Author: Philip Curran

Welcome to the second installment of our 8-part series on People Strategy. In our first entry, we looked at why the gap between business goals and human execution exists. Today, we’re pulling back the curtain on the "anatomy" of a strategy that actually moves the needle on enterprise value. If you’re a CEO of a…

Category: CEO Advisory Primary Theme: Leadership Effectiveness Empathy without discipline is a structural liability. When HR stops carrying load, credibility collapses. The CEO Test: Pattern Recognition Use this as a stress test. If these patterns are present, the function is not supporting performance. It is distorting it. The Mediation Loop Your CHRO spends more time…

Primary Category: Enterprise ValueSecondary Category: Organizational Drift The standard PE playbook is a structural fantasy. It assumes stability that does not exist. Most portfolio companies enter the first 90 days with load-bearing fractures already in place. The leadership system is carrying unresolved stress, misaligned incentives, and unclear authority. No checklist can compensate for structural shear…

A load-bearing beam does not fail all at once. It fractures under pressure, then gives way when stress hits the frame. That is how leadership teams collapse in portfolio companies. Not from bad luck. Not from market timing. From structural failure under velocity stress. Sponsors misread the signal. They call it culture. They call it…

By Philip Curran, Principal, Rinnovare, and Graeme Crawford, CEO, Crawford McMillan INTRODUCTION The failures that quietly destroy value in portfolio companies rarely appear in the dashboards. They sit underneath them. Private equity operators are trained to see the obvious signals. They can spot a soft revenue bridge, a margin story held together by optimism, or…

Primary Category: Enterprise ValueSecondary Category: CEO Advisory The Moment That Matters The board meeting ends. The deck was clean, the EBITDA story defensible, and the Operating Partners left with cautious optimism. But as the room breaks, the real signal appears. The CFO pulls the Head of Sales aside to question the pricing model they just…

Primary Category: Enterprise ValueSecondary Category: Organizational Drift The Moment That Matters The Letter of Intent (LOI) is signed at an 8x multiple. Then the Quality of Earnings (QofE) team starts pulling threads. The EBITDA says $4M. The operating model says something else. Customer relationships sit in the Founder’s phone. Decisions stall because no one can…

The Moment That Matters The ink is dry on the carve-out. The TSA (Transition Service Agreement) clock is officially ticking. On Day 1, the portco is tethered to the seller’s legacy infrastructure—an expensive, slow-moving system designed for a company ten times its size. For the PE Operating Partner, the TSA is a double-edged sword. It…

The Moment That Matters The wire has cleared. The champagne is flat. Now the Drift Tax™ starts showing up in places most deal teams do not measure fast enough: stalled decisions, mixed messages, executive hedging, and quiet talent flight. In the first 72 hours post-close, the portfolio company is at its most exposed. The legacy…

The Moment That Matters You are sitting in the final Investment Committee meeting before a mid-market carve-out. The financial due diligence is pristine. The tax exposure is quantified. The "People" slide in the deck shows a neat row of checkboxes that give the illusion of readiness: Payroll transition? Confirmed. Benefit plan parity? Audited. Employment contracts?…

Categories: Cross-Border Leadership, Enterprise Value The Moment That Matters Imagine the scene: You are in elated, buzzing boardroom in Milan. The numbers look excellent. The product-market fit in the Eurozone is undisputed. The next logical step, the "Milan to Manhattan" move, is on the table. But as you look across the desk at your leadership…

Primary Category: Organizational DriftSecondary Category: CEO Advisory The Moment That Matters The board meeting ended ten minutes early. There were smiles, polite nods, and a unanimous "yes" to the new regional integration strategy. On paper, it was a win for the CEO. Everyone was aligned. Or so it seemed. Fast forward six months: the integration…

Primary Category: CEO AdvisorySecondary Category: Organizational Drift The Moment That Matters The Chief Nursing Officer sits in the boardroom, staring at a dashboard of red. Turnover in the ICU is at an all-time high, patient satisfaction scores are dipping, and "incivility" reports between departments are piling up. The CEO suggests another round of "wellness stipends"…

Most mergers and acquisitions look spectacular on a spreadsheet. The synergies are mapped, the EBITDA growth is projected, and the market share expansion seems inevitable. Yet, history is littered with the carcasses of "perfect" deals that withered away within the first eighteen months. Why? Because while the balance sheet was integrated, the people were not.…

Primary Category: Enterprise ValueSecondary Category: Cross-Border Leadership The Moment That Matters The boardroom in Milan is quiet, save for the hum of an espresso machine. Six months ago, the deal closed. A mid-market leader in precision manufacturing, a "hidden champion" of the Bel Paese, was carved out of a larger conglomerate with an ambitious EBITDA…

The Moment That Matters: The 18-Month Ghost Move It’s eighteen months post-close. The press releases have yellowed, the new signage is bolted to the glass, and the combined health system is, on paper, a regional powerhouse. But inside the C-suite, the air is heavy. Synergies that looked "conservative" in the pitch deck are nowhere to…

You’ve done the hard part. You’ve built a powerhouse in Dublin, Cork, or Galway. Your product-market fit is undeniable, your domestic growth is plateauting in the best way possible, and the board is pointing toward the States. But as you start to set up that first office in Boston, Austin, or New York, you hit…

For a CEO leading a company of 150 to 1,500 employees, the "people" problem eventually shifts from a tactical nuisance to a strategic bottleneck. You have outgrown your "Head of HR" who excelled at payroll and compliance, but you aren't quite ready: or haven't yet found: the permanent Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) who can…

Primary Category: Enterprise ValueSecondary Category: CEO Advisory The Moment That Matters The call usually happens at 6:00 PM on a Friday. A health system CEO is on the line, and the tone is one of controlled exhaustion. Their CHRO: the person supposed to be managing the burnout of 5,000 clinicians and navigating a complex labor…

The Moment That Matters Imagine a Monday morning executive huddle at a major regional health system. The CEO looks at the "Access and Throughput" dashboard. For the fourth month in a row, ED boarding hours are up, and OR utilization is stagnant. The room is full of talented people. There is no lack of effort.…