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Securing investment is just the beginning. Discover the nine key focus areas investment-backed businesses need to address to build performance under pressure.
When a business takes on investment, whether PE backing, a growth equity round, or pre-sale preparation, the pressure on the organisation changes overnight. Targets sharpen, timelines compress, and suddenly, the quality of your people strategy stops feeling like a nice-to-have, and shifts to a critical component of driving value.
Yet most investment-backed businesses of between 50 and 250 employees face the same structural problem: they’ve outgrown an operational HR function, but they’re not quite at the point of justifying a full-time Chief People Officer. The result is a gap – and it’s exactly when the stakes are highest.
This is where deep people expertise comes into play, and where having a genuinely senior people lead at the top table stops being optional. Expecting someone who manages HR administration to fulfil this role is unrealistic – you need someone who thinks commercially, operates at board level, and understands the specific pressures that investment brings. Calibre and experience are vital, and have been shown time and time again to be a crucial differentiator in delivering commercial success faster.
While the specifics of a CPO’s role in an investment-backed business will vary client to client, here are nine areas that experience tells us matter every time.
1. Clear strategy, brought to life
Investment changes the game. Your people strategy needs to change with it.
Growth under investment isn’t the same as organic growth. Investment almost always insists on an accelerated model where commercial success is under the microscope and timelines become pressured to deliver returns. The people infrastructure needs to support that growth plan. That might mean doubling headcount in 18 months, entering new markets, integrating an acquisition, or building out a leadership layer that didn’t exist before.
Where we have repeatedly supported investment-backed clients is in helping to get clear on both the strategy itself, and the plan to get there. In other words, what outcomes are needed to support the ambitious targets, and specifically, what the business actually needs from its people, both now and over the investment horizon, translated that into a practical, board-ready plan. We work alongside the CEO, the SLT and investment stakeholders to build a people strategy that aligns with the growth plan, not just the day-to-day operational needs.
This includes workforce planning, organisational design, performance frameworks, and reward structures that scale. We’re not talking box-ticking exercises and documents which live in a drawer; these are living, breathing plans that gets picked up in every leadership meeting, and which require practiced and effective delivery.
2. Accountability frameworks and structured decision-making
Many investment-backed businesses are transitioning from intuitive, founder-led ways of working to something more structured. That transition is harder than it looks.
A recurring pattern in businesses that have grown quickly, particularly those moving from family-run or founder-led models, is that decision-making has been fast and instinctive but not always documented, distributed, or accountable. People have delivered results through proximity and trust rather than clear role design and defined expectations. That works up to a point. Under investment, that point arrives quickly.
Introducing structured accountability frameworks, goal-setting methodologies such as OKRs, clear job design, and decision-making parameters that give people genuine ownership without creating chaos, is one of the most impactful things a senior people lead can do. It allows a business to remain agile and responsive while giving investors and the board the governance confidence they need.
Equally important, and often underestimated, is internal communication. Businesses that have operated informally for years often have no real rhythm for communicating decisions, progress, or achievements internally. Formalising that, building a cadence of structured communication that keeps the whole organisation aligned and informed, is not a soft exercise. It directly affects performance, retention, and culture during a period when all three are under pressure.
3. Leadership team readiness and upskilling
The leadership team that got you to investment isn’t always the one that gets you through it.
This is one of the most delicate, and important, things we help businesses navigate. Investors often back a founder or a core team based on what they’ve built. But the skills that build a business from scratch don’t always map neatly onto what’s needed to scale it with external capital, reporting requirements, and governance expectations.
In fact, management capability is often cited as the number one risk in investment-backed businesses. While you may have a fantastic team to have got this far, it’s important to know whether those same people have what it takes to go forward from here – and whether you are able to develop them if not, or need to make a tougher call. Maintaining the culture and bringing people with you on an investment journey is a real challenge, and is one of the most common stumbling blocks for leaders of investor-backed businesses.
