A sponsor writes the plan before it owns the company. 1 of the largest listed sponsors says its own investment teams prepare and execute a systematic value creation plan developed during a thorough due diligence effort, which is the sequence every deal team recognizes: the list is built in diligence and delivered by the company's executives. The list is rarely the problem. The chairs those executives sit in are.
We read the complete filing history of 15 U.S. companies that completed a private-equity-sponsored public listing between 2020 and 2024 and were listed for the whole of the 24 months to 2026-09-11, and counted the people who held the chief executive and chief financial officer seats. The 15, with their Form 8-K records for the window, are Academy Sports, Alight, BrightSpring, Bumble, Certara, Core and Main, Definitive Healthcare, Driven Brands, Dutch Bros, Hayward, Leslie's, Petco, Portillo's, Savers Value Village and Torrid. Value creation plans fail on initiative 5, not initiative 1, because the constraint that decides delivery is owned management capacity rather than initiative quality. The order and the owner are the plan.
Published plans name many initiatives and order none of them
7 of these 15 companies publish a named strategy list in Item 1 of their fiscal 2025 annual report: Certara, Core and Main, Definitive Healthcare, Dutch Bros, Leslie's, Portillo's and Savers Value Village, and between them 53 named initiatives, 14 accountable seats, and 25 people through them in 2 years. The published lists run from 3 named initiatives at Portillo's to 14 at Leslie's, and the middle of them sits at 6. Core and Main, Dutch Bros, Savers Value Village and Leslie's, 4 of the 7, name 6 or more items once nested items are counted with their parents. On top-level headings alone, 1 of the 7, Core and Main, does.
Not 1 of the 7 published lists states an order across its initiatives, the Dutch Bros list included. 1 published list, Leslie's, nests 10 named sub-items under 3 of its 4 headings and none under the heading that asks for disruptive innovation; the filing calls the whole thing its growth strategies. Academy Sports, Alight, BrightSpring, Bumble, Driven Brands, Hayward, Petco and Torrid, 8 of the 15, publish no named list in Item 1, so where the list is not disclosed a reader cannot even count the load.
An annual report strategy section is a disclosure document and not the value creation plan, so these counts are a floor on what a management team is running and never a census of it. The direction of that bias matters: a looser reading of the same filings yields longer lists, never shorter ones. We call the measure initiative load, the number of named initiatives a plan assigns per stable accountable seat.
The seats those initiatives land on do not hold for 24 months
Across the 15 companies, 51 different people held the 30 seats a value creation plan is written for. The median company ran through 3 people in 2 chairs, and 10 of the 15 changed a chief executive or a chief financial officer inside 2 years, all but Academy Sports, Dutch Bros, Hayward, Savers Value Village and Torrid, while 2 of them, Alight and Portillo's, put 6 different people through those 2 chairs.
The churn is disclosed continuously rather than once. There are 80 Item 5.02 filings across the 15 companies in 24 months, of which 26 report a change in 1 of the 2 seats, and 29 of the 52 seat-holdings were in the finance chair against 23 in the chief executive chair, because 1 person held both in succession. Where a seat changed at all, the earliest change was announced a median of about 6 months after the window opened on 2024-09-11.
The tails are worse than the median. 1 company put 4 finance chiefs in 1 chair inside the window, 2 of them interim, and handed the chair over 3 times in 5 months. Another ran 3 finance chiefs in 4.1 months and handed each of its 2 accountable seats to an interim holder in turn, 7.9 months apart, in sequence and never at the same time.
The 7 companies that publish a named strategy list name 53 initiatives in all, against 14 accountable seats that 25 different people passed through in 24 months, and not 1 of the 7 lists states an order.
Source: Lunon analysis of Form 8-K Item 5.02 and fiscal 2025 Form 10-K filings, SEC EDGAR, 2024-09-11 to 2026-09-11.
The count of initiatives is not the defect, the missing owner is
No published evidence supports the obvious reading, that plans fail because the list is long. BCG found no statistically significant difference in success between a digital transformation built on 1 initiative and one built on several. So initiative load is not a count of ideas. It is a count of ideas per chair that will still be occupied when the idea comes due.
The same research puts the constraint where our own count puts it. Only 30 percent of digital transformations hit their target value and hold it, and on BCG's own 6 factors only 1 in 4 organizations clears the bar on putting high-caliber talent on the work, while only 2 of 5 monitor progress adequately. Capability and attention, not scope, are where the value goes.
Going off track is the normal case rather than the exception: 96 percent of transformation programs hit a turning point where the program has gone or will go off track. Transformations that score above average on all 6 of EY's key drivers are modeled at a 73 percent chance of success, against 28 percent for those below average on all 6. Clearing every driver at once is a statement about the people in the chairs.
The sponsor writes the plan and the company's own executives carry it
Capacity cannot be imported, and the sponsors describe the division of labor themselves. 1 of the largest retains roughly 45 operating executives and advisers as independent consultants who are not its employees, and publishes no headcount for an operating group of its own. Another counts about 980 asset management professionals, its operating arm among them, out of 5,043 employees worldwide, and publishes no headcount for the operating arm itself.
The wording about who does the work is consistent. That sponsor's operating professionals are described as assisting portfolio companies and supplying operational guidance, and 2 further large sponsors say their portfolio operations professionals work with portfolio company senior executives to identify efficiencies and growth, in near-identical words. Carlyle, KKR, Blackstone, TPG, Apollo and Ares, all 6 of the largest listed sponsors we read, describe the people they bring to a portfolio company as working with, partnering with, assisting or advising its management rather than standing in place of it.
Delivery capacity is therefore whatever sits in those 2 chairs and on the bench beneath them. Initiative load is a property of the company, not of the sponsor, and no operating group closes the gap on the day a chair turns over.
AlixPartners puts the leadership break around year 2 of the hold
The sponsors report the same constraint when they are asked directly. 65 percent of private equity firms report a portfolio company chief executive change during the holding period, and only 9 percent say their firms rarely replace chief executives. 44 percent of portfolio company leaders say their risk of losing top performers has gone up, and AlixPartners puts that down to gaps in succession planning, coaching and development under rising pressure.
AlixPartners reports that chief executive turnover spikes around year 2 of the holding period, and that sponsors and portfolio companies align on goals but not always on priorities. A list with no stated order is precisely the document that cannot settle a disagreement about priorities. Meanwhile 38 percent of portfolio company executives worry about losing their jobs because of disruption, and 27 percent of private equity executives say the number of underperforming assets in their portfolios increased year over year.
The wider labor market offers no relief. Median years of tenure with a current employer in management occupations was 5.7 years as of January 2024, down from 6.9 years in January 2014, and management, professional and related occupations recorded the highest median tenure of any major occupational group at 4.8 years as of January 2024. A plan that assumes a stable bench is assuming a condition the data does not supply.
Write the order, name the owner, and the list becomes a plan
Registrants almost never write this failure down. The phrase too many initiatives appears in only 12 documents in the whole EDGAR full-text index, and initiative fatigue in none, which is why the constraint has to be counted in seats rather than read in language. In 2018 the interim chief executive of a packaged-food company said his company had lost focus, and that it had too many initiatives that made the company unnecessarily complex, and an activist investor put the words into an SEC filing to argue the board should go.
Corporate buyers said the order was wrong 7 years ago: in PwC's 2019 study, 34 percent of acquirers made value creation a day-1 priority in their latest deal and 66 percent said it should have been. Even the advisers who write these plans say a plan should be a blueprint, not a checklist. A blueprint has an order; a checklist does not.
4 changes turn a list into a sequence, and not 1 of them requires a new initiative.
Rank the list before signing. Every named initiative gets a position, and the position is the commitment the investment committee approves. A plan with ties has not been sequenced.
Give each wave 1 accountable seat. The owner is a named holder of 1 of the 2 seats the profit and loss lands on, not a workstream or a sponsor team. Waves without a named seat are ambitions.
Gate the later waves on a condition. Wave 2 starts when a stated condition in wave 1 is met, so an initiative that slips moves the queue instead of running alongside everything else.
Re-sequence on the day a seat changes. A departure is a capacity event before it is a personnel one, and the queue has to be redrawn in the same week the filing goes out.
The test of a value creation plan is not whether every initiative is a good idea. It is whether initiative 5 has an owner who will still be in the chair when it starts. Measure initiative load at signing, write the order, name the owner of each wave, and the plan survives the turnover these filings say is coming.
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