Running partner to PE-backed mid-cap leadership teams.

Most of the situations EMCS gets called into aren’t broken. They’re stretched — sometimes very stretched. A portfolio company leadership team already running hard — BAU demanding full attention, and the change agenda the value creation plan demands running alongside it at the same time. Two simultaneous demands, each requiring a fundamentally different kind of experience. One is operational leadership — the capability that attracted PE backing in the first place. The other is change leadership — something all good operational leaders have developed through necessity, but most would recognise as secondary to their particular operational sweet spot.

That call comes one of two ways: the PE board representative sees it and reaches out, or the business leadership recognises it themselves and makes contact directly.

That recognition is itself an act of humility — and in our experience, one of the best predictors of how quickly and well things go. When everyone can skip the corporate positioning and be honest about where the genuine strengths lie, we get straight to the work. We look to work with leadership teams and PE firms who share that view.

If that doesn’t feel right to you — we’re probably the wrong firm.

The second of those demands is what EMCS was built for. Change leadership — diagnosis, design, delivery — is our core, not a secondary capability. But that doesn’t mean arriving and overlaying. The starting point is always what’s genuinely already strong: recognising it, respecting it, and building from it. We amplify what’s there, augment where there’s a real gap or a capacity constraint, and bring the change leadership layer that ties it together — with the depth of experience to form a clear view fast, the seniority to operate at board level, and the commitment to get hands-on where the work requires it. Not replacing what’s already working with our own templates. Strong enough, and principled enough, to say clearly what needs to be said — sensitively and constructively, but without hedging.

We’re a cooperative of high-experience change leaders who’ve worked alongside each other on hard engagements over many years. One of us leads every engagement, and that lead has open access to the respective strengths of the others. We know each other’s shape and how to play to it — we don’t fight for intellectual turf, we make each other considerably more than the sum of the parts.

EMCS engages as a running partner to mid-cap boards providing the change leadership capabilities that, in a larger firm, the CIO and Change Director would bring to bear — but not as a typical interim would. What we bring is fractional access to multiple specialist capabilities, sized and blended to what the situation actually requires, with an accountable individual at the centre.

The change leadership judgment and direction sits separately from the delivery beneath it. No commercial interest in who delivers, or how long it takes (I actually worry about this last tiny phrase – I think its wrong as written – I think its trying to say we are not interested it it running on to give us an income stream – but what its making me feel is something else – I do care how long it takes – now I know it covers that with the efficennt as possible but I think that was me reacting to what the former phrase implied to me or what I feared it would imply), other than that it’s done as efficiently as possible. That separation is what makes the independence real — and in our experience, it’s what makes the difference.

We are selective about who we work with and what we take on. In part that’s a function of career stage — but more fundamentally, it’s how we’re built. The engagements we take on are ones where we genuinely believe we can make a difference, and with positive-energy, low-ego people we respect and expect to work well with. We’d walk away before we’d compromise on either. That applies to the portfolio companies we support and to the PE firms we choose to work alongside. When EMCS takes on an engagement, it’s because the conditions for doing genuinely good work are there. The problems matter to us. The people matter to us. Your challenge becomes ours. Personally.

We aren’t wired to cling on. We’re wired to tackle gnarly challenges, not tread water. We’ll be the ones pressing you to retake full ownership — before you feel the need to ask, because frankly anything else would embarrass us — and our experience is you’ll be the one asking us to stay a little longer. That tension, for us, is exactly right.

If something in what you’ve read feels relevant to a situation you’re navigating, the right next step is a straightforward conversation. (kind of tells them – we could use more Nigel language … If something in what you’ve read feels relevant to a situation you’re navigating let’s discuss it as a straightforward conversation)

nigel@engagingmcs.com