A promotion can tell you something about the person receiving it. It can also tell you something about the person announcing it. In January 2026, Brian Kwait, chief executive of Odyssey Investment Partners, celebrated Henry Bendit’s move to managing principal. He singled out Bendit’s progression from associate, his work with company managers and his mentorship of colleagues. The announcement made room for a career inside a career: someone who had learned the business was now helping others learn it.
That is a useful place to begin with Kwait. He co-founded Odyssey, invests in established businesses and has served on boards across machinery, services and distribution. His own professional route began with accounting, continued through corporate finance and arrived at private equity in 1989. Decades later, the question of how experience gets passed along still occupies space in his public remarks. An investment firm needs capital. It also needs people who know what to do when capital meets a functioning company.
Ohio, Michigan, and the accountant’s desk
Kwait is a native of Ohio. He graduated from the University of Michigan’s business program in 1983 with a BBA and later earned an MBA from Wharton, where he belongs to the class of 1988. Before Bear Stearns, he worked as a CPA and senior accountant at Ernst & Whinney. It is a beginning with considerably more arithmetic than mythology.
In 1988, he joined the corporate finance group at Bear, Stearns & Co. as an associate. His work included debt and equity financings and restructurings, covering industrial manufacturing, business services and retail services. He stayed until 1989, when he joined the private equity investing group at Odyssey Partners.
The sequence puts financial reporting, financing and ownership into the same career. Those are different ways of looking at a business: what its records show, how it obtains money and what its owners can change. Kwait’s later work would bring them together. The industrial and service companies that appeared in his banking assignments would also become central to the investment firm he helped establish.
Eight years before the founding
From 1989 to 1997, Kwait was a principal in Odyssey Partners’ private equity group. In 1997, he became one of the founders of Odyssey Investment Partners. The distinction between the two names matters. The founder had already spent eight years inside the earlier organization’s investing operation; the new firm followed an apprenticeship of his own.
His fellow founders included Stephen Berger and William Hopkins. The three would remain part of the leadership identified when Odyssey announced its sixth fund in February 2020: Kwait as CEO, Hopkins as vice chairman and Berger as chairman. Jeffrey McKibben and Craig Staub were promoted to senior managing principal at the same time. The leadership group was expanding around people who had worked inside the firm.
By that closing, the senior investment team averaged 16 years of investment experience at Odyssey. Tenure is an unglamorous statistic until you consider how much a company can change over that span. Managers depart, markets shift and acquisitions alter the organization. A team that remembers earlier decisions has something useful to bring to the next discussion.
- 1983BBA, Michigan
- 1988MBA, Wharton; Bear Stearns
- 1989Odyssey Partners
- 1997Co-founds Odyssey Investment Partners
The bottle needs a label
To understand one part of Kwait’s investing career, consider the machinery that gets a product ready for a shop shelf. Someone has to fill the bottle, close it, label it and prepare it for shipment. A consumer may admire the packaging without ever thinking about the equipment. The equipment company has rather more reason to think about it.
In December 2004, Odyssey acquired ProMach from an investor group led by Frontenac. At the time, ProMach designed and manufactured machinery for bottling, flexible packaging, end-of-line packaging and identification. It also supplied replacement parts, consumables, installation, training and maintenance. Its business continued after the machine was sold.
Kwait, then a managing principal, spoke about working with the management team and pursuing growth. ProMach had roughly 800 employees in the United States and Canada and annual revenue above $150 million. This was an operating business with customers, equipment and service obligations already in place. Buying it meant taking responsibility for what came next.
In June 2011, when an affiliate of The Jordan Company agreed to acquire ProMach from Odyssey, the buyer described a change from a collection of individual brands into an integrated operating company with a unified market strategy. The sale closed the following month. Kwait’s biography lists ProMach among his former boards.
That description gives a concrete meaning to integration. A group can own several brands and still behave like several separate companies. Bringing them into a common operating structure is another task altogether. In this case, the buyer’s account of the business at exit offers a useful view of the work done between acquisition and sale. A signature begins the ownership period; it does not perform the management.
The third verb earns its place
Odyssey calls its approach buy, build and integrate. The final verb is easy to hurry past. Acquisition announcements supply a date and a transaction. Integration asks how the combined business will function on an ordinary working day. A company’s systems and people have to accommodate the organization it is becoming.
