Why PE Organizations Need to Apply Their Own Playbook to Themselves
June 16, 2026 – John Zink and Ed Richards are co-founders of Taurean, a firm purpose-built to help private equity organizations design and build their value creation capabilities. Mr. Zink spent his career inside PE operating groups at Vista Equity Partners and Marlin Equity Partners, driving value creation from the ground floor of portfolio companies. Mr. Richards built his foundation in consulting, where he helped scale a firm from startup to $250 million and a successful exit, advised some of the world’s largest PE firms on operational strategy, and later built and led Marlin’s global portfolio operations team, scaling to more than 60 professionals globally.
Together, they founded Taurean on a conviction that is becoming impossible to ignore: what PE firms do with the companies they buy has never mattered more. The era of financial engineering and cheap debt producing reliable returns is over. Firms that want to win now need to treat their value creation capability as a real product, integrated into the investment process from day one, not an appendage they bolt on after the deal closes. Mr. Zink and Mr. Richards recently sat down with Hunt Scanlon Media to discuss what that looks like in practice.
The conversation around PE performance has shifted a lot in recent years. What are the most forward-thinking firms doing differently, and where are legacy firms getting left behind?
Zink: The firms we most admire are starting to think about themselves as businesses, not just capital platforms. That sounds obvious, but it is a real departure from how most PE firms have historically operated. The traditional model is a loose affiliation of investment partners, each running their own process, with an operating function sitting somewhere off to the side available when needed. That model worked well enough for a long time because the tailwinds were so strong. If valuations keep expanding and capital stays cheap, you do not need to transform every business to generate a strong return. What the best firms are doing now is designing the machine that produces returns, not just deploying capital and hoping for the best. That means integrating the operating capability into the investment process from sourcing through exit, building real accountability structures between deal and ops teams, and being intentional about what kind of firm they want to be and what they want to be known for. The firms that are winning are not running investment and operations as two separate tracks that occasionally intersect. They are building a genuinely integrated capability.
Richards: I would add that the legacy model was never really tested because it did not need to be. Returns looked good on paper, and LPs were satisfied. Now that the environment has changed, what you are left with is a lot of firms that have never had to ask hard questions about how they actually operate. The gap was always there. It is just finally being exposed.
Why has it taken this long for that gap to surface?
Richards: For roughly thirty years, the combination of expanding multiples, cheap debt, and a consistent influx of capital into the asset class meant you could generate strong returns without fundamentally transforming the businesses you owned. Financial engineering did a lot of the heavy lifting. In that environment, the quality of your operating model was largely irrelevant to your outcomes. Firms got credit for returns that the macro environment deserved as much as they did. Now that those tailwinds are gone, you are seeing returns bifurcate based on who can actually operate. And a lot of firms are discovering that they built their operating capability as an afterthought, if they built it at all.
The second part of the answer is a structural one. Most founders of PE firms have spent their careers working on deals, not running businesses. They are exceptional at evaluating companies, structuring transactions, and managing investor relationships. But managing processes, developing people, designing organizations, holding teams accountable to operational milestones, those are genuinely different skills. There is no reason to expect someone who has spent 20 years doing deals to intuitively know how to build and run a high-performing operating function. Most of them have never had to.
You built Taurean specifically to address this. What does that work actually look like in practice?
Zink: We call it performance architecture. The idea is intentional design rather than making it up as you go. We start with Strategy before we ever talk about people. That means interviewing stakeholders across the firm, understanding the investment thesis, defining the organizational archetype, and getting genuine alignment on what success looks like in the role before anyone writes a job description. That is the step most search firms skip entirely, and honestly most operating consultants skip it too. They show up with a framework and try to fit the firm into it. From there, Selection is about identifying truly compatible candidates rather than recycling a familiar list of names. And then Success, which is about staying close after the offer is signed to make sure the hire actually lands and launches quickly. An accepted offer is not the finish line. It is the starting line.
That failure rate in value creation roles is striking. What actually drives it?
Richards: In most cases it is a design problem, not a talent problem. And that distinction matters enormously for how you solve it. When an operating partner does not work out, the instinct is to conclude the person was wrong for the role. Sometimes that is true. More often, the role itself was never properly defined. There was no shared understanding between the operating partner and the investment team about when they get involved, on what issues, with what decision rights. So a capable person walks into an ambiguous situation and either overcorrects or underfits, and within eighteen months everyone is frustrated. We saw this pattern repeatedly before starting Taurean. The answer is not a better search. The answer is a better design process before you ever start a search. Firms that skip that step are not just wasting the search fee. They are losing 12 to 18 months of value creation time, and often the credibility of the operating function itself.
What should a mid-market PE firm that is building or rebuilding its value creation capability be asking itself right now?
Richards: Start even further upstream than most firms do. Before you talk about the investment thesis, ask what you want to be known for. Do you want to be known as a firm that is collaborative with founders, or one that takes a more directive approach? Are you hands-on operators or do you take a more passive governance posture? Do you have strong conviction views that you bring to portfolio companies, or do you follow the lead of management teams? These are not abstract branding questions. They have direct implications for the kind of operating partner who will thrive in your environment, the relationship between your deal team and your ops team, and how portfolio company leaders experience working with you.
Once you have answered those questions honestly, then you work back through the investment thesis. What does your portfolio actually need? Are you buying businesses that need top-line growth help, operational efficiency, digital transformation, or some combination? The answer shapes the organizational archetype, the profile of the people you hire, and how the role should evolve over the life of a fund.
The third thing I would stress is that onboarding and integration deserve the same seriousness as hiring. You can make a great selection decision and still lose the person within a year because no one invested in setting them up on the front end. That cost, in time, money, and missed value creation, is enormous and almost entirely avoidable.
What does the PE firm of the future actually look like from a talent and organizational standpoint?
Zink: I think the distinction between investor and operator largely disappears. Not immediately, but over the next decade. What you will start to see at the most sophisticated firms is deal pods where the team is a genuine mix of investment and operating experience, people who have done both and can move fluidly between them. Experience as an investor makes you a better operator because you understand what the board and the GP actually need. Experience as an operator makes you a better investor because you know what is real in a management presentation and what is noise. Firms that figure out how to build that hybrid capability will have a structural advantage in both deal selection and value creation.
What about the use of AI?
Zink: The AI dimension is real and worth taking seriously here. A meaningful portion of what junior investment professionals spend their time on today, data room analysis, deal modeling, initial outbound sourcing, monthly portfolio reporting, is going to be largely automated within the next couple of years. The technology to do most of that already exists. What cannot be automated, at least not in any meaningful way yet, is the human side of operating. Change management is still a human-to-human exercise. If anything, AI expands the leverage an operator can have, because it frees them from the analytical work and lets them focus entirely on the human work.
