Why the RevOps Manager Role Is Mission-Critical for PE-Backed Companies: The NContracts Story
In private equity, you have exactly 20 quarters to triple a company's value. Miss your revenue targets for two quarters, spend another quarter diagnosing the problem incorrectly, and you've just burned through a year and a half without solving the root cause.
This is why the RevOps Manager role has become mission-critical for PE-backed companies. When deployed effectively, RevOps doesn't just keep your CRM clean or generate pipeline reports. It becomes the diagnostic engine that prevents catastrophic time loss and unlocks systematic value creation across the entire revenue function.
Matt Gallagher, Portfolio CRO at Hg, puts it bluntly: "The most important thing when you have a growth issue is proper diagnosis. You've got to be able to find out where the problem is. Because if you go in and you try to solve the wrong problem, you've lost all that time. In private equity, you basically have five years to triple the value of the company. You have 20 quarters to get this right. You just can't lose that many."
The revenue operations function serves as what Gallagher calls "the doctor's chart" - providing all the readings needed to diagnose properly and make decisions with precision in compressed timeframes.
But here's the challenge: most PE-backed companies struggle to find RevOps Managers who can actually deliver this level of strategic value. The market is flooded with candidates who can describe sales funnels and build dashboards, but finding leaders who can diagnose complex revenue problems, influence cross-functional teams, and operate under PE accountability standards is exponentially harder.
How RevOps Managers Unlock
Value in PE-Backed Companies
The difference between portfolio companies that hit their growth plans and those that struggle often comes down to one critical capability: the ability to diagnose revenue problems accurately and quickly.
Revenue Diagnosis Prevents Catastrophic Time Loss
When you miss your ARR targets for a couple of quarters, the clock starts ticking. Is the problem customer retention? Failure to expand existing accounts? Not enough new logo acquisition? Even if you correctly identify it as a new logo problem, you still need to diagnose whether you're failing to generate pipeline, whether pipeline isn't converting, or whether deals are slipping at close.
Without precise diagnosis, companies waste entire quarters implementing the wrong solutions. A strong RevOps Manager prevents this by establishing the metrics infrastructure and analytical rigor to pinpoint exactly where revenue is breaking down. Instead of just reporting that you're behind plan, they tell you why, where to focus resources, and how to measure whether the intervention is working.
From Reactive Reporting to Strategic Planning
One of the most valuable but underappreciated impacts of the right RevOps Manager is freeing up CRO capacity for strategic work.
When your CRO is consumed with interpreting data, building board decks, and diagnosing current problems, they can't invest time in strategic planning for two, three, four years out. This creates a time horizon problem. Your revenue leader becomes reactive instead of proactive.
The right RevOps Manager shifts this dynamic. They own the diagnostic work, the metrics interpretation, and the board-ready narratives. This elevation allows the CRO to focus on annual planning, organizational design, market expansion, and the strategic transformations needed to hit the two and three-year growth targets in your investment thesis.
Better Board Communication Accelerates Decisions
Board meetings in PE-backed companies need to accomplish more than status updates. Boards need to understand current performance, identify emerging risks, evaluate strategic options, and make decisions in compressed timeframes.
When RevOps delivers board decks with both granular metrics AND clear narratives, board members who aren't "go-to-market nerds" can quickly understand what's happening and what needs attention. This better understanding leads to faster decisions, quicker course corrections, and less time lost on ineffective strategies.
Cross-Functional Alignment Through Influence
Revenue operations sits at the intersection of sales, marketing, and customer success. For PE-backed companies undergoing rapid transformation, especially those combining recently acquired companies, this cross-functional position becomes critical for driving alignment.
The most effective RevOps Managers manage through influence. They use insights to create alignment across teams that may have competing priorities, different systems, and varying levels of analytical maturity. This "secret sauce" of change management and stakeholder influence often separates RevOps Managers who drive transformation from those who just maintain systems.
The Hidden Complexity of
Hiring a RevOps Manager
Understanding the strategic value RevOps delivers is one thing. Actually finding someone who can deliver it is another entirely.
What NContracts Needed (And Why It Was Hard to Find)
When Brian Lapidus joined NContracts as CRO of the PE-backed compliance software company, his team had the basics in place: solid infrastructure, good systems, a decent framework. But they were lacking the deeper analytical capabilities needed to get stronger data insights into the revenue GTM motions that was crucial for Lapidus to lead them in the right direction.
The role required someone who could:
Diagnose revenue problems with precision. Not just report that pipeline conversion is down, but identify whether the issue is lead quality degradation, sales execution gaps, or pricing/packaging misalignment. Look at sales velocity metrics and pinpoint whether deals are stalling at discovery, getting stuck in technical validation, or slipping at contract negotiation.
Turn data into strategic narratives. The ability to spot trends in the metrics is table stakes. The real value comes from translating those trends into compelling stories that drive executive decisions and board-level strategy. As Lapidus puts it: "We found people who are metrics driven, but we couldn't find someone who strove for data insights and could use the data to help me tell stories. And that to me is what RevOps is all about."
