Walker Lewis

W. Walker Lewis is the founder and chairman of Devon Value Advisers, a financial consulting and investment-banking advisory firm founded in 1997. Public company biographies describe Devon Value as a firm focused on financial consulting and investment banking, and third-party firm profiles describe its work as portfolio and acquisition analysis, transaction advisory, deal sourcing, divestiture and spin planning, deal structuring, and investor communications.

Lewis graduated from Harvard University and began his career at Boston Consulting Group. In 1972, he founded Strategic Planning Associates, a management consulting firm that expanded nationally and internationally and was acquired in 1989 by Marsh McLennan; it later operated as Mercer Management Consulting, where Lewis served as chairman from 1989 to 1991. A 1986 Washington Post profile reported that SPA had grown to 270 employees and $28 million in fiscal 1986 revenue.

From 1991 to 1993, Lewis was president of Avon Products North America and a member of Avon’s Office of the Chairman. He later held senior investment-banking roles, including senior adviser at Dillon Read and managing director at Kidder Peabody, where he was a member of the firm’s management committee.

Lewis has served on more than 20 public and private company boards. Listed examples include Ameriprise Financial, Applied Predictive Technologies, London Fog Industries, Mrs. Fields, Owens Corning, Scientific Games, American Management Systems, and Unilab. He is also listed as a board member of PreachFor Foundation.

• Lewis’s public investment-related writing and commentary is centered on operating return on capital and its relationship to shareholder value. In CFO.com, he said: “Return on capital is the simplest, closest measure” of what a company earns relative to required capital.
• Devon Value’s stated advisory work emphasizes portfolio and acquisition analysis, deal sourcing, divestitures, spin planning, deal structuring, and investor communications, suggesting a bias toward businesses where strategic choices and capital allocation can change enterprise value.
• His angel activity is publicly documented in FSAStore.com, an early e-commerce company serving flexible spending account consumers; Wellfound lists him as an angel investor in the company.
• His board history suggests comfort with operating businesses across consumer, financial services, analytics/software, and business services rather than a narrow venture-sector specialization.
• For early-stage companies, the strongest fit appears to be founders who can explain unit economics, return on invested capital, capital needs, and why growth will create durable value rather than consume capital inefficiently.