John Mcdonald

John M. McDonald III is a veteran middle-market investment banker with roughly 35 years of experience. He began his career not in finance but in engineering, working at IBM and Motorola, where he contributed to the launch of IBM's first personal computers and Motorola's first consumer cell phones. He graduated *magna cum laude* with a BSE in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science from Duke University (and was inducted into Tau Beta Pi), then earned an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

McDonald spent more than 11 years as a Managing Director in the Investment Banking Healthcare Technology / Life Sciences group at Raymond James & Associates, where he led the healthcare/life-sciences banking effort. In January 2000, he left to co-found Hyde Park Capital Advisors in Tampa alongside John Hill — building it into one of the most active M&A advisory boutiques headquartered in the U.S. Southeast, with several hundred completed transactions and billions of dollars in aggregate deal value over two-plus decades.

In 2024, McDonald co-founded Kensington Park Capital, a relationship-driven M&A-focused investment bank also based in Tampa. He has publicly said the firm reached "largest independently-owned M&A investment bank in the Tampa Bay region" status within about 18 months, built on a low-fixed-cost model emphasizing cloud infrastructure, a remote/contractor workforce, and AI. Across his career he says he has guided entrepreneurs through more than 300 company sales, mergers, and capital raises and has "built three investment banks from the ground up." He is a registered representative with securities transactions conducted through StillPoint Capital, LLC (Tampa, FL).

• Advises founder- and family-owned middle-market companies on sell-side and buy-side M&A, capital raises (equity and debt), recapitalizations, and fairness opinions — an advisory practice rather than a seed/angel check-writing operation.
• Deep specialization in healthcare / life sciences and technology, extended over time to business services, consumer, industrial, distribution, and logistics.
• Emphasizes long-term relationships over transactional deal flow: *"We care very deeply about building long-lasting relationships."*
• Highly selective on deal quality: *"[If] we don't have at least a 95% confidence level that we are going to get a deal closed … we are just not going to take it on."*
• Views M&A as *"very much tied to the economy, interest rates, and the stock market,"* but argues a relationship-first pipeline insulates the firm from cyclicality.
• Describes the Kensington model as a deliberate reinvention: *"We are creating an entirely new business model for investment banking, and it works beautifully."*