By Vantage Solutions LLC

For PE operating partners and sponsors deciding where people strategy can add value.

A value creation plan is executed one portfolio company at a time. Bain’s Global Private Equity Report 2026 notes that lower leverage and the lack of multiple expansion make value creation more challenging. In Vantage’s view, that places more of the return on how each company operates and on the people who run it. It also raises two connected questions: what does each company need to build and maintain its people strategy and infrastructure, and which of those needs are shared across a portfolio?

The picture is uneven

Each portfolio company describes its people situation in its own terms. One CEO reports turnover; another reports open roles. One company has a seasoned HR leader with dashboards, while the next relies on an office manager and a payroll provider. The people section of each company’s board materials shows what that management team chose to measure, at the depth it was able to measure it.

Contrast that with the rest of the board materials. Revenue growth, EBITDA margin and cash conversion are defined the same way in every company, so a sponsor can read the portfolio at a glance. Many sponsors now collect a few standard people figures, such as net new hires, for investor reporting, but few have developed a common way to read the people side of the value creation plan. Without it, the operating partner is making decisions on uneven data, both about what each company needs and about what the portfolio needs as a whole.

Leadership change adds to the challenge. Altrata’s Portfolio Company Talent 2026 study found that 68% of US and UK portfolio companies hire at least one leadership team member every year, and it names the CFO as the most frequently hired leadership role. Each new leader inherits whatever people infrastructure is already in place, whether or not it fits the plan.

What an assessment does

For an operating partner, every company in the portfolio raises the same practical question: what does it need, and in what order, to build and maintain the people strategy and infrastructure its plan depends on?

Vantage’s HR Strategy Assessment, built on the Seven Ps to High Performance™, Vantage’s framework for organizational effectiveness, applies one set of standardized measures to help answer these questions. For each company assessed, the outcome is a risk and capability scorecard and a prioritized High-Performance Roadmap for implementation over one year: what to prioritize and why.

On the risk side, the assessment looks past the organizational chart to the system around the leaders. It examines how decisions move and where critical knowledge sits, how deep the bench is behind essential roles, and whether the company’s people infrastructure fits its next stage of growth or the stage it has already outgrown.

On the capability side, it recognizes that in some companies, capability lives in systems. Roles are defined around the work the business requires now, and decision rights sit at the right level. Critical knowledge is written down, and there is a bench behind the leaders who matter most. In others, capability lives in a few individuals. The founder still approves most decisions. The organizational chart looks complete, but the roles below the CEO carry titles more than authority. These companies can perform well until one of those people leaves, or until the growth plan demands more capacity than they have to give. In Seven Ps terms, the question is whether Platform, the structure of the company, carries the work, or whether People, a few individuals, are carrying it alone.

From the outside, the two companies can report similar numbers. The difference shows up when the value creation plan starts asking for more. The HR Strategy Assessment measures where a company can and cannot give more. Once it’s measured, that difference becomes something a company can act on in its roadmap, and something a sponsor can see across the portfolio.

What the roadmap gives a sponsor

The High-Performance Roadmap sets forth how to build and sustain the people strategy and infrastructure the company needs to create value and support the return the investment thesis calls for. It reflects the company’s own stage and strategy, and the company keeps ownership of its people decisions.

The roadmap is metrics-driven. Internally, it is aligned to the value creation plan. Externally, it is measured against what high-growth companies require. That gives the sponsor and the company clear metrics for measuring progress.

For an operating partner, the roadmap changes the conversation with each management team. Instead of reacting to the people issue raised at the latest board meeting, the sponsor and the CEO can agree on a sequence: the gaps the plan depends on come first, and the rest can wait. A new leader, including a new CFO, steps into an agreed plan rather than a blank page. And because the measures are the same in every company, progress can be discussed in the same terms across the portfolio.

The assessment stands on its own at the company level, and a sponsor can conduct one whenever a company needs a clearer read on its people. A sponsor can begin with one company or a few whose plans depend most on their people, and act on those company roadmaps whether or not anything is ever built at the fund level.

Seeing the portfolio side by side

Because every company is measured the same way, the results can also sit side by side. One architecture, applied company by company, makes different companies legible as one portfolio. Needs that repeat across holdings become visible, and so do the needs that belong to a single company. A thin bench behind a critical role, for example, may turn out to be one company’s issue or a pattern across several, and the right response differs in each case.

The ability to compare offers a reason to consider a portfolio-wide human capital function: needs can be identified the same way in each company, rather than estimated from the loudest problem. That function is a set of people systems built once at the sponsor level and available to every portfolio company. It can follow the HR Strategy Assessment, or it can be built based on the sponsor’s own read of the best candidates for shared support.

Some sponsors are already building people capacity at the fund level. In Preqin’s Weekly Private Markets People Moves for October 5, 2026, Sole Source Capital named a Chief Human Resources Officer in a newly created role, Charterhouse Capital Partners added two senior advisers “focused on AI-led portfolio value creation,” and VSS Capital Partners named a Managing Director, AI and Value Creation. A week later, Preqin reported that Adams Street Partners had named a Partner and Head of Human Resources who “will lead the firm’s global HR function.”

A handful of appointments is a small sample. In Vantage’s view, though, it is a signal of where sponsors are placing people in the value creation plan. People power growth.