Our People Directors conduct honest, commercially grounded assessments of leadership capability and readiness. We work with leaders to close gaps, through coaching, development programmes, role clarity, and sometimes honest conversations about where responsibilities need to shift.
The goal isn’t to replace good people. It’s to make sure the leadership team – and the management capability supporting it – is set up to lead through the next phase, and that investors and the board can see that clearly.
Client example: At Echion Technologies, the founding team needed to evolve from a technical/R&D-led culture into a commercially scaled organisation. People Puzzles worked with the leadership team to build the structures, clarity, and people capability needed to support a significant growth phase – without losing the culture that made the business distinctive in the first place.
4. Reducing founder and owner reliance
Key person risk is one of the first things an investor looks at, and can be one of the biggest red flags. And usually, it’s one of the last things a founder wants to talk about.
When a business is too dependent on one or two individuals, whether that’s the founder, the MD, or a key commercial relationship holder, it represents a real risk to enterprise value. Investors and acquirers know this. And if it’s not addressed, it shows up in due diligence, in valuation, and ultimately in deal structure.
People Puzzles helps businesses systematically reduce key person dependency, building out more rounded teams and devolved capabilities which mitigate risk long term. That means documenting and distributing institutional knowledge, building second-line leadership capability, creating robust processes that don’t rely on individuals, and ensuring the business can operate and grow without being contingent on any one person’s continued presence.
This isn’t about sidelining founders – in fact, many of our best client relationships are with founders who want to step back from operations and focus on strategy. It’s about building a business that works at scale, and proving that to investors and buyers. And often, it’s a welcome relief for founders who have found all too often that all roads lead to them in the business.
5. Succession planning
If a key person walked out tomorrow, what would happen? Most businesses don’t want to answer that question. We help them not have to worry about it.
Succession planning in an investment-backed business isn’t just about the CEO. It’s about having depth across every critical function: sales leadership, operations, technical capability, financial oversight. Investors want to see a business that isn’t one bad day away from a crisis.
We build succession frameworks that identify the critical roles, assess internal pipeline, identify gaps, and create development plans for high-potential individuals. This work serves a dual purpose: it protects the business operationally, and it signals to investors and potential acquirers that the organisation has genuine leadership depth.
Done well, succession planning also plays a significant role in retention. When talented people can see a path, they stay. When they can’t, they leave — often at the worst possible moment.
Client example: For a number of clients approaching exit, People Puzzles has helped build visible, credible succession structures that have directly supported valuation conversations — demonstrating to buyers that the business isn’t contingent on a small group of individuals and that the leadership pipeline is genuinely strong.
6. Stakeholder and investor management
Investors aren’t just financial partners. They’re scrutinising your people and your culture (whether you know it or not)
Board meetings, investor updates, and due diligence processes all involve a people dimension that many leadership teams underestimate. Investors ask questions about turnover, culture, engagement, capability gaps, and whether the leadership team can execute the plan. Having a credible, strategic answer – not just an HR update -matters.
People Puzzles People Directors operate at board level. We can prepare people reporting that speaks to investors in the language they care about: productivity, retention, leadership depth, cost per hire, time to productivity – the “HROI” of the business. We also support the CEO in navigating investor relationships where people decisions are a factor: restructures, leadership changes, culture concerns and so on.
This isn’t something a traditional HR manager can (or should be expected to) do. It requires someone who has sat at senior tables, who understands what investors are looking for, and who can translate people strategy into commercial outcomes.
7. Commercial approach to people planning and recruitment
Headcount is one of the biggest cost lines in most businesses. It needs to be managed like an investment, not an afterthought.
In investment-backed businesses, every hire needs to earn its place. That means robust workforce planning, smart use of permanent versus flexible resource, commercial briefing of agencies and internal recruiters, and clear return-on-investment thinking about where talent spend goes.
