Teakwood Capital

Managing Partner Shawn Kelly, who co-founded the firm in 2005, leads the investment committee. Kelly is supported by a group of operating partners who evaluate acquisition targets and, post-close, often step into interim leadership roles inside portfolio companies. The firm's deal-by-deal capital model gives the investment committee direct approval authority without requiring LP advisory board consent on individual transactions.

Teakwood sources the majority of its acquisitions through relationships with business brokers, regional accounting firms, and estate-planning attorneys across Texas and the Sun Belt who represent founders facing succession challenges. The firm targets proprietary, off-market situations where a retiring owner lacks a family successor or internal management buyout team. This sourcing funnel is relationship-driven and built over two decades of operating in the same geography, not through broad auction processes.

Teakwood deploys capital on a deal-by-deal basis from a network of high-net-worth individuals and family offices, rather than through a traditional blind-pool fund structure. This gives the firm flexibility in sizing equity checks and allows it to avoid the deployment-pressure timeline that defined-duration funds impose. The trade-off is that co-investors must be re-syndicated for each new platform acquisition.

The firm targets founder-owned, lower-middle-market companies generating between $2 million and $10 million in EBITDA. Typical acquisition candidates operate in niche manufacturing, B2B software, field services, and industrial technology — sectors where retiring baby-boomer owners create consistent succession-driven deal flow. Teakwood writes equity checks of $5 million to $15 million per transaction and prefers control positions that allow it to implement operational improvements directly.

After acquiring a company, Teakwood typically places an operating partner — often a former divisional CEO, plant manager, or sales leader — into a line executive role inside the business for the first 18 to 24 months of ownership. These operating partners carry personal economics tied to the EBITDA improvement of the specific company they run, separate from firm-level carried interest. The model functions as an embedded turnaround and professionalization engine, centralizing financial reporting, upgrading sales processes, and preparing the company for add-on acquisitions.

The firm's geographic focus centers on Texas, Oklahoma, and the Mountain States — a region where Teakwood's principals have spent their entire careers and built the relationship networks that feed proprietary deal flow. The Coppell headquarters places the firm inside the Dallas-Fort Worth logistics and industrial corridor, giving it short travel times to most of its portfolio companies and acquisition targets.

Teakwood holds portfolio companies for five to seven years and exits primarily through sales to strategic acquirers — corporations seeking Sun Belt market entry or product-line expansion — or to larger private equity firms executing buy-and-build strategies in the same sectors. The firm occasionally uses dividend recapitalizations mid-hold to return capital to co-investors while retaining control for continued operational improvement, as it did with a field-services automation portfolio company in April 2024.