New whitepaper from The Barton Partnership's C-Suite Succession and Board Advisory practice
Most private equity firms treat leadership succession as a problem to solve when something goes wrong: a CEO underperforms, a CFO doesn't fit the next phase, a founder exits earlier than planned. By the time that happens, the cost has already been incurred.
Leadership alignment isn't a contingency. It's a value creation lever in its own right, one that should be assessed during diligence, built into the first 100 days, and carried through to exit. The Succession Premium, a whitepaper by The Barton Partnership's C-Suite Succession and Board Advisory practice, lays out why, and what that looks like in practice.
A few of the report's key points:
Executive turnover in the first year is usually a diligence story, not a performance story. When a new leader doesn't work out within months of close, the more likely explanation is that the assessment never matched the investment thesis to begin with.
The first 100 days are where value creation plans either gain traction or begin to stall. Most firms spend this window on introductions and process. The firms that pull ahead spend it executing.
Exit readiness isn't a pre-sale activity. It's a posture that should be in place from acquisition, so that when the market window opens, the business and its leadership team are already prepared to go through it.
To put this into practice, the whitepaper introduces The Barton Partnership's Succession Model, a three-stage framework spanning diligence, post-deal value creation, and exit preparation, built to keep leadership alignment as a continuous thread across the deal lifecycle rather than a series of disconnected decisions.
“The firms that win the next cycle won’t just have the best thesis. They’ll have the most rigorous answer to one question: do we have the right leaders to execute it?” – Marty O’Doherty, Senior Vice President, Head of C-Suite Succession and Board Advisory at The Barton Partnership
To download a copy of the report, please complete the form below: