Private Equity
Building the leadership capability behind value creation
The drive for performance in Private Equity is intense. Fund cycles compress the time you have to build value. And delivering alpha returns is increasingly challenging in the current economic and geopolitical environment. Management teams are expected to align around ambitious value creation plans and deliver at pace. In this context, the importance of optimal leadership cannot be overstated.
PSFI works across the Private Equity ecosystem — with investment firms, their leaders, and the businesses they back — to build the leadership capability on which value creation and business transformation depend. We combine deep expertise in leadership and organisational performance with first-hand experience of Private Equity, investment banking, professional services and management consulting. We understand what taking an investment demands of a leadership team, and what it takes to turn that pressure into stronger performance.
How we help Private Equity firms
As firms grow and the PE sector evolves, retaining exceptional talent, developing the next generation of partners and leadership succession, are of critical importance.
We work with PE firms to:
- Develop the next generation of leaders – Bespoke programmes for partners, directors and future leaders, building the capability to lead themselves, their teams, the firm, and in the market, at the pace the fund cycle demands.
- Strengthen senior teams – Helping leadership teams build trust, sharpen accountability, make faster decisions and operate as a genuine collective, not a group of individually strong partners.
- Develop and retain exceptional talent – Strengthening succession pipelines and building the bench strength funds increasingly need to show LPs.
- Coach senior leaders – Individual and team coaching that creates space to think clearly through the complex, high-stakes calls senior roles demand.
"The biggest benefit for me of the workshop – and the full series – is getting my group of peers together to establish strong relationships amongst us both individually and collectively."
Partner, international Private Equity firm
How we help Portfolio companies
Investment changes the operating reality fast. Leadership teams have to align around a new value creation plan, absorb a step-change in pace, and, increasingly, lead through consolidation as platforms acquire and integrate at speed. PSFI works with CEOs, management teams and senior leaders in portfolio companies to build the leadership capability that ambitious growth plans actually require.
We help organisations to:
- Build high-performing management teams – Creating the trust, clarity and alignment leadership teams need to execute under pressure rather than get pulled into the operational weeds.
- Lead through investment, transition and integration – Supporting leaders as ownership, roles and ways of working change, including through buy-and-build and platform consolidation, not just the initial transaction.
- Create alignment around strategy and value creation – Translating the value creation plan into clear priorities, collective ownership and action across the leadership team.
- Build the culture to support growth – Ensuring leadership behaviour and culture evolve at the same pace as the business, rather than becoming the thing that slows it down.
Why PSFI
We’ve operated at this level ourselves
Our people combine deep expertise in leadership and organisational performance with first-hand experience inside Private Equity, investment banking, consulting and professional services, including Cinven, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, KPMG, EY and Freshfields. They understand the investment cycle and the performance pressure because they’ve worked inside it, not studied it from outside.
You get that experience without the scale of a big-firm engagement team.
We’re not a 40-person account structure. You work directly with senior faculty who’ve operated at this level; the depth of a top-tier firm, the attention and pace of a boutique. That combination is deliberate.
- We bring the real issues into the room – No generic frameworks or off-the-shelf programmes. We start by understanding the fund, the portfolio company, its people and what it’s actually trying to achieve, then build the work around the live issues leaders are facing right now.
- We focus on change that lasts – Insight alone doesn’t move performance. Our work is designed to shift behaviour: stronger relationships, better decisions, and leadership teams that operate differently long after the engagement ends, through the hold period and beyond exit.
Private Equity Expert Spotlight
Caroline Rawes
Principal Consultant
Caroline has held senior executive people leadership roles across private equity and leading international law firms. She was most recently Chief HR Officer and Partner at Cinven, where she established the firm’s first CHRO role to support its international growth and advise on leadership, organisational development, talent, succession, inclusion and culture.
Henry Marsden
Managing Partner
Henry has worked with Private Equity firms in an advisory capacity over the last 20 years. As an experienced consultant and advisor as well as coach, Henry designs, develops and delivers development programmes with a focus on leadership development, succession planning and top team development.
Our work
Developing the next generation of leaders at an international Private Equity firm
An international Private Equity firm wanted to strengthen the leadership capability of a cohort of future leaders and build stronger connection across the group as part of a succession plan.
Following an in-depth discovery process, PSFI designed a 12-month programme combining workshops, individual coaching and other development activity — focused on leadership at multiple levels: leading self, leading others, leading in the firm and leading in the market.
The result was stronger relationships and trust across the cohort, increased leadership confidence, and greater collective ownership of the firm’s future. The client asked PSFI to run the programme again for its next cohort.
Supporting a management team following Private Equity investment
A large professional services business was navigating a significant transition following Private Equity investment. Its management team needed to operate differently: with greater clarity of purpose, stronger collective leadership and the ability to execute strategy at pace under a new ownership model.
PSFI worked with the management team over an extended period, helping them clarify individual and collective leadership purpose, operate more strategically, and establish the culture and ways of working needed to deliver the firm’s growth plan.
The result was greater cohesion and trust across the management team, clearer ownership of strategic priorities, and stronger alignment between leadership behaviour and the organisation’s growth ambitions.
Contact the team
Whether you’re developing the next generation of leaders within your firm, strengthening a senior team, or supporting leadership within a portfolio company through investment, growth or integration, we’d be delighted to talk.
Our thinking on Private Equity
The Private Equity environment keeps evolving — and so do the demands placed on its leaders. Our research and conversations with leaders across the sector explore the leadership, talent and performance questions shaping PE firms and the businesses they back.
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Articles
AuthorSpotlight on Christine O’Shea
We are delighted to welcome Christine O’Shea as an Associate. Christine is a Chartered Psychologist in Occupational and Coaching Psychology and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. As a leadership consultant she has more than 25 years’ experience...
Spotlight on Keith Goddard
We are happy announce that Keith Goddard is joining as an Associate. Keith is an applied business, performance and wellbeing psychologist with more than 40 years’ experience in learning, development and organisational psychology. He has worked extensively with professional service...
Spotlight on Miriam Desjardins
We are delighted to announce that Miriam Desjardins has become a Principal Consultant. Miriam was previously an Associate. Miriam has more than 25 years’ experience working in developing people and organisations, with ten of those years spent in management positions....
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