The private equity buyer wants to tie our leadership team's post-close retention bonuses to individual performance targets, but we run on a collaborative leadership model. How do we restructure these incentives to keep our leadership team aligned?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Private equity buyers often try to apply individual, siloed key performance indicators to leadership team members post-close. This approach is highly destructive if your team is used to running on a collaborative EOS model where everyone is aligned around company-wide Rocks and the V/TO. Individual incentives create internal competition, cause finger-pointing, and break the trust required to run a healthy business. To protect your culture and maintain performance, you must push back and restructure these retention bonuses around collective goals. Propose a team-based incentive pool that is tied directly to overall company EBITDA or key scorecard metrics that require cross-functional cooperation. Use your Accountability Chart to show the buyer how your leadership roles are integrated. Explain that success in sales depends on operations delivering, which depends on finance managing the metrics. If the buyer insists on individual metrics, align them directly with the departmental Rocks that the team already commits to each quarter in their Level 10 Meetings. This ensures that the post-close goals are a natural extension of the systems they already use, rather than arbitrary corporate targets. By structuring the incentives around collective execution, you keep your leadership team working as a cohesive unit, protect your culture, and ensure the business continues to hit the performance targets required to secure your full transaction value.