About Us

BayHawk Capital is a growth-oriented private equity firm founded to invest in essential services and technology businesses headquartered in North America.

Our Managing Partners developed a shared set of values and investment philosophy over 15 years of working together at Thomas H. Lee Partners. Our founding team has significant domain expertise with over 50 years of combined investment experience having deployed over $4 billion of equity capital in our sectors of focus over our collective careers.

Our Approach

Mission: What are we building?

Mission: What are we building?

Our mission is to build the most trustworthy firm in the industry for all stakeholders. In doing so, we believe we will earn outstanding risk-adjusted returns as we become the partner of choice for talented founders, management teams, and limited partners. We are committed to creating the absolute best place in the industry for entrepreneurial investment professionals who share our set of values to pursue their life’s work.

Our values: What are they?

Our values: What are they?

We chose the name “BayHawk” to represent where we came from and the values that were instilled in us by our parents. Doug grew up as the son of a local dentist in Massachusetts (“The Bay State”). Jeff grew up as the son of a high school football coach in a small town in Iowa (“The Hawkeye State”). Anyone who joins us will have a high-performance orientation and share a set of personal characteristics that will come to define us as a firm, including being honest, low ego, scrappy, resilient, collaborative, empathetic, and optimistic.

Philosophy: Why are we different?

Culture

Working with us will feel different than working with other firms because of the personality and values of our team. Just being smart doesn’t get you a job at BayHawk. You need to have the right combination of intellect, hustle, grit, and empathy. You have to be a good person who inspires trust in others and cares about those around them. We are committed to maintaining a small team which means we never have to sacrifice any of those qualities.

Flat, entrepreneurial structure

Each person on our investment team is empowered to be a decision-maker. You will never have to wonder if the person you are interacting with will change after the completion of a deal or if that person has the authority to speak for the firm. We have a bias toward action and are focused on efficiency and transparency in every interaction.

Approach to value creation

We believe that operating talent needs to be bespoke and embedded in the boards and management teams of our companies. Our top priority is getting the team right at each company. In parallel with that, we provide: (i) strategic thought partnership from a well-constructed board that leverages the depth of our sector-specific networks and (ii) all of our firm resources and infrastructure to execute follow-on M&A. We do not have our own internal team of operators that we intend to place inside your company.

Long-term orientation

We have a bias toward longer hold periods and extending duration on high-quality assets. Value creation takes time. Our belief is that the industry at large has become too focused on short-term generation of “IRR” as the primary performance metric at the expense of durable value creation. We believe a focus on long-term capital appreciation (multiple-of-money), while still generating strong IRRs, will produce better risk-adjusted investment outcomes over time. Our primary goal is to build great companies and hold them for as long as the situation merits, allowing us to compound returns over many years.