About Kingsway

Board of Directors

Terence M. Kavanagh, Chairman
Charles Frischer, Director
Gregory P. Hannon, Director
Doug Levine, Director
Joseph D. Stilwell, Director
Corissa B. Porcelli, Director

Officers

John T. Fitzgerald, Chief Executive Officer and Director
Kent A. Hansen, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Learn More About Our Corporate Governance >>

Integrity- we do the right thing

Intellectual Curiosity- we strive to be lifelong learners 

Continuous Improvement- we are driven to surpass what has already been achieved

Teamwork- we operate in a team environment where egos have no place

Acquisitions: We target reasonable valuations for good businesses. Our view of a good business is one that generates enduringly high returns on net tangible capital. More specifically, businesses that satisfy many or most of these criteria:

Industry Attributes

Growing
Fragmented
Non-cyclical
Low capital intensity
Low or no regulatory regime
Not overly technical or complex

Company Attributes

Recurring revenue model
High operating margins
History of reliable and consistent profitability
Low customer concentration
High returns on tangible capital
Motivated seller

Organic Investments: Our businesses are typically capital light, so capital reinvested in our existing operating businesses is generally low. That said, we have a focus on growing our pool of recurring revenue customers. We make investments in product development, sales, marketing and IT with a goal of growing the lifetime value of our customer base. We apply a minimum return on investment test to support our investment decisions.

Debt Issuance and Repayment: We view debt as an important source of capital and will target using a manageable amount of leverage to support operating company acquisitions. We will then seek to repay debt using operating cash flow to enhance intrinsic value per share.

We base our operational approach on continuous incremental improvement. The Japanese term is kaizen. In practice it means that we won’t settle for the status quo and we engage all of our employees to create solutions to improve our performance

Our organization will be a meritocracy. We have designed a variable compensation plan based on individualized goals and performance reviews. In short, we reward our managers for a) getting results; b) with their team; c) while behaving the ‘right’ way.

We will create a sense of urgency — a bias for action.

We seek to minimize costs and to redeploy these dollars to ‘strategic investments’ that will grow earnings and cash flow and enhance our competitive position.

We support managers who possess what we refer to as the FIVE H’s:

• Honesty – unimpeachable integrity
• Humility – personal awareness and the ability to know what they don’t know
• Hustle – high energy and a gritty willingness to seek and tackle challenges
• Hunger – motivated with a burning desire to succeed
• High Potential – strong intellect and a capacity to learn quickly

We then provide:

• Accountability to living our core values and achieving established performance objectives
  (the right way)
• Incentives to act like owners and opportunities to participate meaningfully in long-term
  value creation
• An operating framework and set of business tools we call the Argo Business System

Informed by our many years investing in businesses acquired through the search fund model, we are perhaps less nervous than some in backing early-in-career managers in leadership positions and supporting them with our operating framework.