John McDonald, Senior Managing Director & Co-Founder, Kensington Park Capital

August 2026 —John McDonald, senior managing director and co-founder of Kensington Park Capital, spoke with Invest: about the firm’s rapid growth since launching less than two years ago. With a cloud-based model and a fast-expanding senior team, the firm has already closed its first marquee M&A deals and built what McDonald calls the strongest team of his 37-year career. “When people row together, they do better, and that’s what’s happening here,” he said.

What changes over the past year have most impacted Kensington Park Capital, and how are they shaping the firm’s growth?

Kensington Park is still a very young firm. It’s essentially an unofficial spin-off of Hyde Park Capital, which I co-founded about 25 years ago with my partner, John Hill. We built Hyde Park into a substantial, well-recognized investment bank, and then, two years ago, he bought me out. That transition gave me the opportunity to immediately launch Kensington Park.

When you start a new company, you truly start from zero. You have to create the entity, build the brand and then grow everything from there. Today, we’re still less than 24 months old and already approaching a dozen senior managing director investment bankers. Beyond that, our support and business development teams have grown quickly, giving us a deep bench of talent.

In our line of work, people are the most important asset. I’m very proud to say this is the best investment banking team I’ve had in my entire 37-year career. The biggest change over the past year has simply been growth — growth in headcount, capabilities and opportunities. What makes that pace possible is that we intentionally built Kensington Park to live in the cloud, enabling us to recruit top talent from around the world.

When we first started, I would joke that our goal was U.S. domination because we were recruiting investment bankers across the country. Then this year we brought on an investment banker from Germany who executes European deals, and the joke evolved from U.S. domination to world domination. We say it facetiously, but our model truly is built to scale nationally and internationally.

In a more selective capital environment, how does your philosophy around aligning management teams and investors shape the way you approach portfolio activity?

One of the most important milestones for us this year was closing our first M&A deals. This summer, we closed the sale of a Tampa-based company called Illuminate Group. It’s a young, rapidly growing business, and we brought in a private equity firm from St. Louis — the Compass Group Equity Partners — that invested significant capital to help accelerate its expansion.

That’s a good example of alignment at work. Our job is to pair strong companies with capital partners whose vision and expectations match what the management team wants to achieve. In this case, we had a promising local company and an investor eager to support fast growth.

We also closed a transaction for Skymark Roofing, the largest residential roofing company in Central Florida. Its footprint spans from Jacksonville to Tampa to Naples. Once again, we found a strong entrepreneurial business and connected it with the right partner: Peak Roofing, backed by Exuma Capital in South Florida.

These deals reflect our broader role in Florida. We’re headquartered in Tampa, and we’re identifying top investment opportunities locally and nationally. We’re bringing tens — and in some cases hundreds — of millions of dollars of outside capital into Tampa Bay and Central Florida. That’s a real service to the community and one reason we’re one of the more active M&A firms in the state.

For a company less than 24 months old, closing these transactions and having 11 active engagements underway is meaningful. Some will close this year, some next year, but collectively they show that even in a more selective capital environment, high-quality companies with clear value propositions still attract strong investor interest.

With talent attraction and retention becoming increasingly competitive, how are you cultivating a culture that attracts top investment professionals?

We’re attracting talent because we’ve built a culture of collaboration. In many investment banks, it can feel like everyone is out for themselves in a zero-sum world. That’s not how we operate at Kensington Park.

Every Monday morning, we hold a one-hour staff meeting on Zoom with all our investment bankers and support staff. Everyone shares updates on their deals, and what’s powerful is how actively the team helps one another. If someone is working on a roofing deal, several bankers might chime in with investor contacts or strategic relationships. Collaboration is built into our DNA.

When people row together, they do better. That’s exactly what we see here. Another unique aspect is that, despite their accomplishments, our team members are incredibly humble. There are no big egos. That humility creates real friendships, not just professional respect.

We reinforce that culture through how we spend time together. Every May, I host a retreat at my home in the Florida Keys for the team and their spouses. We fish, go out on the boat and enjoy a long weekend together. It strengthens the sense that we work hard and play hard; we’re colleagues and friends. For high-performing professionals who can work anywhere, that combination is magnetic.

From your perspective, what makes the Tampa Bay market such an attractive environment for investment today?

The fundamentals are very strong. If you look at Florida Chamber or Tampa Bay Chamber data, the statistics back up what’s already obvious: Florida is one of the fastest-growing states in the country, and Tampa Bay captures a significant share of that growth.

The Tampa Bay MSA is now around 3.2 million people — a substantial and rapidly growing region. Another key factor is wealth migration. Florida ranks No. 1 by a wide margin for net wealth migration, meaning we’re attracting not just people but capital. Texas is a distant second.

Much of that wealth is coming from states like California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Illinois. That influx brings business owners, entrepreneurs and investors to Florida and specifically to Tampa Bay.

When you combine a rising population with rising wealth, you create a powerful engine for deal activity. Demographics add another layer as baby boomers make up a major share of U.S. business owners, and many are reaching a point where they want to transition to work fewer hours, take money off the table or begin new chapters.

That’s where we come in. We sit down with business owners and ask what they want to accomplish. Many say they want to shift from working 60 hours a week to 20 or 30 and take some chips off the table. We design transactions that allow them to do that.

In that sense, we’re an agent of change for their lifestyle and for their ownership structure. In a market like Tampa Bay, where population growth, wealth migration and demographic shifts all support strong deal flow, that role becomes even more impactful.