Most private equity investors underestimate how significantly leadership quality affects operational outcomes — and overestimate how quickly a wrong hire can be corrected. This report examines the patterns we observe across industrial portfolio companies: where leadership gaps most commonly appear, what drives them, and what the cost of delayed action looks like in practice.
PE portfolios consistently outperform when led by executives who have operated — not managed — in comparable environments. This report examines what separates operators from administrators and why most search processes are not designed to find them.
Due diligence processes routinely scrutinise financial performance and operational infrastructure. Leadership quality — whether the management team can perform under new ownership — is assessed far less rigorously, and far later than it should be.
eadership failures in the period immediately after close are rarely about competence — they are almost always about context, alignment, and the absence of a clear mandate defined before the executive arrived.
The CFO profile that works in a public company rarely works in a PE-backed environment. The gap between what investors think they’re hiring and what they actually need is one of the most consistent sources of leadership failure we observe.
The operators who can genuinely move the needle in a PE-backed manufacturing business are almost never on the market. Understanding why — and what it takes to reach them — is the difference between a search that delivers and one that doesn’t.