For PE houses and operating partners
Five years in the PE ecosystem. Eight cohorts a year. Forty-plus conversations with operating partners and PE-backed executives operating where the margin for a wrong read of the situation is real. The work I do with PE firms and their portfolio companies is not generic leadership development. It starts with the specific problem in the specific investment at the specific moment.
What PE houses come to me for
The investor–management interface
The gap between what an investor needs from a management team and what that team is currently able to produce is where most value creation problems start. It is rarely a strategy failure. It is almost always a leadership system failure — in communication, in how decisions are made and escalated, in whether the CEO is actually leading the team or carrying it.
I work at that interface. Not as a mediator, and not as an extension of the investor’s influence over management. As someone both sides trust enough to be honest with.
Leadership risk in the portfolio
Most operating partners assess leadership risk at the point of investment. Almost none have a systematic way of monitoring and addressing it during the hold period. By the time a leadership problem shows up in the numbers, six months of recovery time has already been spent.
I can work across a portfolio as a retained resource — providing early warning, an independent read of situations, and direct support to the management teams where it is needed. The relationship is confidential. The reporting line is agreed at the outset.
The 100-day window and beyond
The first hundred days of a new investment or a new CEO are when the culture is set and the psychological contract with the management team is written. Most PE houses manage the financial and operational dimensions of that window carefully. The human dimension — how the team is being led, how the CEO is being supported, what the relationship between investor and management actually feels like on the ground — gets managed informally, if at all.
I work in that window. The objective is not to make the CEO dependent on external support. It is to build the leadership foundation that makes the rest of the programme easier.
The Human Curriculum
For portfolio companies navigating agentic AI
The next transformation challenge for most PE-backed businesses is not digital — it is human. Agentic AI is changing what it means to manage people. The roles are changing. The psychological contract is being renegotiated without anyone formally agreeing to do so. The supervisory liability question — who is responsible when an agent makes a consequential decision — is unresolved in most organisations.
I have developed a leadership programme for PE-backed companies navigating this transition. Developed with Agentic Risks — whose research, across 23 peer-reviewed theories of people management, establishes precisely which nine components agentic AI disrupts and by how much — it provides a scored gap analysis and a structured programme response. Seven modules. Three-day residential. Evidence-based.
Available as a single portfolio company programme, a cross-portfolio operating partner cohort, or a full-year engagement.
The entry point
A conversation first. Thirty minutes. You describe the specific investment and the specific problem. I give you an honest view of whether I can help and what I would do. No framework presented upfront, no proposal sent before we have spoken.
If the conversation suggests a diagnostic is useful — a scored gap analysis of where the leadership risk is highest — we can do that as a standalone session. It produces a document you can use whether or not we take it further.