Manage through influence across functions. In PE-backed companies, especially those combining recently acquired entities, RevOps needs to drive alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success teams without direct authority. This requires change management skills, stakeholder influence, and the emotional intelligence to navigate organizational politics while maintaining credibility.
Deliver visibility that satisfies PE standards. Portfolio teams need specific metrics, specific reporting cadences, and specific levels of data hygiene to monitor their investment thesis. The RevOps Manager needs to understand what PE firms look for in board decks, which KPIs matter for the growth plan, and how to deliver this visibility without creating administrative burden.
Move fast under compressed timelines. When you have 20 quarters to triple value, you can't afford slow iteration cycles. The right RevOps Manager can act quickly, implement changes rapidly, and measure impact without waiting for perfect data infrastructure.
But here's the challenge most PE-backed companies face: anyone can claim they understand sales funnels or pipeline velocity. Proving they can actually diagnose complex revenue problems, influence stakeholders, and operate under PE accountability standards requires different vetting than traditional recruiting.
Matt Gallagher, Portfolio CRO at Hg, discovered this when he tried tapping his network.
"I went to my network first and just said, 'Hey, do we know anybody like an up and coming RevOps person who's not a full head of revenue ops, but is good at reading this data?' And I had two different people came back to me and said, 'If I had somebody like that, I wouldn't let you have them.'"
Mid-level RevOps talent with genuine diagnostic capabilities is scarcer than senior roles, and testing for these capabilities in interviews is notoriously difficult.
NContract Experience and Why They Chose a
Specialized RevOps Recruiting Partner
After struggling to find the right candidate internally, NContracts got a referral to RevSearch from their Portfolio CRO at Hg.
What differentiated RevSearch was their exclusive focus on Revenue Operations and deep understanding of PE-backed environments. As a firm that specializes in RevOps recruiting for PE and VC-backed companies, RevSearch brought dual fluency in both PE expectations and CRO operational needs.
“I loved the partnership with RevSearch. It felt like we were doing this together. We were in it together and that was from jump all the way through offer. For such a specialized role, having a specialized firm is important.You need that specificity in this role. This is a hard role to fill. So understanding what PE looks for, understanding what a CRO would look for, and finding the Venn diagram of those two things is important and it's hard. Working with RevSearch was really positive and a big win for us.” - Brian Lapidus
This vetting process went deeper than typical recruiting screens. RevSearch has built a rigorous RevOps assessment that tests both analytical capabilities and storytelling skills. They don't just verify that candidates can describe sales funnel analysis, they test whether candidates can actually do it and communicate insights effectively.
"Really testing the narrative," Lapidus says. "Like someone says that they can look at a sales funnel, look at sales velocity and help diagnose issues through your sales funnel. But how do they demonstrate that in an interview? Anybody can say whatever they want. Their ability to ask those pointed questions and to kind of push where they saw some maybe softness in their answers was helpful."
RevSearch's specialized approach combines our recruiting expertise with genuine passion for Revenue Operations. Every candidate goes through our "RevOps Assessment Requirement" which is a rigorous evaluation that tests for both analytical capabilities (spotting trends, diagnosing data hygiene issues, calculating pipeline metrics) and communication skills (turning KPIs into insightful stories that drive business impact).
By the time candidates reached NContracts for interviews, they'd already proven their technical chops. The company could focus on cultural fit and strategic alignment rather than basic competency validation.
The Crisis That Tested the Partnership
Only two days before their top candidate was scheduled to start, he rescinded his acceptance.
For a role they'd been searching to fill for months, with PE timelines pressing and revenue growth imperatives mounting, this was potentially catastrophic.
"It was a surprise to RevSearch. It was certainly a surprise to us," Lapidus recalls. "We were super excited about the candidate. And so when this happened, the search had been over. We had stopped searching. So we had been probably dormant for about three weeks."
What happened next revealed the difference between transactional recruiting and true partnership.
"The minute that the candidate let David and I know, he was on the phone with me," Lapidus says. "He's like, 'Listen, we're going to fix this.' Right away, he jumped right back in, they reignited our search. We had three new candidates within days."
The speed mattered because in private equity, every week without the right RevOps infrastructure means another week of potential misdiagnosis, delayed decisions, and time lost from those 20 critical quarters.
But speed alone wasn't enough. The new slate of candidates needed to be even better than the original pool.
"The person we ended up hiring has been a fantastic addition to our team. In many ways he's a better fit than the initial candidate that we had made the offer to." - Lapidus
The Business Impact of Getting the RevOps Manager Hire Right
When NContracts' RevOps Manager joined the team, the value creation showed up immediately in three critical areas:
1. CRO Capacity Freed for Strategic Work
Before the hire joined, Lapidus spent significant time interpreting metrics himself. As Gallagher explains, "You had a CRO who was good at interpreting the metrics, but it was taking a lot of his time to do that."
This created the classic time horizon problem.
With the new RevOps Manager in seat, that dynamic shifted immediately. "We can see Brian's time horizon in terms of his planning and next steps and goals for the org for the next quarter," Gallagher notes. "We can see that elevating, which was the main purpose of this hire.
This capacity shift alone likely paid for the RevOps Manager investment multiple times over.
