly doubling down, and they move through relationships, not job boards.
Where the OC Finance Jobs Are Actually Going
If you are a finance, credit, or accounting professional in Orange County wondering where the growth is, stop reading the departure headlines and start tracking the capital. The action is not at the legacy names shrinking their footprints. It is at the specialized, sponsor-backed platforms that are scaling.
These firms hire differently. They move fast, they pay for specialized expertise, and they rarely post their best seats publicly. The candidates who win them are the ones already positioned, already visible, and already known to the right person before the search even opens.
This is the rotation in one sentence: the county is not losing finance jobs, it is trading generic corporate seats for specialized capital-markets ones. The In-N-Out back office packs up while the Wingspire credit team staffs up. Same county, different center of gravity. The talent that reads this shift early gets the best seats. The talent that waits for a headline gets what is left.
The Move Every OC Finance Operator Should Make Now
Do not wait for the perfect posting. If the growth is at sponsor-backed platforms and private credit shops, that is where your network and your visibility need to be pointed today. Get known in that world before you need it, not after.
Sharpen the specialized profile. Large-ticket experience, sponsor relationships, credit judgment, these are the skills that command premiums right now. Generic finance experience is fine. Specialized, capital-markets-adjacent experience is what gets the direct call from a firm that is scaling.
And be reachable. The best seats at firms like Wingspire get filled quietly, through someone who already knows the talent and the timing. If you are heads-down and invisible, you are not on the shortlist, no matter how good you are. The operators who win in a rotating market are the ones who were positioned before the music changed.
Orange County is not the story the headlines are selling you. The talent is not leaving. It is relocating toward whoever is still growing. Make sure that is you.
The best finance and accounting seats in Orange County rarely hit a job board. They get filled quietly, through someone who already knows the talent and the timing. If you are a senior operator ready for your next move, let’s make sure you are on the shortlist before the search goes live.
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Sources: Wingspire Equipment Finance / Business Wire; Wingspire Equipment Finance newsroom; Wingspire Equipment Finance, record annual fundings.
Cathy Trinh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Recruiter Hustle, OC/LA’s no-filter media platform for talent, finance, and recruiting professionals.
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Cathy
Chief Talent Strategist & Editor-in-Chief. 26-year global recruiting veteran, #1 bestselling author, cancer survivor, and humanitarian placing C-suite and VP talent across Southern California.