Key Takeaways

  • Mid-market companies typically depend on just 15 to 20 mission-critical roles to generate their returns, making mis-hires far more dangerous than in large conglomerates.
  • Industry data from ghSMART shows a baseline 50% failure rate for external executive hires; structured evaluation aims to push successful placements toward 70% to 90%.
  • At portfolio company JM Test, Kanbrick isolated calibration turnaround time as the core operating bottleneck, establishing real-time tracking across branches and individuals where no baseline data previously existed.
  • Aligning shop-floor compensation directly to turnaround speed tripled frontline employee bonuses in the first two years of ownership while accelerating customer fulfillment.
  • Kanbrick executes executive recruiting through Kanbrick's Adapted ghSMART Hiring Process, replacing standard job descriptions with rigorous outcome scorecards.

The Kanbrick's Adapted ghSMART Hiring Process

  • Step 1: Scorecard: Do you have a clear scorecard of what success looks like? Do you have a mission? Do you have objectives? Do you have outcomes? Most people skip over that. They start a job description and start hiring. That helps us get alignment on what type of leader we need, what type of goals we need to accomplish this, who disagrees with that, and get all the stakeholders to give their input.
  • Step 2: Sourcing: Most sourcing is reactive. You post and whoever is available applies. Usually the best people are happily employed. You need to go find them. We spend a lot of time proactively building those relationships. We focus heavily on our employee value proposition. Why does someone want to join one of our businesses? What are they going to learn, where are they going to grow, and what are they going to gain from that experience? Communicating that matters.
  • Step 3: Selection: It is a combination. The interviews are structured: we run competency-based interviews, cultural-based interviews, and outcomes-based interviews. After that, we do a case study to test that depth of analysis and understand how they think and how they operate. We layer in cognitive assessments, behavioral assessments, and back-channel references.

When This Works (and When It Doesn't)

This framework operates best when applied to the 15 to 20 mission-critical seats that govern performance in middle-market acquisitions. At that scale, a single leadership misstep stalls an entire operating thesis. In businesses producing $10 million to $50 million of EBITDA, senior leaders directly steer the few operational levers that dictate cash conversion, such as turnaround time in service depots or route density in distribution.

Where the process falters is high-volume hiring and early-stage environments. Running structured competency screens, multi-stakeholder scorecard alignments, and bespoke case studies for individual contributors or rapid headcount expansion creates administrative gridlock. Furthermore, when an acquisition faces immediate cash burn or severe vendor disruption, running an eight-week evaluation cycle is a luxury sponsors cannot afford. In turnaround situations, interim operators must step in before the scorecard process can conclude.

Why It Matters

Private equity sponsors targeting mid-market founder-owned firms frequently underwrite value creation to pricing power and bolt-on acquisitions. Britt Cool's approach signals a return to internal compounding driven by operational bottlenecks and talent retention. Most sponsors lose value by cycling through portfolio company executives; ghSMART's baseline 50% hiring failure rate explains why management turnover frequently delays exit timelines.

By building an internal community of 4,000 executives and pairing long holding periods with factory-floor KPI tracking, long-duration platforms are out-executing traditional buyout funds that rely on financial leverage. The fact that JM Test tripled employee bonuses within two years indicates that frontline margin capture comes from transparent metric visibility, not headcount reduction.