By Tom Bradbury, Founder & CEO of Broad-Gauge
Private equity firms often cite operational efficiency and financial rigor as hallmarks of their portfolio management—but beneath these layers of traditional levers lies an overlooked asset: the workforce. For most portfolio companies, labor is not just a cost—it’s their biggest investment. Yet despite its significance, human capital data remains siloed inside traditional HRIS platforms, rarely connected to financial metrics. This blind spot leaves GPs without a comprehensive view of workforce impact on performance and value.
To strengthen governance and risk monitoring, private equity needs a next-generation strategic overlay—one that links workforce metrics to financial outcomes across a portfolio. By integrating HRIS data with staple financial metrics as well as human capital financial indicators, GPs gain new transparency through vital levers of performance.
New Optics into Performance: Putting Dormant Data to Work
In today’s data-rich environment, the absence of insight into the efficacy of workforce investments isn’t due to scarcity—it’s due to underutilization. Too much valuable data sits idle because it isn’t connected to decisions or strategy. When activated and analyzed, that data becomes decision-useful — identifying opportunities for value protection and creation that were previously hidden.
With proper architecture, this data can be transformed into dashboards that reveal talent volatility, operational health, and cultural indicators that often precede financial shifts. These optics equip GPs with early signals for intervention, while also benchmarking success across geographies, sectors, and operating teams.
Strategic Collaboration: GPs and Operational Executives
Moving forward, GPs will not only monitor these metrics—they’ll use them to drive alignment. Investor-driven outcomes will require deeper partnerships with operational executives who know how strategy meets execution. A shared lens of integrated performance data will enable both sides to prioritize resources, identify leadership gaps, and execute targeted interventions that boost value.
For management teams, this visibility will empower them to deploy talent more strategically, drive cultural change with measurable impact, and course-correct more precisely in fast-changing conditions.
Real World Examples of Decision-Useful Workforce Data
The value of workforce-integrated metrics isn’t theoretical—it’s playing out across portfolio companies in ways that directly affect financial outcomes. Here are two examples where data served as a catalyst for action, alignment, and measurable returns:
- Healthcare Portfolio Company: Root Cause and Rapid Payback: A healthcare operator faced alarming attrition in its highest revenue-generating department. Traditional HR dashboards provided surface-level figures, but the integrated overlay revealed specific root-cause drivers and calculated the financial cost of this turnover within that department. The distilled data positioned the operating CEO to immediately recognize the need for direct engagement. In collaboration with two managers, she deployed a targeted solution—an investment that was only a fraction of the attrition’s financial drain. The results were unmistakable: voluntary attrition dropped by 60% within eight months, delivering a clear and accelerated payback that shifted a portion of those real costs to the bottom line.
- Engineering Firm: Tech Constraints and Talent Risk: Another portfolio company, in the engineering sector, uncovered productivity bottlenecks linked to outdated technology solutions. The integrated workforce data pinpointed exactly which employees were impacted and why. Leadership made swift and calculated investments in tools that improved team efficiency and productivity. And the other shoe dropped six months later, when the same data surfaced an unintended consequence: the IT team—responsible for deploying and supporting the new tech—was overextended and under-appreciated. Data that was not coming through in traditional leadership updates. This led to a tangible threat of attrition among key talent with deep knowledge of the solutions. With that insight, executives were able to intervene before deeper productivity and support issues emerged as a risk with value implications.
These examples underscore how workforce data doesn’t just inform HR—it touches revenue, operational risk, and strategic continuity. It equips GPs and operating leaders with the clarity to act decisively, anticipate downstream effects, and ensure investments are generating expected returns. Ultimately, this data isn’t just diagnostic—it’s directional, showing both where value is at risk and where value can be scaled.
Solving for the Middle Market: A New Partnership Model
Middle market companies – a major focus for PE – are experiencing enterprise-level complexity without enterprise-level resources. Whether it’s workforce transformation, customer engagement, or the challenges evolving AI from a set of novel tools to highly leveraged infrastructure—these firms face enormous pressure to understand where and how to evolve quickly and intelligently.
GPs must understand the inner dynamics of these companies to make surgical investments in people and performance. By using a workforce-integrated data overlay, GPs can step in not just with capital, but with clarity—seeing where to support leadership, improve frontline execution, and build capacity for growth. These insights transform value creation from subjective application of best-practices into science and make workforce strategy a formal lever in private equity’s playbook.
Tom Bradbury is Founder & CEO of Broad-Gauge, a data service providing PE firms and Operating Executives with uniform, decision-useful workforce metrics to protect and grow value across a portfolio. Connect with him on LinkedIn here.
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July 2025