2. Board Communication Quality and Decision Speed
The quality of board materials improved dramatically, impacting both the detail and the narrative clarity that drives faster decisions.
"The board decks not only have a great level of detail in the metrics that they're sharing so we can see what's happening today, but good call outs, good narrative that makes it easy for people who are not wonky go-to-market nerds like me to be able to read the tea leaves and see exactly what's happening," Gallagher says.
In PE contexts, this communication efficiency directly impacts value creation.
3. Sales Team Confidence and Execution
The new RevOps leader introduced a partnership framework that fundamentally shifted how NContracts approached Fortune 1000 relationships, moving from transactional selling to strategic partnerships.
"He brought a great perspective on how we work with Fortune 1000 brands," Lapidus says. "Not just the approach of selling to those brands, but how we create true partnerships at that level. That's given the sales team confidence in that process."
This wasn't just about sales methodology. It was about giving sellers the frameworks, metrics, and confidence to pursue larger deals with longer sales cycles and higher ACVs. In PE-backed companies looking to expand upmarket, this kind of transformation directly impacts ARR growth and enterprise value.
4. Unexpected Technical Leverage
The new hire brought an unexpected capability that created additional operational leverage: Salesforce administration expertise.
"He's a Salesforce administrator and it wasn't a requirement for our job, but now that he's in-seat, he's able to do things with our data and with our systems that we would have had to use our overall organizational Salesforce admin for," Lapidus explains.
This technical depth accelerated iteration cycles. Instead of waiting for shared IT resources to make system changes, the RevOps Manager could test hypotheses, implement solutions, and measure results immediately. In environments where speed of learning matters, this capability multiplied his impact.
The Cultural Fit That Amplified Business Impact
While the business impact drove the ROI, Lapidus emphasizes that the RevOps placement's cultural fit and emotional intelligence amplified his effectiveness.
"He's talented, he demonstrates our values which are hungry, humble and smart and innovative. He pushes me, he pushes our sales leadership team to think differently given the data. He manages through influence."
The change management skills showed up in how he approached the organization. "He demonstrates really, really strong change management skills. I'm not sure that they're deliberate or just how his approach to business is, but it's fantastic. He's affable, he's collaborative, he's positive."
This combination of technical capabilities plus emotional intelligence is what separates RevOps Managers who drive transformation from those who just maintain systems.
"I think at the end of the day, it's his knowledge, his skills, but also his cultural fit with us that has differentiated him in the seat," Lapidus notes.
Why RevOps Continues to Separate
Winners from Strugglers in PE Portfolios
The critical strategic question isn't whether to invest in RevOps, it's when.
The NContracts experience validates a thesis that Gallagher is applying across Hg's entire portfolio of 58 companies: RevOps capabilities are becoming the operational infrastructure that separates portfolio companies that hit their plans from those that struggle.
As more portfolio companies realize this value, competition for strong RevOps talent will only intensify. The skills that create this diagnostic capability such as data interpretation, strategic storytelling, cross-functional influence, PE fluency don't scale through training programs or technology platforms. They come from experience operating in high-accountability environments.
Companies that build RevOps capabilities proactively (ideally within the first 100 days post-acquisition) have the diagnostic infrastructure in place when problems emerge. They can skip straight to diagnosis and solution, saving 6-7 quarters of costly infrastructure building.
This is why Gallagher views RevOps investment as a systematic lever across Hg's portfolio, not just a solution for struggling companies. The proactive investment in diagnostic infrastructure becomes a competitive advantage in executing growth plans.
Strategic Lessons for PE-Backed Companies
The NContracts case offers several insights for portfolio companies and PE operators thinking about RevOps investment:
Invest in diagnostic capabilities before you have problems.
Measure success by CRO capacity shift, not just metrics quality.
Test for diagnostic capabilities, not just systems knowledge.
Look for PE fluency, not just SaaS experience.
Prioritize change management EQ alongside analytical horsepower.
Move decisively when you find the right person.
The Bottom Line on RevOps Manager
Hiring for Private Equity Portcos
As PE firms increasingly recognize that revenue operations capabilities separate portfolio companies that hit their plans from those that struggle, the competition for strong RevOps Managers will only intensify.
"It's not hard to just put a JD up for a RevOps role with all these kinds of tasks," Gallagher says. "That's easy. Anybody can do that. Getting somebody who understands and can interpret the data is trickier and you really need a careful eye in vetting those candidates to do that."
For NContracts, partnering with a recruiting firm that specializes exclusively in RevOps for PE-backed companies meant the difference between a prolonged search and finding the right leader. It meant working with recruiters who understood the PE context, could vet for both analytical depth and change management EQ, and brought domain expertise to every stage of the process.
The result: a CRO who can focus on strategic transformation rather than data interpretation, board meetings where the narrative is clear and decisions come faster, and the diagnostic infrastructure in place before problems compound.
In private equity, where you have just 20 quarters to triple a company's value, that kind of operational leverage isn't optional. It's how you win.
And finding the right RevOps Manager to deliver that leverage requires more than traditional recruiting. It requires specialized expertise in both Revenue Operations and the unique demands of PE-backed growth.
