Start with your own rate. When an executive fails, the standard toolkit often cannot distinguish a people constraint from a system constraint. TL Partners built the instruments to make that read from the diligence window through the hold.
Running a company rather than backing them? The company side is here.
Each stands alone; each makes the next sharper, because the benchmarks compound inside your portfolio rather than walking out the door with a vendor.
The management team scored against the specific investment thesis, delivered deal-team-legible, inside your diligence window. Compressed to the question the IC actually has: can this team carry this plan? Run on four acquisitions to date; the consistent lesson is that teams look different scored against the actual plan than against "good executive." Fixed fee per deal, priced per executive assessed. The walkthrough: Anatomy of a Leadership Diligence.
The Strategy Alignment Audit run 60 to 90 days post-close, while drift is cheapest to fix and the 100-day plan is still soft. The same instrument a CEO can commission alone; run fund-side, every participant is told so on day zero, and the readout lands beside the value-creation plan. Same fixed-fee structure as the company-side audit; portfolio pricing when it runs across holdings.
The same audit run comparably across holdings, one page per company: the likely constraint, what it costs monthly, the trend since the last read. Comparability is the product: it is how a lean portfolio talent function covers the whole book without adding headcount, and a leading indicator operating reviews currently lack. Scoped to the portfolio, priced per company.
For funds that want the system without renting it deal by deal: we stand up TL Partners' instruments inside your fund, each built fresh against your theses, and hand your team the keys. Two shapes: a build-and-transfer engagement, or a fractional portfolio talent partner one to two days a week while the system stands up. Built to outlive the engagement, including the ending where you hire the seat in-house. We will tell you when that is the right call.
The audit is a snapshot. For holdings that want the reading continuous, Alyn, the product we incubated at TL Partners, sits in Slack and surfaces where work is drifting from stated priorities week to week, while course correction is still cheap. It follows the diagnostic; it does not replace it. The portfolio version of the argument is Reading a Portfolio.
You cover the book with a team you can count on one hand, and most outside help adds work before it removes any. The instruments here are built against that constraint: they arrive already run, the readouts land deal-team-legible, and every benchmark they produce stays inside your fund, sharpening your next read. Where the line sits between work the seat should own and work worth sending out is a live question; we spend a lot of time comparing notes on it with people who hold the seat, and the answer is different at every fund. If the comparing is useful, with or without an engagement on the table: thomas@tlpartners.biz. And if the build-it-in-house door is the one you are weighing, The Portfolio Talent Operating System documents the system.
The method ran inside a software PE firm before it was an offering: our founder built a portfolio talent function there from a standing start, 2021 to 2023. The case is sanitized and fund-agnostic. No fund's deals, companies, or economics appear. The instruments were built against deal math, on deal clocks, and have since been rebuilt as TL Partners' own generalized method.
Leadership diligence run on four acquisitions pre-close, scored against each deal's thesis and delivered deal-team-legible.
Executive scoring rolled into talent density across eight portfolio companies in the US, Israel, and Latin America; search run across seven companies against assessment-defined briefs, not departures.
Workforce planning tied to the value-creation plan: engineering hubs stood up in Latin America at four companies, planned headcount growth cut at two others, and go-to-market changes with CEOs that lifted revenue per rep 15 to 22 percent.
The right question, so plainly: three differences of input, one of sequence.
First, everything is scored against your thesis rather than a generic leadership model, which is why a team can pass a franchise assessment and still fail your plan.
Second, the inputs include work-function metrics: where decisions stall, where handoffs break, where effort pools against stated priorities. That is the input family assessment franchises structurally lack, and it is the one that separates a leader who narrates well from a leader whose organization executes.
Third, the benchmarks stay with you; every assessment, audit, and search sharpens the next one, inside the fund.
And the sequence: when WHO and HOW are both broken, the instruments say which to fix first. Repair the system enough to see the person, then judge the person against the thesis. Run in the other order, you pay for a search you may not have needed, and most holds only have five or six years to spend.
Fifteen minutes of material, your questions after: the three misreads, the two instruments, and the record above. We leave the one-pager. And if the more useful first step is a deal in diligence right now, say so and we will scope the read this week.
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