Portfolio CEOs have no exit date for their leadership teams

Portfolio CEOs have no exit date to give their leadership teams

Portfolio CEOs keep asking me the same question, and it has nothing to do with the numbers. What do I tell my leadership team? They were promised an exit two years ago. There is still no date.

Everyone in the building knows the timeline slipped. Nobody says it in a meeting.

So people run the numbers privately. The senior hires who signed on for a three-year stretch are five years in. The equity that was going to change their life has become a line in a document they no longer believe.

They have not resigned; they have just stopped spending real effort on anything beyond the current quarter.

McKinsey puts the average buyout hold at 6.6 years, against 6.1 across 2011 to 2020. More than 16,000 companies are held past four years now, the highest share on record. Bain counts it at close to seven years, and 32,000 unsold companies worth $3.8 trillion still waiting.

If you do not sit inside a portfolio, the same pattern shows up wherever a payoff keeps getting postponed: the sale that stalls, the raise that slips, the turnaround that runs two years past what the board was told.

You cannot hand them a date you do not have. Pretending otherwise costs you the one thing still fully in your control, which is whether people believe what you say.

What you can do is stop asking them to work toward a promise they have already written off. Re-anchor the work on something you control, inside a horizon they can actually see. A twelve-month scoreboard they own, and compensation that pays out along the way rather than only at the end.

Then say the thing most leaders avoid: I do not know when this ends, and here is what we are doing regardless.