Harvey Kestenberg

Founding Partner (Retired)

Harvey Kestenberg is the co-founder of KRP LLP.

After earning his designation as a Chartered Accountant in 1966, Harvey was promoted to partner at a small Toronto accounting firm where he worked for four years, gaining widespread experience serving organizations across a large breadth of industries. In 1973, Harvey took the opportunity to launch his own venture. He recruited Ralph Rabinowicz as his partner and the two founded KRP.

In those early days, Harvey handled most of the fledgling firm’s business development duties, while Ralph provided audit, accounting and tax services to their growing clientele. Both shared the same vision: to create an accounting firm where employees and clients were treated like family; one in which everyone would know each other by their first names, including those of their immediate family members. Helping entrepreneurs overcome life’s challenges and achieve personal, as well as professional and financial, success became a firm-wide philosophy.

Over the years, KRP’s service offerings expanded to include accounting, tax, mergers and acquisitions, financial consulting, risk advisory, corporate restructuring and estate planning. With widespread growth and the introduction of new faces as the firm matured, Harvey’s emphasis on building strong, lasting relationships with clients remained the cornerstone of KRP’s service culture. Not surprisingly, it was also a major contributing factor to the firm’s ongoing success.

Throughout his career, Harvey’s tax and accounting insights—as well as his extensive fundraising efforts for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation—have been featured by a wide array of media outlets and organizations including the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants.

Harvey pursues a range of extracurricular pursuits from working out in the gym and playing harmonica and piano, to golfing in the summer.

“If there is one fundamental thing that sets us apart, it’s this: Any competent accountant can prepare financial statements. We add value by bringing to the process astute management input combined with effective organizational strategies which, when added to our clients’ skills, help build better businesses.”