What your new CEO inherits is rarely what they are shown.
A 45-day organizational diagnostic for incoming CEOs and the private equity firms who place them. Delivers an unfiltered picture of what is actually unfolding inside the organization before high-stakes decisions are made on curated information.
When a PE firm places a new CEO, the clock starts immediately. Growth targets, operational improvements, and value creation milestones do not wait for the organization to warm up to new leadership.
What happens inside that organization in the first 45 days is rarely visible to anyone at the top.
Every stakeholder the incoming CEO meets has an interest in how they are perceived. Information is curated before it reaches leadership.
Executives manage optics alongside operations. What they omit tells as much of the story as what they share.
People at the frontline rarely tell the CEO what is actually broken. Not because they are dishonest, but because they are watching carefully before they decide whether it is safe to say so.
Without an independent read, the decisions your CEO makes in month one are based on someone else's edited version of the organization.
For a PE-backed company with a defined growth thesis and a compressed timeline, that gap between what the organization knows and what the incoming CEO sees is not just a leadership risk. It is a portfolio risk.
A focused, time-bounded diagnostic that runs in parallel with the CEO's onboarding. While the CEO is meeting the leadership team and building relationships at the top, this diagnostic moves vertically through every layer of the organization independently.
The earlier this diagnostic runs, the more candid and actionable the picture. Narratives calcify quickly once the organization learns what the incoming CEO values and how they respond.
The diagnostic spans the full vertical of the organization:
Each layer is approached with genuine inquiry rather than interrogation. People speak candidly when they feel genuinely heard rather than evaluated. This distinction is what makes the findings honest.
45 days
Full vertical spectrum, from individual contributors and frontline workers through directors, VPs, and senior leaders, across functions
No stake in existing narratives or org politics
Systemic origins surfaced, beyond visible symptoms
When you place a CEO into a portfolio company, you are making a high-conviction bet that they can execute the thesis. The diagnostic de-risks that bet.
Getting an unfiltered operational read on a newly acquired company before the CEO makes month-one structural decisions
Validating or challenging what leadership has reported during diligence versus what is actually happening at the ground level
Accelerating the incoming CEO's orientation so they can move with confidence rather than waiting for trust to develop organically
Identifying the specific friction points that are costing the portfolio company in rework, attrition, and missed delivery before they compound
I have spent my formative career moments inside complex organizations where inefficiencies were costing companies hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, rework, and downtime. At that scale, the problems were quiet, normalized, and invisible in the reporting that reached the top.
Blindspots, inefficiencies, and bottlenecks are present in mid-market companies too. It just appears differently. This diagnostic is designed to find the root source behind organizational challenges.
— Alexandra
Where time, effort, and capacity are being consumed by friction rather than output. Patterns that have been normalized into the cost of doing business.
Whether the organization knows what it knows. Where critical insight lives in individuals instead of systems, and what the exposure looks like.
Whether agile practices, delivery discipline, and decision-making processes are functioning as designed or serving as cover for deeper accountability gaps.
Where demoralization lives, where trust has eroded, and where the conditions for attrition are already in place regardless of what surveys report.
Whether visible problems such as rework, missed goals, and change orders trace back to individual failure or to structural and leadership patterns.
Where authority is nominally present but influence is absent. Where unhealthy leadership behaviors have been absorbed into how the organization operates.
The organization you enter in week one is not the organization you will see in month three. The window closes faster than most incoming CEOs expect.
The organization has not yet learned what the new CEO values or how they respond. People at the frontline still speak candidly. Patterns are visible before they go underground.
Direct reports are calibrating their communication to the CEO's preferences. Reporting tightens. The picture presented to leadership becomes increasingly curated.
Without early clarity, decisions made in the first quarter are made on someone else's edited version of the organization. For a PE-backed company on a value creation timeline, the cost of those decisions compounds faster than it would elsewhere.
This diagnostic works best when the intent is genuinely to know what is there before acting on incomplete information.
A structured findings report covering organizational health across all critical domains, delivered within the 45-day engagement window.
Direct. Specific. Designed as an operational briefing for the incoming CEO and the PE firm supporting the transition. It's an analytical intervention, that bypasses generalizations. An honest read of what is actually unfolding.
What is genuinely working and should be protected through the changes ahead
Problems with a structural origin that will compound in cost if not addressed early, including rework cycles, attrition risk, and delivery failures
Specific leadership practices that are shaping culture and performance in ways that may not be visible from the top
Actionable recommendations calibrated to the CEO's first-year mandate, the PE firm's value creation thesis, and the organization's actual capacity for change
The First 90 Days diagnostic is led by an organizational diagnostician with decades of hands-on experience navigating leadership effectiveness, product management, agile delivery, and cross-functional dynamics across organizations of every size.
Experience includes operating inside complex organizations where inefficiencies were costing hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, rework, and operational downtime. In environments where a single workflow informed capital portfolio decisions ranging from 300 million to 500 million dollars, the patterns that cause dysfunction at the midmarket level were visible at scale.
One pattern became clear over time: the most damaging organizational dysfunction is rarely dramatic. It is quiet. It is normalized. It is absorbed into cost overruns, attrition, and missed goals. And it is invisible in the reporting that reaches incoming leadership.
The First 90 Days exists because the gap between what organizations know and what incoming leaders see is expensive. And it does not have to be.
BUILT FROM INSIDE
Career-long experience navigating organizational complexity at every level
This conversation is worth having before day one.
A discovery conversation takes 30 minutes. It is designed to help you assess whether this diagnostic fits your situation and timeline. No obligation. Just a clear conversation about what the organization is walking into and whether The First 90 Days diagnostic can help you see it before the window closes.
Engagements are limited. The First 90 Days diagnostic runs best when it begins before or within the first two weeks of the CEO's tenure.