Building People Practice Excellence Across a High-Growth Technology Portfolio

For private equity and investor-led portfolios, People & Culture is often discussed as a value driver - but less often systematically assessed and leveraged on a regular basis.

When an established private equity-style technology investor began shaping its portfolio, its founders were clear on one thing: leadership and culture would be central to performance.

What they were less clear on was how to ensure consistently high-quality People & Culture practices and optimise performance outcomes across a diverse group of autonomous and specialised technology businesses without undermining the entrepreneurial DNA that made those businesses successful in the first place.

That’s where Rutherford HR came in.

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The Business Challenge / Opportunity

Our client was established as an investment company to acquire successful small-to-mid-sized technology companies in a range of international locations when founders or owners were ready to sell.  Companies within the investment portfolio are typically mature, niche, profitable, and want to remain highly autonomous. Some companies have in house operational HR support, but most do not.

Our client intentionally keeps central mandates light - their philosophy being to enable, not constrain and to add value (through advice and the provision of core back-office resources), not standardise for the sake of efficiency or control.

However, as our client’s portfolio grew, several patterns began to emerge:

• Increasing frequency of people-related issues across the portfolio
• Variable quality and inconsistent investments in HR 'infrastructure'
• Ineffective approaches to performance management and incentive design
• Compliance and operational risks
• Productivity challenges relating to niche technical skill needs and retention dependencies in some key markets
• A reliance on CEOs to manage complex people matters, often without specialist support

Our client could see that some core HR fundamentals — compliance, baseline policies, performance frameworks — were being reinvented (or overlooked) across the portfolio. They wanted to explore whether there was a smarter, more centralised way to address these concerns and satisfy the demand for more HR support.

At the same time, our client was clear: any centralised approach needed to respect autonomy. These were not cookie-cutter businesses and did not want, or need, cookie-cutter solutions.

The challenge wasn’t about imposing standards. It was about elevating the quality of people practices intelligently, efficiently and in a manner which could also scale as new companies were added to the portfolio.

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What Rutherford HR Did

1. Co-Creating the Right Starting Point

After a series of thoughtful discussions with our client’s leadership team about what exactly was needed, we proposed a structured yet pragmatic solution: a People Practices Benchmarking Project.

Rather than immediately implementing a centralised HR function or retainer model, we recommended first understanding the current state of play.

True to our values, we invested our time generously upfront to define:

• What effective people practices look like at different stages of company maturity (start-up, scale-up, mature)
• The level of people-related rigour and infrastructure appropriate at each stage of maturity
• The business performance implications of gaps in people practices

We designed a benchmarking framework that was both practical and grounded in data and behavioural science.

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2. Direct CEO Engagement Across the Portfolio

We firstly asked each portfolio company CEO to provide us with some qualitative and quantitative people and performance data and then met with them individually to learn more.

This was a deliberate choice.

We believe business performance conversations must be personal. And we know from our experience in the technology sector that CEOs value direct, commercial dialogue - not traditional HR jargon or HR process that appears (or actually is) bureaucratic and/or detached from business outcomes.

Through structured interviews and data gathering, we assessed areas including:

• Organisational design and scalability
• Leadership capability and team effectiveness
• Talent attraction and retention strategies
• Performance management processes
• Culture clarity and behavioural expectations
• Risk and compliance foundations

We asked practical questions:

• Where are people issues consuming leadership bandwidth?
• Where are capability gaps limiting growth?
• Where are risks sitting quietly in the background?
• What would “next-level” leadership look like in this business?

This approach surfaced both strengths and vulnerabilities.

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3. Identifying Gaps and Their Business Implications

For each company, we produced clear, tailored insights based on their maturity level, gaps to benchmarks, and the implications of those gaps.

Each portfolio company also received a set of prioritised recommendations for action.

Our recommendations were both pragmatic and proportionate. For some companies, small structural or attentional changes would significantly improve clarity and performance. For others, more foundational work was required.

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4. Providing Portfolio-Level Insights

Beyond individual company feedback, some consistent themes emerged quickly:

• CEOs needing more support to manage complex people issues
• A lack of strategic clarity and informal performance management processes leading to misalignment
• Leadership teams operating without clear behavioural norms
• Lack of structured succession and development planning in key leadership and technical roles
• Inconsistent documentation and compliance practices
• Inefficient HR related spend on systems and services that could be centralised for improved quality and cost effectiveness

As a result, we identified portfolio-wide insights and recommendations for our client to address:

• Common needs across multiple companies, including compliance risks requiring immediate attention
• Areas where centralised support would meaningfully reduce workload, improve quality and/or deliver better cost outcomes across the portfolio
• Opportunities to create shared resources without stifling autonomy
• The likely scope and value of a future HR advisory retainer model aligned to our client’s philosophy

This work created clarity – both at the portfolio company and investment company levels – allowing our client to move from anecdotal concern to data-informed decision-making.

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The Result

The impact of the benchmarking project was tangible and immediate.

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1. Actionable CEO-Level Improvements

Every portfolio company CEO received specific, tailored recommendations.

Many began implementing changes quickly, especially where these involved a change in their focus or would lead to immediate impact – such as improving performance conversations and clarifying leadership team accountabilities.

Several CEOs engaged Rutherford HR directly for deeper support, including:

• Designing targeted retention plans for critical technical talent
• Managing complex performance processes
• Strengthening leadership team alignment and effectiveness

We were also able to add immediate value with more significant issues including supporting the redesign and integration of two portfolio companies into a coherent operating model aligned with our client’s strategic intent.

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2. Immediate Risk Mitigation

The project surfaced compliance gaps that required urgent attention.

With our support, our client took swift action to address these issues, significantly reducing portfolio-wide risk exposure.

Rather than discovering these gaps reactively (for example, during due diligence or following an employee claim), our client was able to act proactively.

That alone represented substantial value protection.

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3. Clearer Strategic Direction for the Investment Company

The benchmarking work provided our client with:

• A clear view of portfolio-wide People & Culture maturity
• Data-informed insight into where centralisation would add value
• Confidence in where autonomy should remain untouched
• Greater clarity on future people due diligence processes
• A defined pathway toward a future HR advisory model

Rather than implementing a centralised HR structure based on assumption, our client could now design solutions grounded in evidence.

The work also validated our client’s instinct: leadership and culture were indeed central to enterprise value creation.

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The Bigger Picture

Contrary to many firms in their sector, our client chose to treat People and Culture initiatives as part of their broader value creation strategy. Through the People Practices Benchmarking Project, they achieved considerable gains by:

• Reducing risk and improving compliance
• Reducing costs – especially around hiring and retention activities
• Adding value through leadership, performance and organisational design interventions

And they did so without compromising the autonomy and entrepreneurial energy of their portfolio companies.

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Looking Ahead

Our work has continued.

Rutherford HR now supports the investment company and selected portfolio companies on targeted engagements spanning:

• Performance management
• Leadership team effectiveness
• Talent retention strategy
• Organisational design
• CEO development and succession planning

What began as a diagnostic exercise evolved into a trusted advisory partnership.

Because when People & Culture infrastructure is aligned to business strategy - and implemented with care, rigour and commercial pragmatism - it becomes a powerful lever for growth.

If your organisation is navigating growth, portfolio expansion, or leadership scaling challenges, we would welcome a conversation.

At Rutherford HR, we don’t deliver generic HR solutions.

We build performance-enabling people leadership infrastructure - designed to fit your business, your maturity, and your ambition.