- Topic
- Leadership
- Published
- 12 March 2026
- Reading time
- 4 minutes
- By
- Everston Partners
In short
- Numbers describe what a company has done. The team decides what it does next.
- We test a team for honesty about its mistakes, depth beyond the founder, and how it behaves when things go wrong.
- Investors say people matter most. Far fewer give them the same rigor as the financials.
Every investor reads the numbers. Revenue, margins, customer retention and cash flow all matter, and we study them closely. But we rarely start there. Our first meetings with a company are about the people who run it.
Numbers look backward
A spreadsheet tells you what a business has done. It can suggest what might happen next, but only if the conditions stay the same. They never do. A key customer leaves, a supplier raises prices, a competitor arrives with more money. What matters then is not the model. It is how the team responds.
What we listen for
We are not looking for polish. In the room, we try to learn a handful of things:
- Do they talk openly about their mistakes, and what changed afterwards?
- Can they explain why the numbers moved, not only that they moved?
- How do founders and managers disagree, and how do they settle it?
- Does the business run well when the founder is not in every decision?
- Who does the CEO turn to when a decision is hard?
- Do customers, suppliers and former colleagues describe the same company the founder does?
The strongest companies we meet can answer these questions without a prepared script. The leaders know their weak spots, and they are not afraid to name them.
Investors say people matter. Fewer act like it.
Ask almost any investor and they will tell you people come first. In a 2024 article for Harvard Business Publishing, AlixPartners reported that 69% of private equity and portfolio company leaders rank talent as the most important factor in creating value.1 Yet in an earlier AlixPartners and Vardis survey, 86% of portfolio company executives said a culture assessment matters when a firm buys their company, while only 28% said their investors always or often carry one out.2
That gap is the opportunity. Treating the team with the same discipline as the financial model is not complicated. It takes time, and most deal processes do not make room for it. We make room for it.
Why this changes the investment
If the team is right, the numbers tend to follow, and we can build a structure that gives them room to grow. If the team is not right, no structure fixes it. Better terms do not make up for a leadership team that is not pulling in the same direction.
This is why our partners spend time with management before the details of a deal are discussed. It is also why we stay close after the deal closes, helping with hiring and board work, because the same people we backed on the first day are the ones who will decide how far the company goes.
Key takeaway: when the team is right, the numbers get a chance to do their work.
Two halves of every investment
Capital builds the company, and people decide how far it goes. We commit to both from the first conversation, and we hold ourselves to the same standard on each.
If you lead a company and want to talk about the people behind it, we would like to hear from you.
Sources
1. Ted Bililies, AlixPartners, "Successful Private Equity Firms Manage Talent Differently," Harvard Business Publishing, 5 December 2024. Read the article
2. AlixPartners and Vardis, Fourth Annual Private Equity Leadership Survey, reported by Private Equity Wire, 28 March 2019. Read the report