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Our Principals > John D. Harkey, Jr.
Mr. Harkey was raised in Brownwood, Texas, and attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a BBA with honors in Finance and a JD. He earned an MBA from Stanford University School of Business.
From 1987 through 1992, Mr. Harkey worked with two private equity firms, including Capstone Partners in Dallas, Texas, where he led or participated in the acquisition and sale of both public and private companies presenting a combined market value in excess of $500 million. He took an active operational role in transitioning and stabilizing an acquired company and turning around its operations. He has acquired companies in the healthcare, petrochemical, telecommunications, wholesale distribution and restaurant industries.
Between 1993 and 1996, Mr. Harkey and John Cracken practiced law together.
Between 1997 and 1999, Messrs. Harkey and Cracken led the acquisition and combination of two public (NYSE:SWH and NASDAQ:ELCH) and five private restaurant companies, resulting in consolidated system-wide sales of more than $240 million with operations in 16 states and Canada and 6,000 full and part-time employees.
Mr. Harkey is today Chairman and CEO of the resulting holding and operating companies, Consolidated Restaurant Companies, Inc. (CRC) and Consolidated Restaurant Operations, Inc. (CRO – www.croinc.com). He is responsible for (1) overseeing all of the CRO's operations, (2) participating in identifying, structuring, and negotiating strategic transactions, and (3) working with CRO and its platform companies to effectively assimilate new platform and roll-up acquisitions. Mr. Harkey also serves as a director of Total Entertainment Corp. (NASDAQ:TENT - www.tentcorp.com).
Messrs. Harkey and Cracken co-founded RLX Technologies, Inc. (RLX – www.rlx.com) in 1999 to design, patent, manufacture and launch the first "server blade" computing system. Mr. Harkey served as RLX's Vice Chairman from RLX's inception until December 2000, and he serves today as a director of RLX. Messrs. Harkey and Cracken also co-founded CriticaLogix, Inc. (CLX) in 2001 to design, patent, manufacture, and launch a first server blade computing system based upon a solid-state InfiniBand backplane and optimized to serve as a Beowulf cluster. Mr. Harkey served as CLX's Vice Chairman from CLX's inception until September 2001 when CLX's COO, CTO and product vision became a permanent part of RLX.
Mr. Harkey is a member of the Board of Directors for the Circle Ten Council of the Boy Scouts of America.
See the Dallas Morning News profile of John Harkey — PDF, 992 KB.