HR is an EBITDA lever, not a cost center.
For operating partners and diligence teams: HR infrastructure is value-add. We read it against the thesis and hand you a sequenced plan with owners, timing, and quantified exposure.
Deep experience leading talent management across a nine-company operating platform, $3.5B in revenue and roughly 10,000 employees.
Know what is in the handbook before it is your problem.
A fast read on compliance exposure, org risk, and the HR capability, surfaced before close, not after.
An org chart by Friday, and a plan behind it.
Stabilize the floor, stand up the operating rhythm, and sequence the value-add moves.
Turnover, leadership bench, and total rewards, tied to the model.
We quantify what the workforce is costing and what fixing it returns, in the language of the deal.
Not every engagement starts with an assessment.
“We need senior HR capacity inside a portco, and we need it now.”
Fractional, ~3 months or more. We have done it inside PE-backed businesses and we report the way an operating team expects to be reported to.
“There is a specific value-creation gap and the team needs help closing it.”
A scoped project. One sponsor brought us into a field services company because they wanted Danaher operating rigor pointed at a retention problem, not a diagnostic. We found the real root cause, tried three recruiting models before one held, and left the operating discipline with their team.
“We need to know what we just bought, or what we are about to.”
The full read. Four to six weeks.
The people numbers inside the quality of earnings.
Quality of earnings work is rigorous about almost everything except the workforce. Compensation structures that will not survive the first year post-close. Benefits run-rate. Turnover and the real cost of replacing what walks. Classification exposure. Accrued and unfunded liabilities. And the cost of building the HR function the investment thesis quietly assumes is already there.
Those either land as modeled adjustments or they land as surprises in month four. We can run that estimation alongside your QofE provider and hand the deal team defensible numbers instead of a placeholder.