People Puzzles brings a commercially disciplined approach to people planning. We help businesses build hiring plans that are tied to the growth strategy, as opposed to being reactive to gaps, and we ensure recruitment processes are efficient, well-briefed, and producing people who genuinely move the needle.
We also challenge businesses on the assumptions they make about headcount. Sometimes the right answer is to hire; sometimes it’s to restructure, develop existing talent, or bring in specialist fractional resource. We help leadership teams make those calls with clarity, not just convention.
Client example: At Corinthian, People Puzzles supported significant commercial growth by helping the business build the people infrastructure – hiring frameworks, performance systems, and leadership development – to support aggressive expansion without the chaos that often accompanies rapid scale. We also saved them over 35% in recruitment costs despite almost doubling headcount.
8. Scaling without breaking your culture
Culture is what got you here. Rapid growth is one of the fastest ways to erode it.
As headcount scales, new layers of management arrive, and the founder’s direct influence inevitably dilutes, the behaviours and values that defined the early business can quietly disappear. Not through any deliberate decision, but because nobody has made them explicit. What was once held together by a small, tight-knit team starts to fragment when that team grows to fifty, a hundred, two hundred people who never experienced the culture in its original form.
The right questions to ask are straightforward, even if the answers are not. How has your culture changed as you’ve grown? Are the behaviours that are expected and rewarded clear to everyone, or just to those who’ve been there longest? How do you currently approach engagement: structured and regular, occasional, informal, or not really a focus? The answers tend to reveal a lot about cultural risk.
Senior people leadership helps businesses make culture tangible: defining the behaviours that underpin performance, building engagement practices that give real visibility of how people feel, and catching cultural drift before it becomes a retention or performance problem.
Not every investor will prioritise this. Those focused primarily on financial engineering may view culture as a soft consideration. But for investors who want to grow a business, not just restructure one, culture is a performance variable. High turnover destroys EBITDA. Disengagement shows up in productivity. And in a buy-and-build strategy, cultural incompatibility between acquired businesses is one of the most common reasons integrations fail. The smartest investors understand this. The best business owners insist on it.
9. Enterprise value optimisation and exit readiness
Every decision made during the investment period is either building or eroding enterprise value. The people function is one of the most critical components.
Exit readiness is about more than clean financials. Buyers and acquirers look hard at the people dimension: management quality, culture, engagement, retention, employment risk, TUPE considerations, and whether the team will stay post-acquisition. A business that has its people house in order will achieve a faster, cleaner, and more valuable exit.
People Puzzles has experience working with businesses throughout the investment lifecycle, from the point of initial investment through to exit preparation and transaction support. We understand what acquirers look for in due diligence and we help leadership teams get ahead of those questions, not scramble to answer them in a data room.
This includes employment contract reviews, people data tidying, culture documentation, engagement benchmarking, and ensuring the HR function itself is something a buyer sees as an asset rather than a liability.
Client example: People Puzzles worked with a south-coast media agency to ensure that as the business grew rapidly, its people practices, documentation, and culture were in the kind of shape that would withstand scrutiny, positioning the business to be genuinely acquisition-ready when the time came.
Why People Puzzles?
We’re not a consultancy that parachutes in, runs a workshop, and leaves you with a report. Our People Directors join your leadership team, typically one or two days a week, and stay for the duration of what the business needs. They get to know your investors, your culture, your people, and your plan.
Long term improvement requires long term support, and we are there to support clients however they need us, from quick interventions to decades-long support.
We’ve been doing this since 2010. We have 85+ People Directors across the UK, which means we can match the right person to your sector, your stage, and your geography. And because we’ve worked with over 1,000 businesses, we bring pattern recognition that a standalone HR hire simply can’t replicate.
Investment-backed businesses are our sweet spot. We understand the pace, the pressure, and the prize. And we know how to help you get there.
If your business is investment-backed, pre-investment, or scaling towards a future transaction, we’d love to talk.
Get in touch at peoplepuzzles.co.uk or speak to your local People Director today.