Retained Executive Search & Leadership Advisory

The leadership architecture
for the AI era.

Retained executive search and leadership advisory for companies whose next eighteen months will decide whether AI becomes value — or stays a slide.

Begin an Engagement The Alignment Audit
The Thesis

Multiple expansion has left private equity. EBITDA growth is what is left, and AI maturity is now the most defensible source of that growth. Aretas Partners architects the leadership systems — the C‑suite, the operating‑partner bench, the board — that convert AI ambition into measurable enterprise value, on the timeline that capital demands. We are retained when the next eighteen months will decide the decade.

The Macro · February 2026

The lever has changed. The leadership specification has not yet caught up.

Cheap debt is gone. Multiple expansion is gone. What remains is operating performance — and AI maturity is now its dominant source. The data underneath the thesis is unambiguous, drawn from the firms whose research private equity itself underwrites.

12%
Annual EBITDA growth now required to deliver target PE returns — up from 5% in the prior cycle. Bain calls it “12 is the new 5.”
Bain Global PE Report 2026 →
5.5%
Of organizations report more than 5% of EBIT and significant value attributable to their use of AI — the rest remain in pilot purgatory.
McKinsey State of AI 2025 →
Alpha
Must be made, not assumed. Operational value creation is now the primary source of PE returns — and leadership is its operating instrument.
McKinsey Global Private Markets Report 2026 →
The Aretas Practice

Three disciplines. One mandate. Read as a sentence: align, create, change.

01

AI‑Strategy
Alignment

We translate the value-creation plan into a defensible leadership specification. Most retained search begins with a title. Every Aretas engagement begins with the question that title obscures: which archetype does the next eighteen months actually require?

02

PE Value
Creation

We are retained exclusively where capital is impatient. Private equity sponsors with portfolio companies past the four-year hold. Technology platforms whose AI roadmap is ahead of their leadership. Transformation-stage businesses whose mandate is no longer optimization.

03

Change‑Capable
Leadership

We architect the system, not the seat. C-suite, operating-partner bench, board. Engagement begins with the Aretas Alignment Audit and concludes with placement and onboarding of the executive whose archetype, judgment, and time-to-impact match the value-creation plan.

150+
Executive placements at the intersection of AI, technology & transformation leadership — prior to founding Aretas Partners

Single-partner by design. Concentrated by discipline. Selective by necessity.

Aretas Partners is run by one partner who reads every brief, attends every interview, and signs every reference letter. The model is not a constraint — it is the strategic posture. Sponsors retain Aretas when the engagement is too consequential to delegate down the firm, and when the conversation about leadership archetype is the conversation that matters most.

The next eighteen months will decide the decade.

Begin with the Alignment Audit — the diagnostic that converts strategic intent into a defensible leadership specification.

Begin an Engagement