New CEO onboarding
An upside-down org chart is one of the toughest things a new CEO can inherit. A portfolio company's new CEO got the organizational health read in a week. What might have taken a full quarter of listening tours took days.
Perspectives
Short, first-hand takes from Entromy's leadership on organizational health, execution risk, and talent decisions in private equity, originally shared on LinkedIn.
These are unfiltered observations from conversations with operating partners, portfolio CEOs, and deal teams: what's working, what's breaking, and what the data shows before it shows up in the financials. Each entry links out to the original post on LinkedIn.
New CEO onboarding
An upside-down org chart is one of the toughest things a new CEO can inherit. A portfolio company's new CEO got the organizational health read in a week. What might have taken a full quarter of listening tours took days.
Execution risk
When execution feels off, great portfolio company CEOs don't wait for retrospective reports. They lean forward and listen to the teams executing the plan on the frontlines in real time.
Change absorption
AI is pushing every company to move faster. The question no one is asking is whether the organization can take it. Every organization has a ceiling on how much change it can absorb.
Proactive stewardship
There's always at least one partner whose companies consistently hit plan. Not because they got lucky. Because they know about the execution problem before it becomes an execution miss.
Talent infrastructure
He spent fifteen years outside private equity before his first deal team, and asked the question everyone else had stopped asking: why don't we evaluate leadership infrastructure the way we evaluate financials?
New CEO onboarding
A new CEO's first instinct was a 90-day listening tour, coffee after coffee, slowly mapping where the friction lives. There is a faster way to get the same read.
Operating partner visibility
Most operating partners never get years of in-person trust-building with a portfolio company's leadership team. One said the quiet part out loud: at arm's length, I'm just not sure I can trust the executive team.
New CEO onboarding
The clock on a hold period starts the moment the deal closes. Yet new CEOs routinely spend the entire first quarter listening and guessing.
Events
At LPGP Connect, the phones were down and hands were raised. Jan moderated a panel with leaders from Apollo, Blackstone, and Mercer on building talent assessment infrastructure in private equity.
Talent assessment
Michael Jordan takes a generic talent assessment, scores high on athleticism, and gets placed on the lacrosse team because they need athletes right now. That's the core issue with rigorous but context-free assessments.
Leading indicators
The scoreboard tells you what happened. The film room shows you what's forming. Revenue, EBITDA, and churn are lagging indicators. The signals worth tracking appear earlier.
AI in PE
From tactical AI tools to whether AI magnifies experienced judgment or replaces it: Brad hosted a discussion with leaders from BayPine, GrowthCurve Capital, and Macquarie Group.