Our Story
A Garage. A Donut Shop. Two Veterans. One Idea: Own Something.
The American Dream
Flying Horse Capital was founded in Dallas, Texas. But the idea behind it started two generations earlier, in a garage in Connecticut and a donut shop in Rhode Island.
Joseph Kirchon, our Founder and CEO, is the grandson of two small business owners. Both served in the United States Armed Forces in World War II. Both came home, went to work, and built something from nothing. Neither of them called it entrepreneurship. They called it providing.
Everything this firm believes about ownership came from watching what they built, and what happened to it.
Bridgeport, Connecticut
Joseph P. Kirchon, Jr. and Florence Tekin Kirchon
Westerly, Rhode Island
Angelo A. "Banjy" Gencarelli, Jr. and Burnie Cousin Gencarelli
Angelo A. Gencarelli, Jr., "Banjy" to nearly everyone, was born in Westerly, Rhode Island on January 12, 1920, the son of Angelo A. and Angelina Guglielmello Gencarelli. He served in the United States Navy during World War II. While stationed in New Orleans, he met Burnie M. Cousin, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1922, the daughter of Victor Allard Cousin and Frances Mary Harris Cousin. They married soon after and, when the war ended, made Westerly home for the rest of their lives.
The company they built began with a single conviction. Visiting Burnie's family in southern Louisiana, Angelo tasted a donut made by the Southern Made Donut Company and became convinced New England would want it too. So he traveled to the company's headquarters in Dallas, Texas, and learned the craft of the cream-glazed donut properly, from the people who had perfected it.
He came home and opened his own shop. Angelo's Southern Made Donut opened in Westerly on May 31, 1947, built with a glass window so customers could watch the donuts being made. It was meant to close at 8 p.m., seven days a week. Demand had other ideas. Before long the shop ran twenty-four hours a day, making fresh donuts around the clock.
On April 25, 1949, he opened a larger location with a donut bar and a wider variety. In 1954, he founded the Bess Eaton Flour Company. Together, Angelo and Burnie grew it to more than fifty locations across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
Angelo served on the boards of the Washington Trust Company and Westerly Hospital, and was a past chapter chairman of the American Red Cross. He was a longtime member of the Narragansett Council, Knights of Columbus, the Westerly Rotary, and the Winnapaug Golf Club, because a business that grows in a town owes something back to it.
He died on December 22, 1982, at the age of 62. He was buried with military honors at St. Sebastian Cemetery.
Joseph P. Kirchon, Jr. was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1922, the son of Joseph and Anna Gergel Kirchon. He served in the United States Marine Corps and was a veteran of World War II.
After the war, he moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut to be near his sister, Mary. She introduced him to her friend Florence Tekin, a lifelong Bridgeport resident, daughter of Bruno and Stella Tekin, born in that city in 1926. Joe and Florence married in 1950.
He became an automobile mechanic. Then he became an owner. He opened a gas station and auto repair garage in Bridgeport and ran it for years. The kind of business where the name on the sign and the man under the hood are the same person, and where the customers are also the neighbors.
After selling the garage, he became a licensed boiler repair technician for the City of Bridgeport Board of Education, and retired as a district supervisor after more than twenty-five years of service. A first career he built himself, and a second career where he was trusted to look after everyone else's.
Joseph passed away peacefully on May 4, 2015, at the age of 93, with his family beside him. He was the beloved husband of 47 years to the late Florence Tekin Kirchon. He was laid to rest with military honors at Saint Michael's Cemetery in Stratford, Connecticut.
Our Founder
Joseph "JP" Kirchon — Founder & Chief Executive Officer
JP began his career in public accounting at PwC and Baker Tilly and has spent his career since in operating and advisory finance roles, including as CFO and leader of the Office of the CFO practice at East 57th Street Partners.
He is also a lifelong football coach and former college quarterback, with coaching experience at the high school, college, and professional levels. Both of his grandfathers were veterans who built small businesses of their own, and that legacy is the foundation of how Flying Horse Capital operates today.
Why Start Flying Horse Capital
"My grandfathers didn't have an exit strategy. They had customers, employees, and a name on the building. That's who we buy from, and that's how we operate."
"A coach studies the film, tells the truth, and puts people in position to win."
"We built this firm to be the kind of buyer my grandfathers would have shaken hands with."
A Garage. A Donut Shop. Two Veterans. One Idea: Own Something.
The American Dream
A business built by hand carries more than revenue. It carries a name, a payroll, a set of customers who know the owner, and a town that counts on it. That is true of a two-bay garage and it is true of a fifty-location company. What determines whether any of it survives is not the quality of the business. It is who ends up owning it, and what they intend to do with it.
That is the part we could not stop thinking about.
We are not private equity investors or investment bankers. We are entrepreneurs with roots in American small business, and we built Flying Horse Capital to be the owner these families deserved. One that thinks in decades, keeps the brand, keeps the team, and never operates against a clock.
There's a symmetry we didn't plan. In the 1940s, a Navy veteran from Rhode Island came to Dallas to learn how to build a business that would outlast him. Two generations later, his grandson runs a firm from this same city, doing the same thing for other people's companies.