The firm’s stated method starts with an operational roadmap developed alongside management. It aims to establish an internal acquisition capability in each business, so the company can identify and execute further transactions. Board engagement, functional support and organic growth work sit alongside that acquisition program.
Its published criteria help explain the scale. Odyssey primarily targets North American businesses, including those with international operations, and takes majority control positions. Its listed enterprise-value range is $100 million to $1 billion, with equity investments of $100 million to $300 million. These are firm criteria, rather than a record of Kwait’s personal investments.
Majority ownership makes the management relationship consequential. The firm describes seeking cultural, strategic and economic alignment before developing a long-term plan. In plain language, the investor and the people running the business need to agree on where they are going. They will have decisions to make together after the congratulatory announcement has been filed away.
Acquire majority control.
Develop a plan with management.
Connect acquisitions, people and processes.
A barcode, a boardroom, a staffing business
Kwait’s board work brings the approach into different kinds of companies. At Levata, where Odyssey invested in December 2018, the products include barcode scanners, mobile computers, label printers and RFID equipment. Services include system design, configuration, integration and technical support. Those tools help businesses capture information about assets, people and transactions.
Levata’s chief executive, Daniel Nettesheim, has described Odyssey’s investment in the company’s team, technology, processes and acquisition capabilities. His account places the ownership relationship inside the operation itself. Kwait is listed as an Odyssey board member alongside fellow investors Craig Staub, Tug Fisher and Kelly Rafkin. The board is a group undertaking.
The Planet Group offers another setting. Odyssey invested in May 2021. The Chicago-headquartered business provides staffing and consulting solutions, primarily serving technology and engineering clients. Kwait is listed on the Odyssey team as a board member there, too. In April 2025, the business announced that it was bringing its staffing brands under one name.
His previous boards also include packaging company Ranpak, equipment-rental business Williams Scotsman, Duravant, Pexco and United Site Services. The names cover varied businesses, yet the recurring subject is an existing operation with room to change. A person’s biography can be read through job titles. In Kwait’s case, the board list supplies another way in: the companies around which his working life has been organized.
The next generation gets a turn
When Odyssey closed its $3.25 billion sixth fund in February 2020, the announcement paired fundraising with promotions. The preceding fund had closed in 2014 with $2 billion in commitments. Kwait thanked the investors and the colleagues involved, while explaining why the leadership changes belonged in the same announcement.
“Our people, team culture and apprenticeship approach are Odyssey’s biggest assets”
Brian Kwait, February 2020
The wording makes people development part of his explanation for the firm’s growth. Money was being committed to future investments; colleagues were being given larger roles in making them. Seen together, those announcements describe two practical requirements of an investment business: access to capital and a team able to take responsibility for deploying it.
The January 2026 promotions returned to that subject. Alongside Bendit’s advancement, Spencer Marks and Tyler Miller became vice presidents, while Eitan Lewittes and Isabelle Lotocki became senior associates. Odyssey said nearly all its investment team had started at the firm as associates. The apprenticeship model therefore concerns the people doing the investing, as well as a general preference for mentorship.
Packaging returns, with different cargo
In July 2026, Odyssey made a majority investment in TransPak, a packaging-engineering and logistics business serving customers that include data-center, semiconductor and aerospace companies. TransPak remained under CEO Bert Inch and its existing executive team. The investment plans covered operations, manufacturing, engineering, technology and geographic expansion.
The continuity with the earlier ProMach investment is intriguing: packaging is still present, although the cargo and customer requirements have changed. Craig Staub, who spoke for Odyssey on TransPak, explicitly connected the transaction to the firm’s packaging experience and more recent data-center work. This was an investment by the firm Kwait leads; the announcement identified Staub and Jonathan Place as its quoted investment professionals.
In September, Odyssey backed Falcon Gases, a packaged-gas platform that also acquired Encore Gas & Supply. Bendit spoke for Odyssey on that transaction. The colleague whose promotion Kwait had celebrated at the beginning of the year was now explaining an industrial-distribution investment. That is a fitting place to leave this story: a founder’s career continuing through the work, and through the colleagues taking their own turn at it.