Mike McKenzie
For four decades, when a private equity–backed company stopped fitting the model, he was the call. Path Integral Funds is what he built when the call changed.
The phone rings on a Sunday night.
It is a sponsor, or a lender, or the lender’s counsel. A portfolio company has missed its covenant. The CFO is gone, or about to be. Nobody has built the thirteen-week cash flow, and the next interest payment is due in nineteen days. By Monday morning, Mike McKenzie is in the building.
That call has come 2,387 times. Working as The Interim CFO, he has served as interim CFO and Chief Restructuring Officer to private equity portfolio companies with revenue from $100 million to $5 billion, and he has led 137 restructurings. Each engagement started the same way: a company that no longer fit its lender’s model, and a set of paths forward that nobody had yet counted.
In 2026 the call changed. Private credit defaults reached records. Nonaccruals at business development companies rose sharply, and lenders that once asked him about one borrower began asking about twenty. The problem had moved upstream, from the company to the lender’s book.
An interim CFO sees one company from the inside. A lender with a book of troubled loans needs someone who has been inside hundreds. That is the turn from The Interim CFO to Path Integral Funds.
It began with every path.
He studied physics and economics as an undergraduate at Elmhurst University. In physics he met Richard Feynman’s path integral: a particle does not take one route but all of them, and the path we observe is the one that survives the sum. In economics he met the opposite habit, which is one forecast, one line, one base case.
Every restructuring since has been a practical exercise in Feynman’s method. When the base case fails, list the other paths, weigh them, and steer toward the one that can still be saved.
When the board said fast.
His first market was physical. As a runner on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, he carried orders by hand into a live open-outcry pit. When the market moved hard, the mechanical board above the floor could not keep up, and it posted a single word against the last trades:
It was an early lesson in the gap between how fast a market moves and how fast anyone can measure it.
Bankers Trust, and distressed debt.
At Bankers Trust Company he rose to Managing Director and managed portfolios in alternative assets and distressed debt during the formative years of leveraged finance. This was paper that had left the models built to hold it and had to be priced without them.
Chapter 11, and the recovery value.
At Ernst & Young, as a senior manager in reorganization and insolvency, he advised in the landmark Chapter 11 cases of the post-LBO era, including Macy’s, Federated, and Southland, the parent of 7-Eleven. At Hilco, as senior vice president, he originated and ran inventory dispositions across major retail restructurings, learning exactly what an asset is worth on the day no one wants it.
Inside the companies that no longer fit.
Then came the practice that defines his career. As The Interim CFO, he goes inside the portfolio company, builds the cash forecast, finds the paths that still lead somewhere, and steers the company and its lenders onto one of them.
- Neenah FoundryAs interim co-CFO for a Golden Tree–backed manufacturer, helped take enterprise value from $135 million to $830 million.
- Renova EnergyCross-border restructuring of a London-listed company that delivered full recovery to its bank group through a Section 363 sale.
- Bulk PetroleumA 19% margin improvement, followed by full recovery to secured and unsecured creditors through a Section 363 sale.
- HealthcareTook an assisted-care operator’s enterprise value from $7.85 million to $68 million in eighteen months.
The pattern repeats: a loan the lender had written down, and a recovery the model never priced.
When the machine catches up.
Twice he helped move a hard-to-trade asset onto an electronic market. At The Receivables Exchange, backed by NYSE Euronext and Bain Capital Ventures, he served as head of institutional sales and interim CEO, and annual trading volume in corporate receivables grew from $100 million to $5 billion. At Earn.re, as co-founder and managing partner, he built a regulated digital platform for commercial real estate securities and ran a pilot with the NYSE and Walker & Dunlop to trade multifamily equity.
Each time, an asset that had been illiquid by habit became tradable once the machine could keep up. Today, it finally can.
The shadow desk and the edge of the model.
He interviewed with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for Managing Director of Markets in Chicago, leading the fifty-person shadow operation for the New York Fed’s portfolio, then $8.3 trillion. The process sharpened the question he had carried through every engagement: who runs the assets when the primary model can no longer hold them?
The answer became Path Integral Funds.
Why him. Why now.
The interim CFO practice and Path Integral Funds share the same assets: loans that no longer fit the model, and the companies behind them. The fund carries that work from one company to the whole book.
The experience is already built.
- He has been inside the borrower.137 restructurings from the company side means he knows which paths are real and which exist only in the model.
- He has priced the paper.Distressed debt at Bankers Trust and recovery values at Hilco taught him what a credit is worth when no one wants it.
- He has built the market.The Receivables Exchange and Earn.re put illiquid assets onto electronic rails. Path Integral Funds does the same for private credit.
- He brings the bench.The interim CFO practice becomes the fund’s workout channel, ready to place operating capacity inside a company in days.
The cycle has reached the workout.
- Defaults are at records.Private credit is going through its first full test of how it handles loans that go wrong.
- The decision has moved upstream.The questions that used to reach an interim CFO inside one company are now asked across a lender’s entire book.
- Lenders need a third choice.Between a forced sale at the bid and an extension that defers the problem, there has been very little.
- The machine can keep up.Frontier AI makes it affordable to weigh every path for every loan, at the cost discipline John Bogle made famous.
Education, career, and beyond.
Physics for the method, economics for the market, journalism for the argument, and four decades inside the companies for the judgment.
- Physics and EconomicsElmhurst University · Undergraduate
- Master of Business AdministrationKeller Graduate School of Management
- Master of Science, JournalismMedill School, Northwestern University
- Runner, trading floorChicago Mercantile Exchange
- Managing Director · alternative assets & distressed debtBankers Trust Company
- Senior Manager, Reorganization & InsolvencyErnst & Young · Macy’s, Southland
- Senior Vice PresidentHilco
- Interim CFO & Chief Restructuring OfficerThe Interim CFO · 137 restructurings
- Head of Institutional Sales & Interim CEOThe Receivables Exchange
- Co-Founder & Managing PartnerEarn.re
- Essayist, The Wisdom PremiumWriting as Mac McKenzie
- Instrument-rated pilotLicensed
A path integral sums every possible trajectory.
Our work is to find the one where the loan is recovered.