By ETJ Life – helping PE-backed CEOs thrive in work and life.
Not All Private Equity Is the Same
One of the most important decisions a CEO makes happens before the first day on the job. And most people do not give it nearly enough diligence.
Choosing your sponsor – or understanding the one you have – shapes almost everything about what the role actually feels like. The governance style. The pace of expectations. The level of autonomy you are given. Whether you are treated as a partner or a function. These things determine whether the next four to six years are a collaboration or a grind.
PE firms are not interchangeable. They have wildly different cultures, different operating philosophies, and different expectations of the CEOs who run their portfolio companies. At the upper end of the market, the returns are exceptional and the expectations are unapologetic. CEOs in those environments often describe feeling like a very capable cog in a very large wheel. The economics can be significant if you make it all the way through. But the cost in autonomy and personal toll is real, and it is worth knowing before you sign.
The middle market tends to operate differently. The firms that work with smaller businesses often have more patience for the reality of building, more willingness to treat the CEO relationship as a genuine partnership, more understanding that the human being running the company matters to the outcome. The sponsor who calls you on a Tuesday not because something is wrong but because they want to understand what you are seeing – that is a different experience than the one who surfaces only at board meetings with a fresh set of concerns.
None of this is about one model being right and another being wrong. It is about fit. About understanding what you are signing up for before you sign.
The questions worth asking before you accept: How do you operate when the business misses a quarter? Who do I actually work with day to day? What does a good first year look like to you? Listen carefully to how those questions are answered. And how they are not.
The CEO-sponsor relationship is worth doing real diligence on. It will shape your tenure more than you think.
The AI Question Every CEO Is Quietly Wrestling With
It started as background noise and has become the loudest thing in the room.
Almost every CEO in a technology or services business is being asked some version of the same question right now – by their board, by their customers, by their team, and increasingly by themselves. What does AI mean for this business? How fast do we need to move? Are we behind? And the answer nobody wants to say out loud is: I am not entirely sure.
That uncertainty is not a failure of leadership. It is an honest response to a genuinely uncertain moment. The companies getting it right are not the ones with the most confident AI narrative. They are the ones moving deliberately – using AI to improve internal efficiency, sharpen their go-to-market, reduce the cost of work that used to require significant human hours – while staying honest about what they do not yet know.
One question that keeps surfacing is whether to hire a chief AI officer. The instinct is understandable. The board is asking about AI strategy. Customers want to see an AI story. Bringing in someone with the title feels like a visible signal that you take it seriously. But the signal and the substance are different things. A single person with a title does not make a company AI-fluent. What actually changes behavior is requiring the entire leadership team – product, go-to-market, finance, operations – to think through AI implications in their own functions, and holding them accountable for doing that work.
There is also the competitive pressure. The fear that someone is moving faster, that the product will become obsolete, that the window is narrower than it looks. Some of that fear is warranted. A lot of it is noise. The discipline is in being able to tell the difference.
What this moment requires from CEOs is not certainty. It is clarity about what you know, honesty about what you do not, and a plan that is directional rather than performative.
Move with urgency. Not with panic.
ETJ Life is a community for CEOs in the Performance season. This perspective
reflects ongoing member interactions and real leadership challenges in the seat.