Helping private equity think differently about human capital.
An independent advisory practice serving private equity sponsors and the CFOs who lead their portfolio companies.
Most executive search failures in private equity are not executive problems. They are structural ones.
Sponsors skip the front end. The problem is not fully defined before the search begins. EQ is treated as a soft variable rather than the leading indicator it is. Search providers fill the seat. The deal team moves on.
Then, eighteen months later, the executive is replaced and everyone wonders what went wrong.
HBF Advisors exists to help private equity sponsors and their CFOs close that gap. Not by adding process. By thinking differently about it from the start.
The practice.
Two areas of focus. Both rooted in nearly two decades of pattern recognition in middle market private equity.
Private Equity Talent Advisory
Working alongside deal teams and operating partners on the human capital decisions that actually move value. Problem definition before searches launch. Candidate assessment beyond the resume. Read on management teams pre and post close. Honest counsel on the questions search firms will not raise.
CFO Coaching & Counsel
Confidential support for sitting CFOs in PE-backed environments. New-in-seat acceleration through the first year. Career strategy for senior CFOs deciding their next move. A trusted outside voice for the conversations a CFO cannot have with the sponsor, the CEO, or the board.
Built on the inside of nineteen years in CFO search.
HBF Advisors was founded by Barry Toren, who spent nineteen years at Korn Ferry specializing in CFO search within middle market private equity before launching the firm.
That tenure produced a clear point of view: the structural gap in how PE firms approach human capital is not an awareness problem. It is an operating model problem. Most sponsors know what good looks like. The firms that have built embedded human capital practices have made it part of how they invest. The rest have not.
HBF Advisors is currently on retainer with a major Canadian private equity firm, supporting CFO coaching, portfolio talent advisory, and live executive searches.
A conversation, not a pitch.
If something here resonates, the next step is a thirty-minute call. No deck. No proposal. Just the conversation that should have happened months earlier.
barry@HBFadvisors.com