Ken, partner with experts to drive portfolio value creation plans.

The 'missing middle' of sustainable real assets is seeing a surge in capital for distributed energy and geothermal projects, yet the execution of these capital-intensive platforms often stalls at the transition from pilot to utility-scale. We are seeing a consistent bottleneck where project finance is secured, but the technical diligence and asset monitoring required to satisfy institutional investors outpaces the internal capacity of early-stage teams. Success in this niche depends on leaders who can manage the intersection of physical infrastructure and corporate equity without the overhead of a traditional utility.

Finding operators who have successfully scaled waste-to-value or microgrid projects within a private equity structure is becoming a primary hurdle for funds focused on environmental sectors. As these platforms mature, the demand for Directors of Portfolio Operations and COOs who understand both technical risk and project-level P&L has made compensation benchmarking for these specific roles a moving target. We are currently tracking how mid-market sustainable infrastructure funds are structuring incentives to attract talent from larger industrials into these more agile, 20-person investment teams.

I have spent my career placing the operators who execute against these specific value creation plans. I would be happy to share our recent market mapping of technical leaders in the distributed energy space or provide specific compensation benchmarks for portfolio operations roles. If you are weighing how to scale the leadership teams within your current energy or water investments, we can help pressure-test those requirements against the current candidate pool.