Strategic Partners in Growth
We are a strategic partner to private companies, financial sponsors, and capital allocators bringing decades of experience across capital markets, operations, and executive leadership to deliver practical, high-impact advisory services.
Red Lion Advisory integrates directly with leadership teams, acting as a trusted extension of your company. We advise clients through capital raises, investment diligence, operational challenges, executive leadership, and strategic pivots helping them navigate complexity with clarity and confidence.
Red Lion Advisory is a strategic partner to private companies, Financial Sponsors, and capital allocators. We bring decades of experience across capital markets, operations, and executive leadership to deliver practical, high-impact advisory services.
Advise clients through capital raises, investment diligence, operational challenges, executive level leadership and strategic pivots helping them navigate complexity with clarity and confidence.
Our team leads with discipline, insight, and urgency translating strategy into action and ensuring no momentum is lost in moments that count.
We partner with companies during special situations, we'll run them, we’ll grow/transform them and if and when it makes sense, we’ll buy or help acquire them.
Take the seat. Deploy as interim CEO, COO, or CRO, bringing operating discipline, decision-making authority, and real accountability. Own the role and drive outcomes.
Interim CEO · COO · CRO · Fractional Leadership · C-Suite Deployment
In the right situations, we move beyond advisory and acquire companies directly alongside Financial Sponsors, capital partners, and co-investors. When the fit is right, we bring our own capital, our own operators, and our full conviction to the table.
Direct Acquisitions · Co-Investment · Financial Sponsors Partnerships
Raise capital, design strategy, and drive operational performance then stay through execution to ensure the plan becomes results. Growth isn't just a goal set with you. It's a process managed through closing and well beyond.
Capital Raises · Operational Scaling · Post-Close ExecutionWe step in as operating and investment partners across the full spectrum of high-stakes business situations from capital raises to operational transformation.
Strategic planning and execution support for funding rounds, ensuring alignment with long-term growth objectives. We structure and negotiate financing across the entire capital stack debt, equity, and structured products.
Comprehensive analysis of opportunities with operational and strategic insights that go beyond financial metrics. Our diligence uncovers hidden risks and unlocks true value in complex situations.
Hands-on guidance through critical operational inflection points from scaling challenges to organizational transformation. We stabilize, restructure, and restore momentum when it matters most.
Strategic counsel at the C-suite level, providing clarity and direction during pivotal moments. We step in as interim or fractional CEO, CFO, or CRO, taking the seat and leading the company through critical transitions.
Expert guidance through business model shifts, market repositioning, and strategic reorientations. We help companies navigate the most consequential decisions they'll face with clarity and conviction.
A unified approach to strategic planning, capital allocation, and execution support tailored to your specific needs. We bring the full breadth of our network and experience to bear on your most complex challenges.
Red Lion Advisory integrates directly with leadership teams, acting as a trusted extension of your company. Every engagement is built on operating discipline, real-world experience, and a commitment to driving outcomes.
Don't theorize–execute. Our team brings decades of hands-on transaction experience across capital raises, M&A, and operational restructurings, with strategies tailored to the pace and priorities of each engagement.
Decades of hands-on transaction experience across capital raises, M&A, and operational restructurings
We advise clients through capital raises, investment diligence, operational challenges, executive level leadership and strategic pivots helping them navigate complexity with clarity and confidence.
Strategies tailored to the pace and priorities of each engagement
A track record of executing multi-dimensional projects with discipline, clarity, and speed
Integrate directly with leadership teams, acting as a trusted extension of your company–working inside the organization at the speed and intensity your situation requires.
We integrate directly with leadership teams acting as a trusted extension of your company
Clients get flexible support across finance, strategy, and operations
Our advisory is continuous, collaborative, and deeply aligned with your long-term outcomes
Our guidance is shaped by real-world leadership not theory or financial abstraction. We focus on what drives outcomes in practice, grounded in firsthand operating experience from both sides of the table.
Our guidance is shaped by real-world leadership not theory or financial abstraction
We focus on what drives outcomes in practice, grounded in firsthand operating experience
Independent perspective that gives boards and leadership teams the clarity they need to act
Every engagement is tailored to your stage, structure, and strategic goals. Our approach scales with you offering structure without slowing momentum, and precision without unnecessary complexity.
Every engagement is tailored to your stage, structure, and strategic goals
Our approach scales with you offering structure without slowing momentum
We see every engagement through to execution and delivery
Red Lion Advisory is led by Simit Shah, a senior finance, capital markets and business transformation executive who has served as CFO, Treasurer, and interim C-suite leader, while using treasury, capital structure, and deal-making to drive strategy, growth, and value creation for PE and Family office backed, distressed, and growth companies. He blends CXO/CEO/CFO-level Commercial and Financial leadership with stakeholder-facing execution across capital raising, complex financings, and business transformations in dynamic, high-stakes environments.
Simit brings over two decades of experience closing complex transactions, leading organizations through high-stakes inflection points, and building the institutional relationships that determine outcomes. He has structured, marketed and executed over $3B in capital across debt, equity, and structured products and led the operational side of some of the largest transactions in his sectors.
Simit is direct, deeply networked, and operates at the pace of a dealmaker rather than a consultant. Combining entrepreneurial tenacity, resilience, and tactical rigor, he builds trusted relationships with boards, executives, lenders, investors, and operating teams worldwide. He thrives in ambiguity, wears multiple hats, and is often tapped to solve urgent capital structure, liquidity, and growth challenges. He holds an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business and a BS in Chemistry from Villanova University.
View full profile on LinkedInIdris Elgabalawy is a Director at Red Lion Advisory, where he leads execution across the firm's M&A advisory, capital raising, restructuring, and fractional CFO mandates.
Idris has advised on transactions ranging from $5 million acquisitions to capital deployments exceeding $500 million, spanning buy-side and sell-side M&A, recapitalizations, joint venture structuring, leveraged buyouts, growth equity raises, and asset-backed credit facilities. His engagement work includes structuring multi-party recapitalizations with earnout pools and rollover equity across operating partners, selling shareholders, and joint venture counterparties; designing leveraged buyout structures incorporating PIK toggles and four-tier distribution waterfalls; and leading enterprise valuation work supporting credit facilities of $15–20 million and capital raises of $125–320 million.
He focuses on complex, multi-stakeholder transactions in which capital structure, governance, and operational transition are designed in parallel. He has structured management buyouts with phased seller exits and cross-border manufacturing integration, advised on capitalization design across SAFEs, convertible notes, and priced equity rounds covering 75+ investors, and authored investment memoranda supporting capital raises of $100 million to $320 million for industrial and energy platforms.
Idris advises clients across energy and cleantech, defense and aerospace, healthcare, manufacturing, and consumer products, with technical range spanning unit economics and bill-of-materials cost build-ups for emerging hardware platforms, levelized cost of storage analysis for battery technology, and working capital and covenant frameworks for asset-heavy operating businesses.
Idris holds a B.S. in Finance, with a concentration in Financial Analysis, from California State University, Northridge.
View full profile on LinkedIn
Whether you're navigating a capital raise, working through an operational challenge, or preparing for a strategic pivot we're built to step in and lead alongside you.