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ECI was founded in 1976, at the very beginning of what would become the mid-market private equity industry in the UK. We feel incredibly proud of what the team has achieved over those 50 years: we are one of the longest-standing private equity firms in the UK; we’ve backed hundreds of management teams, delivering transformative transactions and exceptional returns for our investors. Here we draw on five decades of private equity history to highlight some of the changes both in the industry and our business, and our excitement about what comes next.

50 years ago this month

22 June 1976 – the first day of a long hot summer in which temperatures exceeded 32.2ºC for a record-breaking 15-day stretch. The average house price was £12,704, the average wage £72 a week and a pint of beer cost just 32p. It was the day ECI Partners was founded, forming one of the earliest linchpins of private equity in the UK.

In 1976 the UK private equity market was fragmented and institution led. There were fewer than 10 dedicated PE firms, which back then were divisions of merchant banks, government-backed institutions and investment arms, rather than the independent PE houses that have become the norm today.

ECI Partners (then Equity Capital for Industry) was established with backing from the Bank of England as one of the first institutional private equity providers bridging post-war development finance and modern buyouts. Our first fund, ECI 1, was £40m (a long way off our latest Fund, ECI 12, at £1bn).

Ken Landsberg, a former ECI Managing Partner, sets the scene: “Two oil shocks in 1974 and 1976 hit the stock market very negatively, and the Labour government decided to regulate the market to force investment. The Bank of England disagreed and helped raise a lifeboat fund to support companies, approaching 250 institutions, insurance companies and pension funds to raise a total of £40 million. A board was created from c.15 of the great and good in the city, including Tony Lorenz, and after a few years the management team agreed a change in strategy was needed. Tony suggested venture capital following his experience of what was happening in the US. The Board backed him, and in turn he became the first Managing Partner of ECI.”

Tony Lorenz went on to be one of the three founding members of the British Venture Capital Association (now UK Private Capital), and ECI was a founding member of the EVCA, its European equivalent. Their mission was to achieve industry recognition by government and regulators, to set standards and valuation norms and to achieve credibility with institutional investors.

The professionalisation of the industry

The early 1980s saw explosive growth in UK PE, driven by Thatcher era reforms, with pension funds, foundations and endowments starting to allocate to private equity, and the industry transitioning from niche to mainstream with investors like MIT and Greater Manchester Pension Fund.

Landsberg comments: “In the ‘80s we were investing across the board - startups, development capital, so-called buyouts, mid-market buyouts, big leveraged buyouts, even pre-startups, which were just a bit of paper and someone's idea. We got opportunities via the merchant banks, but you would also get calls from the street – everything from automatic bed making machines to flying cars. It was an enterprise economy, and there wasn’t much competition at the time from other investors.” This wider spectrum of opportunities led to the number of ECI’s deals increasing from 52 for the five-year period from 1980-1984, to 192 from 1985-1989.

How ECI's deal mix evolved

From generalist investor to focused mid-market growth buyout house

1980s — 8 deal categories, 244 deals

Capital invested in buyouts by decade

Buyout

Large buyout

Early stage

Expansion

Venture quoted

Start up

Aff'd funds

Other listed

1980s deals

244

across 8 categories

Buyout focus from

1990

Total buyout capital since inception

£3.3bn

† 2020s is a partial decade only — capital invested so far (2020–26).

By the end of the 1980s, the ECI team - who now had spreadsheets to analyse performance of deal types - was increasingly focussing on buyouts. Landsberg described it as a fundamental strategy change, “We shifted from a generalist to focussing on smaller or mid-market buyouts, and with it became much clearer on what we were looking for. Businesses with strong management, robust business models and sustainable growth markets.”

As the industry professionalised, more money flowed in, more Funds were set up, and ECI’s cheque size increased >750x from ECI 1 to ECI 12. It’s clear the PE industry now underpins the UK business environment that ECI was created to help support. But, in an industry where new names appear as often as familiar ones fade, how does a private equity firm last 50 years?

How to last 50 years in private equity?

1. Performance

Clearly you don’t get to last fifty years in this business without strong performance, and over ECI’s 50-year history, we’ve consistently outperformed the market, with five of our last seven realised funds in the top quartile for performance.  

ECI vs UK private capital benchmark — DPI

Distributions to paid-in by vintage year

ECI

UK private capital benchmark

+ Premium over benchmark

2010 vintage

DPI

ECI

2.3x

All

1.4x

Premium+0.9x

2015 vintage

DPI

ECI

2.5x

All

1.4x

Premium+1.1x

2018 vintage still harvesting

DPI

ECI

1.1x

All

0.4x

Premium+0.7x

ECI internal data as at June 2026. UK Private Capital benchmark as at latest reporting (June 2025).

That success doesn’t just drive our longevity; it’s created by it. Having supported over 200 management buyouts since inception - against a median of 96 total deals among the top 50 UK mid-market PE firms - and now deploying our 12th fund, where peers average just 5, the chances are we've seen a challenge or opportunity before.

It means we’ve been lucky to work with some amazing companies across our history, and nothing makes us prouder than seeing investments go on to be success stories long after our investment. Some might wonder what would have happened if ECI’s eight-year hold of Bloomsbury Publishing hadn’t ended just two years before they acquired the rights to Harry Potter... but really, we’re just proud to have been a small part of some fantastic business’s growth journey, and their long-term success is what makes this job so fun.

2. Proven succession model

According to a study by Josh Lerner and Diane Noble, PE founder tenure is unusually long at 19 years, with the study also showing that most LPs believe founders and leaders generally stay too long. