By design, I have spent the last 20 years sitting between two sides of a powerful marketplace: the ambitious value creation executives eager to work on complex PE sponsored transformations and the Private Equity firms that need them to deliver those outcomes.

Twice this month I’ve taken a version of the same call. In the first, a portfolio company CFO resigned with two weeks’ notice in the middle of a refinancing. In the second, a carve-out closed and the TSA clock started running on a finance function that did not yet exist. Neither PE sponsor was calling to start a search. Both were calling because they needed a capable adult in the building ASAP.

For twenty years my honest answer in this situation has been some version of: let me cull through my network and see if anyone springs to mind. This was a terribly unstructured way to try and help.

But in the last few years, something has shifted underneath that question, and I think it’s opening up new opportunities that I can help solve. I can help my clients solve discreet projects and I can also help savvy executives get at bats with the best PE firms in the world to showcase their skills.

Welcome to LION: The Lancor Interim Operating Network.

Portfolio operations models have evolved past the assumption that a firm should own every transformational resource on its P&L. For a decade the direction of travel was to build — hire the value creation team, add the functional specialists, carry the capability in-house. That made sense when the alternative was a high-priced consulting invoice from the MBB cohort. It makes less sense now.

What firms want when those moments of crisis set in is access to relevant stop gap solutions. This is the freelance economy finally arriving in B2B professional services for private equity.

Which brings me to the gap. Private equity has built serious infrastructure for permanent hires — retained search, structured assessment, reference architecture, onboarding plans. The whole apparatus exists because the cost of getting a permanent operating leader wrong is enormous, and firms have rightly decided to spend real money to lower that risk.

What the industry has not built, with anything like the same seriousness, is a bench… a bullpen to tap when time is working against you.

Some of the highest-leverage work inside a portfolio company is bounded by design. Stand up the finance function post-close. Run the pricing initiative. Get the ERP migration across the line. Hold the seat while we search properly. That work has a start and an end, and hiring permanently against it is a mistake in both directions — you either overpay for a temporary need, or you underqualify the person because the assignment looks small on paper.

So historically the PE firms improvise. There are three usual improvisations, and each carries a real cost.

(1) The consulting firm sells you a team and a methodology. Sometimes that is exactly right. Often it means paying for leverage you did not want, working with people who will rotate off, and buying a deliverable when what you needed was an owner.

(2) The interim marketplace sells you volume. You get resumes quickly. Nobody in that transaction has any stake in whether the person is actually good.

(3) The personal network works better than either. It is also the least scalable asset in the business, and it is only as good as who you happen to know. Every operating partner I talk to has three or four people they trust completely. Nobody has forty.

Here is the thread running through all three, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see it plainly: in the interim market, nobody vouches.

Supply is not the constraint. There is an enormous amount of senior operating talent between roles or working deliberately on an assignment basis, and more of it every year. The constraint is signal. When you are moving in days rather than months you cannot run your own diligence, and there is nobody standing behind the name you just got handed.

That is the problem LION was built to solve.

LION — the Lancor Interim Operating Network — connects private equity firms with vetted operators for the situations that are bounded rather than permanent: carve-outs and post-acquisition integration, value creation sprints, interim leadership. It is not a database and it is not a job board. It is a curated matching service, and nothing in it moves without my team looking at it first.

For firms, it delivers a bespoke capability. For executives, it’s a paid audition to showcase your skills.

If you are an operator, here is how it actually works. You register at lancorlion.pe with your background and credentials. We review and approve the registration on our side — that is a person, not an AI filter. You then submit one or more deal sheets describing the work you would actually take on. A deal sheet is not a resume. It is a statement of the situations you want and the outcomes you have delivered in them, which is a more useful artifact than a career chronology and a considerably harder one to fake. From there your credentials go in front of our PE clients, and when a firm wants to go deeper, we arrange the call. Then we serve dealflow based on what our client base is actually asking for.

There is no fee to join.

The case for operators is control coupled with exposure. You work across multiple firms, funds, and industries while keeping the decision about what you take and when you take it. And I would add another observation, having watched this career from the outside for two decades: interim work has quietly become a legitimate senior path rather than a waiting room between permanent roles. Several of the strongest operators I know now do it by choice, and they are not short of work – and in fact they are fielding multiple offers to come inside a PE shop and do it in house.

For sponsors, the case is speed without the usual tradeoff. You are not exchanging diligence for turnaround time. You get specialized expertise precisely when the situation calls for it, without adding permanent headcount to a portfolio operations team that may not need that particular skill in eighteen months.

What we bring to it is twenty years of pattern recognition. We have spent that time placing Operating Partners and portfolio operations leaders at more than 100 firms globally, and the value of that is not the length of the list. It is knowing the nuances of how each of those clients thinks — what they actually mean by cultural fit, what they will tolerate, where expectations need aligning before anyone gets on a call. That is the part a database cannot do, and it is the reason we are willing to put our name on the match.

One thing I want to be up front about, the assessment layer inside LION is deliberately lighter than what my typical clients receive in the Conti Confidence Score, and it sits later in the process rather than at the door. Interim decisions are made on different evidence and on a different clock, and I would rather deliver that framework carefully than bolt the wrong one on for the sake of symmetry.

You should also know my stake. LION is a Lancor product and we make money when the right matches occur. A network built on vouching only survives if the vouching is accurate — our incentive aligns well with the PE firm who has the need.

The network is live. If you are an operator building a portfolio career, create your profile — it takes a few minutes and there is no cost to being in the room. If you are a sponsor who has been improvising the interim layer, come talk to us.

Find out more at https://www.lancorlion.pe.