We sit in the seat and do the work.
Fairlead takes active, hands-on roles inside PE-backed companies: running the asset, preparing and executing the sale, restructuring the balance sheet, raising the capital, and holding the finance function together. You don’t get one person; you get the team, and it scales up or down as the situation moves.
Asset management
The sponsor owns the asset. We run it to the plan. Fairlead takes the operating partner or board seat and carries the week-to-week: budget and capex discipline, plan versus actual, vendor and contract decisions, and the reporting cadence the fund and its LPs expect.
Most of this work starts where a sponsor has more assets than bandwidth: a development platform advancing G&A, a carve-out still running on the seller’s systems, a company whose management is strong on operations and thin on finance. We fill the gap without displacing the team that’s already there.
It is a standing seat, not a project. The engagement scales up when something breaks and back down when it doesn’t.
Sell-side preparation and execution
Exit readiness starts long before a banker is hired: clean historicals, a forecast that can be defended line by line, a quality-of-earnings that survives contact with a buyer, and a data room that doesn’t take six weeks to assemble.
When the window opens we run the process alongside the banker: diligence responses, management presentations, buyer questions answered from the source rather than from memory. The same team that runs the company runs the process to sell it.
Fairlead prepares and manages the process. We do not act as an investment bank or broker-dealer.
Restructuring
When cash gets tight the first job is knowing exactly how tight, and for how long. We build the 13-week forecast, make it the operating document the company actually runs on, and put a number on every decision in front of the board.
From there: covenant and lender conversations, vendor prioritization, contract renegotiation, cost structure taken down to what the business can carry. Someone from Fairlead is in the seat for those calls, not briefing from the outside.
Some of this work ends in a turnaround and some ends in an orderly sale or wind-down. Both need the same thing: an operator with the numbers, who can talk to lenders.
Fundraising
Capital raise preparation and execution: the model, the materials, the diligence file, and the outreach list, then the process itself, run with the sponsor through close.
Development-stage platforms carry their own vocabulary: project finance, construction debt, tax equity, and their own diligence burden. We have sat on the company side of those raises, which is why the questions get answered the first time they are asked.
Finance and back-office management
Fractional and interim CFO, COO, and Controller seats, and the team underneath them: monthly close, AP and AR, payroll, audit support, and the systems that carry all of it. You don’t get one person: you get the team behind the person.
Overhead discipline sits here too: G&A reduction, vendor management, covenant compliance. “Particularly for development-stage platforms where the fund is advancing G&A and development capital, every month of overhead discipline is real return.”
It is also where visibility gets built. Once the close is clean and the data is structured, the sponsor can see the company without waiting for month-end. See Intelligence.
Operating discipline, on the sponsor’s clock.
Embedded leadership
Fractional and interim CEO, CFO, COO, Controller; board and operating partner roles. Sitting in the seat, not visiting it.
Overhead discipline
G&A reduction, vendor management, 13-week cash forecasting, covenant compliance: every month of it real return.
Real-time visibility
Sponsors see what's happening without depending on management, or Fairlead, to tell them.
Exit-ready
The company is kept in a condition to be sold, so the process starts when the window opens rather than six weeks later.
The portfolio company assessment.
Two to four weeks, accelerated by synthesizing contracts, financials, forecasts, and interviews into a persistent repository the sponsor keeps using long after the assessment ends.
Designed for how PE actually works.
Our compensation is tied to the sponsor’s success. We earn alongside the sponsor, not in front of them, and current fees run a fraction of Big 4 and investment-bank rates.