What Founders Get Wrong About Being Needed
Founder dependency feels like value from the inside. Where the idea came from, why being needed misleads, and what to change in your 2027 plan.
Your Strategy Lives or Dies in Middle Management
Middle management is where strategy dies or gets done. What AI flattening and wider teams mean for your 2027 plan, and how to test it before it locks.
How the Company Runs When You’re Not in the Room
Most 2027 plans name priorities, not the second in command who carries them. What the role really means, what it costs, and what it protects.
Everyone Underwrites the Plan. Nobody Measures the Team.
Buying a company is an act of belief. The buyer believes the plan will hold, the earnings will grow, and the team will carry both. Two of those three beliefs get tested hard. The third mostly gets a handshake. That third test is management diligence. Here is what testing the earnings looks like. A forensic […]
Most Value-Creation Plans Die in the Same Place
Private equity nearly doubled its deployment speed and still missed plan. The constraint was never pace – it is which term in the change equation went to zero.
A Start Date Is Not a Beginning
Leadership onboarding is treated as paperwork. It is really a financing decision. Here is what the ramp costs, and what moving the date is worth.
The Bench You Think You Have
In June I argued that the bench is the whole game. That post made the case for depth. This one asks the harder question: succession readiness. Not the person the chart names. The person who could actually do the job on Monday. Most leadership teams can produce a chart with successors on it. Still, very […]
Private Equity Buys Talent. Founders Should Build It.
A report landed this month that every founder should read. Even the ones with no intention of ever selling. Altrata studied more than 11,500 portfolio companies and 60,000 executives. One finding is quiet on the page. Still, it changes the math for anyone building a company. Private equity now fills 74% of portfolio-company leadership roles […]
The Human Capital Risk No One Quantifies
Every company has two or three people it cannot afford to lose. You already know their names. So does your leadership team. In fact, you could probably write the list in under a minute. That is not the problem. The problem is that the list lives in your head. Nobody has written it down, tested […]
Soft Skills are the New Hard Skills
Ask any executive team what makes their best people valuable. The answers come fast: judgment, communication, composure under pressure. Then ask a harder question. What is your system for teaching those capabilities? Usually, silence follows. Most companies treat soft skills as traits they hire, not skills they build. That assumption just became expensive, because the […]