Associate Director - Research

Company Description
Looking for a senior Private Equity professional with hands-on experience in portfolio value creation and operational improvement. The candidate should have worked with a PE firm / portfolio operations team and directly with portfolio-company management teams.

Job Description
Key Responsibilities:
• Assess portfolio-company performance and identify value-creation opportunities.
• Develop and execute initiatives across revenue growth, pricing/GTM, sales effectiveness, cost, working capital and operations.
• Track performance against the investment case and value-creation plan, identifying reasons for underperformance.
• Work directly with portfolio-company CEOs/CFOs and functional leaders on improvement programs.
• Establish KPIs, milestones and governance; track impact on revenue, EBITDA, FCF and ROIC.
• Support 100-day planning, portfolio monitoring and exit readiness.

Qualifications
Candidate Profile:
• 10-15+ years of relevant experience.
• Prior PE / Portfolio Operations / Value Creation experience strongly preferred.
• Hands-on experience executing improvement programs within PE portfolio companies.
• Strong understanding of the PE lifecycle from diligence and underwriting through value creation and exit.
• Strong financial, analytical and program-management skills.
• Comfortable working with PE senior leadership and portfolio-company management teams.

Priority: Candidates with actual portfolio-company value creation and execution experience, rather than primarily transaction, research or strategy backgrounds.