Sullivan: Parachuting former Fortune 500 CEOs into small buyout boards fails
Tim Sullivan · Tim Sullivan – Yale's Private Portfolio (EP.456) · Jul 14, 2025 · at 11:41
Former Yale endowment private investments director Tim Sullivan discusses the operational challenges buyout firms face when adding operating partners.
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“I think one thing we learned pretty quickly was not straightforward to bring in a guy who'd been a successful CEO at a big Fortune 500 company and have him parachute into an LBO situation as a board member or operating partner. You had to find people with the right skill set and mentality. A lot of CEOs are Used to being the boss, having their way. They're used to having a lot of resources around them if they're from bigger companies, and particularly at that point in time, the buyout world, we're typically buying much smaller businesses. So to take some ex-CEO of General Motors or General Electric and expect him to be on the board of a hundred million dollar company and add some value was not a great strategy.”
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