Everyone says they have private equity experience. Half of them mean they sat in the room while someone else did the work.
Spend any time on a technology carve-out search and you see it. Every CV says PE. Almost none of them have actually owned a separation. Hit a TSA deadline. Stood there when the timeline slipped and someone had to explain to the sponsor why.
Advisory pedigree and delivery experience are not the same thing. One tells the fund what should happen. The other makes it happen, on time, under pressure, with real consequences if it does not.
This is not a small distinction, and the data backs it up. Accenture's work on PE carve-outs describes a familiar failure pattern: buyers stay too passive after signing, TSA scope is loosely defined, cost assumptions rely on benchmarks rather than bottom-up analysis, and plans that look robust at signing quickly unravel in execution. When they unravel, TSA periods extend, one-off costs escalate, and management attention shifts from value creation to firefighting the separation.
The people who prevent that are the ones who have been in the delivery seat before. They know where a separation actually breaks because they have been there when it broke. They can challenge a systems integrator's plan credibly because they have run one themselves. They can move between the boardroom and the detail without losing altitude in either.
The question to ask
If you are hiring for carve-out execution, ask the direct question. Did they advise on it, or did they deliver it? Did they write the findings, or did they own the workstream through to cutover and hypercare?
The answer changes everything. It is the difference between a report and a result.