Private Equity & People in Building Products

Hiring for Today vs. Hiring for Tomorrow

Almost all our recent engagements have been centred around private equity (PE). It doesn’t just change the financials; it changes the people equation and talent landscape almost immediately.

When PE enters the picture, the hiring dynamic shifts. It’s no longer just about solving today’s problems, it’s about building the leadership team that can lay the correct foundations, scale and ultimately deliver on the growth story investors have bought into.

For SME Building Product businesses, this shift is profound. Founders and hiring leaders are suddenly working to compressed timelines, adapting and evolving role expectations and a new level of scrutiny that many are not overly accustomed too.

And the talent you need to do all of this? It’s not always obvious in the first iteration and even if you do know what you want, it’s rarely on the market.

The effect of PE and how it changes the narrative

Private equity brings capital and confidence but also another layer of complexity. The hiring focus is subjected to assessment it may not have seen previously. Some of our recent engagements in Building Materials are roles like Head of Finance, Head of Commercial Operations or Inside Sales Director. These titles aren’t just operational anymore; they become strategic levers for growth.

We saw this clearly in a recent assignment for a Finance Director. The business had recently secured PE backing and was preparing to scale nationally. The founder needed someone who could stabilise not only the financial function and build a scalable foundation for growth, but add alignment across commercial and operations, too.

We delivered a candidate who had led similar transformations, understood investor dynamics and could operate with both strategic foresight and tactical precision in the immediate term. Within six months, they’d restructured the team, introduced scalable processes and were already influencing board-level strategy.

That process was straightforward as we have consulted with this business multiple times and had the trust of the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director to go a little “left field” from their initial brief, but it isn’t always easy. Hiring in a PE-backed environment isn’t just faster, it’s harder.

Here are the challenges we see most often:

Compressed timelines are the main challenge as PE-backed businesses move quickly. Hiring cycles shorten but often the expectations rise as there is the increasing need for a “Swiss Army Knife” that can operate effectively in multiple scenarios, often outside of their original role remit.

This leads me to the next point which is role evolution. Sure, we need to hire someone with the capability for today, but they also need the elasticity to be evolve into a regional leader or C-suite executive in an accelerated timeframe.

With all of this comes the inevitable change in board dynamics. Ultimately, there are more stakeholders, more scrutiny and more pressure being applied. Having a leader that can navigate this effectively is essential.

To top this all off, there is a scarcity of talent. The right person for this journey is rare and often not actively looking as they are likely already right in the middle of this work with another employer.

In one recent UK-based Building Product assignment, we partnered with a founder and their PE board to hire a Chief Strategy Officer. The brief was clear: someone who could lead the current team but also build the infrastructure to support bot industrialisation and then commercialisation of this manufacturer inside 24 months.

We didn’t just deliver a longlist we delivered insight. We mapped the market, identified candidates with proven scale-up experience that have lived and breathed in PE environments and helped the founder refine the role to attract the right profile.

So, Hiring for Today vs. Hiring for Tomorrow

This is the tension at the heart of PE-backed hiring. Today’s hire solves current problems mostly linked to pipeline, process and/or performance. Tomorrow’s hire builds systems, scales teams, and aligns with investor vision to deliver against what they have been “sold”.

We saw this play out in two recent assignments for a interior Building Product business undergoing PE-backed transformation. One role was focused on stabilising operations post-acquisition. The other was about building a future-facing commercial strategy. Both hires were critical but they required very different profiles, mindsets and onboarding approaches.

In the first case, we delivered a candidate with deep operational experience and a track record of post-acquisition integration. In the second, we placed a strategic commercial leader who had built go-to-market strategies in high-growth environments. Both are now working in tandem, one stabilising, the other scaling.

The most attractive candidate is not always the one that is the absolute best fit for the role that is live. We encourage our clients to be looking at the bigger picture and having a that “what’s next?” question in their mind, you shouldn’t just hire based on the need today if you know that person will need heavy investment to be effective 12/18/24 months down the line.

Delivering Value and Questioning What Good Looks Like

Let’s talk about outcomes.

In a recent partnership with a founder and their PE board, we were asked to hire an Operations Director. The challenge? The business was growing fast, but operations (production, supply chain, logistics) were underperforming. We didn’t just take a brief for this role, we helped reshape it.

We worked with the founder to redefine the role’s scope, benchmarked compensation against market data and built a candidate narrative that attracted high-calibre talent. We know that the successful hire will need to restructure the team, introduce performance metrics and improve associated KPIs substantially, but they also need to be able to contribute to wider business decisions with their “commercial hat” on in the boardroom.

In another case, we worked with a Managing Director who wanted to integrate a recent foreign head office acquisition into the UKs product range. The PE backed firm had ambitious plans, and the MD needed an experienced UK Sales Manager who could build a vertical market and new presence from scratch. We delivered a candidate with deep UK market experience, strong investor credibility, and a track record of building those relationships that were vital to grow. Within months, they’d built a scalable sales process, were already contributing to board-level planning and are putting the team in a position to scale.

What Founders & Hiring Leaders Need to Know

Here’s what we’ve learned from working across multiple PE-backed assignments:

You need to be crystal clear on the growth story and what the Employer Value Proposition (EVP) looks like. It is all well and good securing investment and PE backing, but if you can’t attract, or retain, the talent that is necessary to get you to the destination, it won’t end how you hope.

When looking to bring in that talent, don’t just hire for the spec, hire for the future and the full journey you are going on.

You need to partner with a Talent Consultant and not a recruiter. You need someone that understands PE dynamics and understands your company, culture and strategic objectives well enough to introduce potential future leaders and not just current performers.

Final Thoughts

Private equity doesn’t just change the numbers, it changes the people strategy – that doesn’t just mean the type of profiles you hire, how you run your processes or how regularly you hire, it means you need a bespoke plan to source the right people to foster innovation and growth. Hiring right isn’t just about today’s fit, it is about what happens tomorrow, and our most successful clients get that.

If you’re a founder, investor, or hiring leader in a PE-backed business, the question isn’t just “who do we need now?”, it’s “who can take us where we’re going?”.