Articles

Why the right CEO is not always the most impressive candidate on paper: how PE investors can test executive fit against the investment thesis, not just the CV.

Portfolio companies are being asked to find twelve percent annual EBITDA growth in a market that used to reward five. Investors are answering with AI-driven value creation programmes — and quietly discovering that the leadership team in place was never assessed for the one capability the plan now depends on. Every private equity conversation now…

With average hold periods stretching past six years and a record backlog of unsold companies, the industry is treating 2026’s exit slowdown as a liquidity story. Inside the business, it is a far more immediate problem — the leadership team hired to deliver a four-year plan is now three years into work nobody originally asked…

Leadership 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 executive who fails in the first ninety days after an acquisition is, more often than not, genuinely capable. They have a track…

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 pattern is familiar to anyone who has sat through enough post-acquisition leadership reviews. A…

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. Clifford Nash Executive Search  ·  Industrial & Private Equity When a private equity…