Since 1981, Mel Pirchesky has acted as a consultant to Pittsburgh-area high-tech start-ups and aging manufacturing companies to help them raise equity funding or turn around their business.

Every so often, though, he falls in love with a deal he can’t pass up and decides to pool capital from his closest business associates to take a position in the company.

“If I see a good opportunity, I’ll find people who want to co-invest with me,” said Pirchesky, who runs a one-man investment banking shop in Pittsburgh called Eagle Ventures.

Those people include a network of shareholders in his firm, which represent 41 area businesspeople, 12 surgeons and seven physicians in other specialties, to create an ad-hoc investment pool.

“We do only about one [investment] a year,” he said. “That’s the advantage of not having a fund; I don’t have any pressure to invest.”