January 12, 2026

Family Office Costs Rising? Why an Interim Executive Can Be the Answer in Uncertain Times

Family offices exist to protect, grow, and steward wealth across generations. At their best, they provide clarity, alignment, and disciplined decision-making for complex financial and personal priorities. Yet in today’s environment of economic uncertainty, regulatory pressure, and volatile markets, many high-net-worth families are asking a difficult question:

Is our family office costing more to run than it should?

Concerns about family office management costs are no longer hypothetical; they are becoming a central issue for families seeking operational efficiency, accountability, and flexibility without compromising discretion or quality.

Increasingly, the solution is not a permanent hire, but interim executive leadership for family offices. It’s not just about the permanent nature of, well, hiring permanently, with all of its burdens – it’s that interim is a powerful way to outsource while still keeping control.

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June 30, 2025

When and How to Divest: A Guide to Strategic Spin-Offs and Carve-Outs

The strategic playbook of most companies focuses on growth through mergers and acquisitions. But that focus on M&A deals overlooks one of the most powerful tools in their arsenal: a clear, proactive divestiture strategy. The strategic shedding of underperforming assets can be a robust engine for value creation and an essential component of dynamic portfolio management for boards, C-suite executives, and private equity funds.

“While there’s plenty of evidence to suggest divestitures can create more value for shareholders than acquisitions, only about 30% of S&P 500 firms engage in them annually,” says Emilie Feldman, professor of management at Wharton and author of Divestitures: Creating Value Through Strategy, Structure, and Implementation.

This underutilization, she posits, is partly due to a psychological bias: “M&A is associated with positive terms like ‘growth’ and ‘opportunity,’ while divestitures are linked to negative terms like ‘failing’ and ‘lagging.'”

Overcoming this misperception is critical to unlocking substantial enterprise value.

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December 8, 2023

3 Things Companies Can Learn from How Private Equity Firms Work to Maximize Value

Robert Jordan | CEO, Association of Interim Executives

Private equity firms have a simple recipe for making money: They identify companies they believe are undervalued, improve those companies, then sell them for far more than they paid to buy them in the first place.

Knowing how private equity firms work can serve as a roadmap for any company looking to improve operations and maximize value.

Start with these 3 things PE firms do following an acquisition in the lower middle market ($2-$15 million in EBITDA) to improve your own bottom line, whether you plan to continue operating your business or want to ready the company for a future PE investment.

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May 4, 2023

Search Fund Primer: Your Guide to Launching a Successful Search Fund

As the incredible success of private equity over the past couple of decades has made clear to many aspiring company owners and investors, if you can find and acquire a decent company, it’s possible to earn great returns. This has fueled a new class of individuals seeking to launch their own search funds. But how to start a search fund that wins at the acquisition game? 

This guide to starting a successful search fund answers the questions: What is a search fund? And, How can I start a successful search fund?

Let’s explore.

The Stanford Graduate School of Business Center for Entrepreneurial Studies explains search funds this way: “The model offers relatively inexperienced professionals with limited capital resources a quick path to managing a company in which they have a meaningful ownership position.”

Inexperienced professionals? Limited capital resources? It doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for success.

But it can be.

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August 29, 2022

Venture Capital 101: How to Survive and Thrive When VC Funds Dry Up

Robert Jordan | CEO, InterimExecs

Way back in 2009, the Great Recession hit America. And it didn’t pass me by.

In case you don’t remember how bad things were, let me refresh your memory: Bear Stearns failed. Lehman Brothers failed. Merrill Lynch sold for next to nothing. Countrywide Mortgage sold for pennies on the dollar. AIG had to be propped up by the federal government. General Motors went bust, was put on life support thanks to the federal government. People were worried. They wondered whether they would go to the ATM one day and no cash would come out because their bank had failed.

And me? I was at a startup called PV Powered. We were developing the next generation of commercial and utility grade solar inverters. We had about 100 angel investors and we were burning $750,000 a month when the Great Recession hit despite as much bootstrapping as possible. The next thing we knew, 98 percent of the investors had backed out, equity stake be damned, announcing they would no longer support the company. And who could blame them?

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April 5, 2022

Crypto 101: Cryptocurrency Basics for Business Executives

Crypotcurrency. NFTs. Bitcoin. Blockchain. They’re the hip new financial products and all the cool kids are talking about them. As many as 40 million have invested in them.

But what are cryptocurrencies and how will they affect the way you run your business in the future?

We talked to Stephen Meade, founder of TheBullsEyeGuy.com, who shared his expertise in a cryptocurrency 101 tutorial. In this beginner’s guide, he explains what cryptocurrencies are, explodes some myths about what they’re good for and helps you understand how you may use them to manage your business in the future.
Let’s dive in.

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March 21, 2022

Business Exit Strategy: Owners Neglect at Their Peril

InterimExecs founder Robert Jordan learned early the tremendous weight an entrepreneur must bear: “When you own the company, it’s nothing like being an employee,” he writes in exploring the sacred trust of ownership. “You might as well compare lifting up a hundred pound weight versus a feather.”

Jordan, who founded his first small business at age 26 and “hit every speed bump you could possibly think of, and then a couple more just for creativity points,” has learned a lot along the way. Among the most important lessons: while business exit planning is critical, it is usually neglected – at the owner’s and board’s peril.

Alejandro Cremades, author of Selling Your Startup: Crafting the Perfect Exit, Selling Your Business, and Everything Else Entrepreneurs Need to Know, agrees. He says that a company’s management team must add “crafting an exit strategy” to their business goals.

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October 1, 2021

Lessons from Intel Capital’s Co-Founder Avram Miller

Avram Miller, a well regarded Silicon Valley luminary, has recently published a memoir that chronicles his journey in the world of technology.

It is called The Flight of a Wild Duck, which is how Intel’s CEO, Andy Grove, referred to him because Miller would always chart his own course. This included founding Intel Capital, which became the most successful corporate venture group, and playing a leading role in the creation of residential broadband.

The book is full of interesting stories of key figures in the tech world and well as important lessons.

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March 31, 2021

4 Winning Strategies to Add Value to Portfolio Companies

“For private equity funds, the clock starts ticking the second you sign, the second you own your new portfolio company. So the Holy Grail is: how do you add superior value?” That’s how InterimExecs CEO Robert Jordan helped kick off a recent panel about adding value to portfolio companies. Sponsored by InterimExecs and hosted by Private Equity Career News publisher David Toll and John McNulty’s Private Equity Professional, panel experts shared best practices for value creation.

On the panel were Jordan, Micah Dawson, vice president of Portfolio Support at Trivest Partners; Pericles Mazarakis, managing partner of TriSpan; and Mike Zawalski, an InterimExecs RED Team member who serves in executive chairman roles with PE-backed portfolio companies.

Here, we round up the top insights from the panelists, everything from the importance of monthly operation reports to establishing trust with the business owner and investing in human capital.

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May 29, 2020

How Company Owners Can Still Win in the Current M&A Market

The COVID-19 pandemic and global economic lockdown has seen merger and acquisition (M&A) activity plummet. From $3.9 trillion in global takeovers in 2019, announced deals plunged 51% in the first quarter in the US according to Refinitiv. Uncertainties in the business and capital markets have led to buyers delaying or cutting back on their acquisition plans. But with crisis comes opportunity. Those able to navigate the new risk landscape may find compelling deals on the other side of the pandemic. Now more than ever, expert help with strategic planning, modelling out “what if” scenarios when the world frees up from lockdown, and preparing better for post-acquisition merger integration can help owners succeed in acquiring or being acquired.

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