The morning I started my first CEO role, I already knew the statistic. 75% of PE-backed CEOs get replaced before exit.
A seasoned executive had told me over lunch a few weeks earlier. He had lived through it himself. He said it without drama, the way people say things that are uncomfortable but true. I filed it. Then walked straight into the role.
For five years I ran Coryton Advanced Fuels, backed by Lyceum Capital. Revenue grew from £10m to over £20m. EBITDA went from £2.1m to £4.3m. The team got stronger every year. In the twelve months before COVID the business was up 35% year on year. The strategy we had set out was working, visibly, in every direction.
I did not think I needed help.
Something felt slightly off
In year three, something felt slightly off. Not a crisis. Not a board meeting that went badly. Just a persistent, quiet sense that the full picture of what I was doing and what I was capable of was not landing the way it needed to.
I told myself the performance would close it. I told myself I just needed to nail the next set of results. I told myself I had been in harder situations than this and figured them out alone.
Every one of those sentences felt true.
When the pressure came
When COVID arrived and the PE firm needed to make a decision quickly, the performance did not protect me. The business had not failed. Not even close.
But the confidence in me as a leader was not strong enough to make removing me feel like a risk. I had built a great business. I had not built an equally strong position inside the relationship that would ultimately decide my future in it.
Those are different things. And I had spent five years confusing them.
The conversations you are not in
The board stopped worrying about whether you can run the business a long time ago. What they are measuring now is judgment under pressure. Composure when things are complicated. Whether they would back you through something they cannot yet see coming.
That assessment is not made in board meetings. It is made in the conversations that happen after board meetings, in cars, over calls, between the people who hold your future in the hold period. You are not in those conversations.
And there is almost no one in your professional world positioned to tell you what is being said in them. The chairman is inside the governance structure. The operating partner is part of the evaluation. Peer CEOs are curating the same narrative you are. Your leadership team is reading your signals, not correcting them.
What I would tell myself now
An elite runner never sees their own stride. It gets filmed, slowed down, and read back to them from the outside, because the thing holding them back is almost always invisible from inside the run.
The question worth sitting with is not whether you are capable of figuring this out alone. You almost certainly are. The question is whether the information you need to figure it out is actually available to you right now.
First published on LinkedIn, 12 June 2026. Adapted for this site.