MTA Consultancy ads

You probably couldn't fly a plane without a functioning dashboard and instruments. But every week, leaders try to run their businesses exactly that way. No dashboard. No weekly metrics. No red, yellow, green to tell you if you're climbing or dropping before it's too late. You can't diagnose a business you're not measuring. And you can't fix a problem you don't see until six months after it started. The cockpit isn't optional. Neither is the scorecard.

6 of the last 8 portfolio CEOs who interviewed me hired me. I don't say that to brag. I say it because I think it tells you something about where the market is right now. These are not CEOs who are struggling. They are CEOs who are winning and know they could be winning faster. They have a strategy. They have the capital. What they want is someone who has sat in their seat, built revenue at scale, and will tell them the truth without a political agenda attached to it. 75% close rate is not a sales number. It is a trust number. And trust in this work starts with one thing: the person across the table believing you have actually done what you are asking them to do.

I hired an executive assistant three years into running my own business. It was one of the best decisions I ever made and one of the ones I waited too long to make. The fear is always the same. What if I hire the wrong person. What if it adds more to my plate than it takes off. What if I spend time training someone who does not get it. Those are real risks. But here is what is more likely. You hire someone who makes your life easier, you get five to ten hours a week back, and you actually spend them on the work that grows the business instead of the work that just keeps it running. Angie did not just take things off my plate. She grew into running operations. The worst case is manageable. The best case changes everything. The most likely case is somewhere in between, and it is still better than where you are right now.

Your portfolio CEOs get talent acquisition support, finance and reporting infrastructure, legal and compliance guidance, and full systems and technology buildout. The one box that stays empty is executive coaching. And that is usually the box that determines whether everything else works. You can hand a CEO the best operating system in the world. If they do not have the self-awareness to know where they are getting in their own way, the plan stalls at the top. The bottleneck is almost never the strategy. It is the person running it. The smartest PE firms I work with have figured this out. They are not just investing in the business. They are investing in the human running it.

Most CEOs backed by PE don't fail because of strategy. They fail because of execution.

PE firms check every box for their portfolio CEOs. Executive coaching is the one that's still missing.