Most of it never becomes a deal
The companies I sat on the board of are the ones the fund bought. The number I walked through, took apart and wrote up is several times larger. Most operational diligence ends in a recommendation not to proceed — and that is the half of the job that saves money rather than spends it.
It also means the pattern library is much bigger than the deal list. When a partner asks whether I have seen a particular failure mode before, the answer sometimes comes from a company nobody bought.
Three moments, three different asks
| Before the deal | Is the operational thesis real, and what does the gap cost? Operational diligence, technology and manufacturing readiness assessment, practical IP and switching-cost validation. |
| First hundred days | Get control without breaking what works. Hundred-day plan, CEO onboarding, delegation of authority, governance stood up. |
| The hold period | Make the plan happen, and know early when it is not. Value creation plan and KPI tree, quarterly tracking, portfolio-wide compliance, embedded operating partner cadence. |
The first hundred days
A new owner, often a new CEO, and a plan written before anybody had seen the inside of the business. The failure mode is not moving too slowly. It is moving fast on decisions nobody has been given the authority to make.
Every line of the plan carries two named leads — one from the sponsor and one from the company. Not an owner and a helper; two names, both accountable. It is the single reason these plans get executed rather than admired.
The post-close report is written as a variance against the investment thesis rather than a status update, so every finding lands as confirmed, better than expected, or not there.
Value creation planning
Most value creation plans are a list of good intentions with a number at the bottom. The useful version is a tree: enterprise value at the top, the three or four drivers that move it underneath, and beneath those the operational measures a plant manager can affect on a Tuesday. If a line cannot be traced down to something somebody does differently, it will not happen.
Five action plans sit behind it — commercial, operations, organisation, cost structure, capital structure — each stating the future state, what is true today against the same headings, and the actions that close the gap. Objectives are defined jointly with the sponsor rather than submitted to them.
Governance that survives a bad quarter
A board that has not decided how it will work will decide it by accident, in the middle of the first bad quarter. A pack format that stays the same every month, so the board reads changes rather than re-reading the business. Committee charters written before the committee is needed rather than after. Governance is cheap to install in month one and expensive to renegotiate in month fourteen.
Portfolio-wide compliance
The work nobody wants until the moment they want it very much. Environmental and safety, CSR, import and export, workplace policy — designed once and rolled out, with reporting a fund can actually aggregate. Across a portfolio it is the cheapest thing to standardise: the same programme installs at eight companies for barely more than the cost of one.
Embedded work comes with a written weekly report against a standing workstream list — hours logged, and for each workstream the named client-side partner, what moved, what did not, and the deliverables due in the next fourteen days. It is not an advisory retainer, and the report is the proof of that.
Right Tack Operational Consulting 