We stopped writing plans nobody executed.
Kestrel was started by operators, not advisors — people who'd already run the businesses they used to only write memos about.
Founded in 2016, out of frustration with the binder.
Before Kestrel, our founders sat through the same meeting from both sides of the table: a hundred-day plan, presented once, filed, and revisited eighteen months later at the board level — usually to explain why half of it never happened. Kestrel exists to be the team that's still in the building in month four, running the parts of the plan that don't run themselves.
We started as a two-person shop working a single portfolio company's pricing and operations. We're a small firm on purpose — every engagement gets partners, not analysts, and we turn down work faster than we take it on.
Four things we hold to on every engagement.
We work inside the business, not above it.
Our people show up to the plant floor, the sales calls, and the weekly ops meeting — not just the board deck.
Diagnosis is fast. Execution is where we stay.
We spend two to three weeks understanding a business, and the next nine months actually changing it.
We're measured on the sponsor's numbers.
EBITDA, cash conversion, and the metrics already in the credit agreement — not a separate scorecard we invented.
Fees tied to milestones, not hours.
A meaningful share of every engagement is structured around the outcomes we agree to upfront.
The smallest falcon in North America. Not the least effective.
The American kestrel hunts by hovering — holding itself almost perfectly still in open air while it reads a field in far more detail than anything else hunting from that altitude — and commits fully the moment it moves. That's the posture we try to bring into a portfolio company: a genuinely close look before we touch anything, and full commitment once we do.