People risk priced before you sign
Operating Partner · HR Due Diligence · Portfolio Company Advisor
Helping private equity firms reduce execution risk through people strategy.
A data room will tell you what a company pays. It will not tell you whether the management team can run your plan, which of them is already halfway out the door, or what harmonizing three compensation structures across four jurisdictions is going to cost you in year two. Those answers live in the operating seat, and that is where I have spent my career.
What the data room will not show you
People risk is legible only to someone who has had to fix it.
These are the findings that do not appear in a quality of earnings report and do not surface in a management presentation. Every one of them has cost somebody a year of their hold period.
01
The indispensable leader. Everyone in the business will tell you this person cannot be replaced. Frequently they are irreplaceable because nothing has been written down, and that is a risk you are buying, not a strength you are acquiring.
02
Compensation that only works in aggregate. The structure looks coherent in a summary and comes apart the moment you place real people into it. Compression, inversion, and a dozen quiet exceptions that were never meant to become precedent.
03
A benefits footprint assembled by acquisition. Multiple carriers, multiple renewal dates, and nobody who has ever priced what harmonizing it actually costs, or how much goodwill it burns.
04
Classification and contractor exposure. Almost always concentrated in the jurisdictions with the least tolerance for it, and almost always described internally as the way we have always done it.
05
Managers trained to hit a number, not to run a business. This is the layer your value creation plan runs through. If it is thin, every initiative you fund lands as an email nobody acts on.
06
An HR function measured on ticket closure. When the people function is scored on responsiveness, nobody is watching the things that carry real money: attrition in critical roles, span of control, or the cost of a structure nobody has revisited in five years.
Transaction support
Before the wire clears.
Diligence that goes past the org chart and the census, into whether this management team can actually run the plan you are underwriting.
01
HR due diligence
Employment liability, classification exposure, compensation structure and the compliance surface across every jurisdiction in scope. The work is separating what is a footnote from what is a repricing.
02
Management assessment
A candid read on the leadership team you are inheriting. Who scales with the business, who is in the wrong seat, and where the first ninety days breaks if nobody moves.
03
Compensation review
Pay structure, incentive design and retention exposure on the people the thesis depends on. Built from architecture and grade logic, not from a survey median that flatters everybody.
04
Integration planning
Day one through day one hundred. Organizational design, harmonization sequencing, systems consolidation, and the communications that decide whether your key people stay through it.
Portfolio value creation
After the close, where the return is actually made.
Embedded work with portfolio company leadership on the operating capability that compounds across a hold period.
01
Executive coaching
Direct work with chief executives and functional leaders, including first-time operators running a business that has just changed hands.
02
Leadership effectiveness
Talent review, succession, and an honest read on bench strength, which is the slide a board deck softens more than any other.
03
HR operating model
Rebuilding the function from ticket-takers into operators. Shared services, hub design, and an honest answer on where headcount belongs.
04
Organizational redesign
Structure, spans, layers and role clarity, tied to the cost line rather than to a chart that simply looks tidier than the last one.
05
AI adoption
Where AI takes real cost out of a people function and where it is theater. Drawn from systems I have put into production, not from a vendor deck.
06
Manager capability
The layer that determines whether any of the above survives contact with the business. Skills, operating cadence, and actual accountability.
Selected work
What the deliverable actually looks like.
Four deliverables, start to finish: the findings, the read on the team, the hundred-day plan, and the operating model rebuild. Built to the standard you would get.
Diligence
Human Capital Diligence
Written findings on the people risk inside a target, priced against the hold.
View sample Management
Management Assessment
An honest read on the leadership team you are inheriting, and the two seats that decide year one.
View sample Integration
The First 100 Days
The post-close people plan, sequenced across six workstreams to a day-one-hundred scorecard.
View sample Value creation
HR Operating Model
Rebuilding the function from ticket-takers to operators, with the cost-to-serve economics underneath.
View sampleOperating experience
Built, not advised on.
I am not a consultant who studied this from the outside. I have carried the pager, owned the budget, and had to make the call.
Senior people leadership, currently sitting as a VP of HR rather than writing about it from a previous life. Trusted advisor to chief executives and group presidents on workforce strategy, organizational design, compensation and complex employee relations.
Operating responsibility across North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific, including jurisdictions with works councils, statutory pay structures, mandatory benefit regimes and termination law that does not resemble anything in the United States.
Compensation and benefits, employee relations, HR systems and analytics, talent acquisition, workforce planning and organizational design. Owned, with the headcount and the budget attached, not advised into.
Enterprise compensation architecture built from scratch. HR technology implemented end to end and then actually adopted. Functions rebuilt from administrative to operating. Executive-level investigations. Market entries, and the harder work of market exits.
Services, distribution and technology, in businesses growing quickly enough to outrun their own infrastructure. Which is the condition most sponsor-backed companies are in.
I write daily for a large audience of HR practitioners and advise HR technology companies on product direction. It keeps me current on what is actually being adopted across the market, which is unusual for somebody still holding an operating seat.
Engagement
Diligence windows are short. So is this conversation.
Tell me the stage and the timeline. If it is not a fit I will say so on the first call, and I will usually know who is.
Diligence
Scoped to your timeline, including the compressed ones. Written findings, not a deck.
Portfolio work
Scoped per company rather than per fund, because the problems are never the same twice.
Confidentiality
Everything shared in diligence stays in diligence. Nothing about your process, your target or your thesis leaves the engagement.