Skin in the Game. Jim Gilreath
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of their impact on you.
If married, mention circumstances of your meeting, any commonalities and what brought you and your spouse to commit your lives together.
Describe your reasons for doing so, if you left your home area.
What were the specific motivations, whether for employment opportunities including functional learnings in line with your goals and preferred function exposure to engineering, finance, or sales and marketing?
Briefly touch on your military background.
As you explain your employer(s) and various job titles you’ve held, mention significant accomplishments, your collective positive job performances, and results that led to promotions.
Did you ever pursue a specific career enhancing job opportunity?
Describe any special training you mastered such as Lean Manufacturing and how you used it to produce targeted company objectives.
Later Employment Years
This should include titles, accomplishments, setbacks, lessons, promotions, awards, special training, challenges, problems solved, examples of leadership traits, and teamwork examples. Connect your career progressions to employer profits, functional developments, and reasons for changing each job. Add a short paragraph about your wife and kids (avoid using their names).
Certifications and Awards
Hobbies
Volunteer Activity
Don’t worry about the length of the first draft. Have a trusted colleague or former mentor look it over and be frank about their critique. Give it an overnight review to settle and make necessary word reductions. Re-read it for action items and insert numbers whenever possible such as sales, growth, EBITDA, cost reductions figures, percentage increases, labor rate reduction, profit margin improvements, and value added. That’s why it’s called the Indiana Jones Bio!
Gilreath Consultancy typically presents PEG clients the fully vetted backgrounds, including exhibits and reference checks on three to four search candidates in separate three ring binders. Many client interviewers take a quick look at the contents of each candidate binder before they interview our candidates, and then close it. In comes the job candidate to the interview with the client representative. This includes Fortune 500 corporate search assignments I used to handle as well as skin in the game searches for PEGs. They say, “Tell me about yourself.” Each candidate’s resume portrays their public profile with lots of adjectives, not too many metrics, dollar signs, EBITDA, and dashboard KPIs.
I wanted my skin in the game candidates to offer the clients more than just their elevator pitch in response to “tell me about yourself”. In manufacturing and chemical processing industries, managers/executives tend to be conservative and do not automatically start bragging about their exploits, skills and achievements. Writing out your life results, warts and all, gives most managers and executives more confidence in themselves. I have each C-Level SITG candidate complete their IJ Bio and become accustomed to communicating their bio highlights naturally, confidentially and succinctly. More than once, if need be. Prepare to be asked, “Tell me about yourself” unless you’re Tom Brady or Jack Welch.
CHAPTER 5
Your cover letter to a PEG firm Partner should state that you are highly qualified for and interested in a skin in the game position with an appropriate portfolio company owned by this PEG. Based on your research, you note that this PEG owns a number of portfolio companies in industries and markets where you have proven expertise in growing certain competitor companies to achieve profitable sales, EBITDA, acquisition integrations, and successful liquidity events.
This cover letter presumes you have researched your PEG targets, including their portfolio companies. You should inform your targeted PEG audience if you have proven experience in growing a company or companies that compete with one or more of the PEG’s portfolio companies.
Targeted PEGs you are pursuing for skin in the game senior jobs will typically be interested in proven senior executives from related or competitor middle market portfolio companies, especially those seeking to invest some of their own money in a business whose equity they can own, then they can help it grow profitably towards a typical successful exit in five years or less. PEG target firms also react well to you mentioning upfront that you have worked successfully for XYZ PEG firm in one of their prosperous LBO deals, putting your own skin in the game.
Your cover letters to targeted PEG firms must communicate any of your past company achievements depending on your line management function.
Show if you have:
Helped add value
Increased cash flow or improved sales
Introduced new products
Opened new markets
Profitably outsourced production
Reduced debt
Kept Capex manageable
Met all covenants
Improved EBITDA
Other typical PEG interests include integrating acquisitions, reducing inventory, eliminating duplicate facilities and unprofitable products, and measuring key performance indicators weekly. Be sure to mention any past successful portfolio company employment under a PEG. Your experience will get the quick attention of your targeted PEG.
Your cover letter should state your functional expertise when you are seeking to partner with a like-minded PEG. If you know other like-minded functions in which you are also qualified and in which you are interested, state that as well. Indicate metrics, product line profitability dollars saved, percentages of EBITDA increased where applicable to zero in on your level of profit improvement, cost reduction or sales increase, and function as leader or team member.
If you say you have P&L experience, make sure it’s full P&L line management experience as a CEO/President/GM over Sales, Marketing, Operations, and CFO. Do your homework before you write your cover letter. Know your PEG audience, portfolio companies, their business model, and backgrounds of Partners you are emailing. In chapter 6 I cover how to approach PEG targets.
If you have a profile on LinkedIn, you might include the link as you are ending your cover letter. Personally, I prefer quality ivory bond paper snail mail to emails. The end result is a greater likelihood of your cover letter and resume being read by your target PEG audience. The better the fit between your background and experience to the targeted PEG, the more you should use the US Postal service and an ivory bond paper letter and envelope for your message and resume. It’s also critically important to have an accurate targeted recipients list. Such a list should have correct titles, spelling of names, and accurate addresses. Just because your peers predominantly use emails in their job approaches doesn’t mean you should as well. Check out chapter 9 and Bob Bronstein, “blast mailer” friend of mine.
SKIN IN THE GAME JOB SEARCH RESUMES
Finding a good senior executive job is more difficult than it used to be in the current economy. Furthermore, it is important that you are comfortable with current communication technology, including social media. Most PEG hiring authorities will ask you to email your resume before they will talk with you, much less interview you.
You need to have a very impactful resume considering the potential value of a SITG executive position that will be charged with growing a PEG’s portfolio company. Hopefully your resume will cause targeted PEG Partners to contact you, or meet you about a confidential portfolio company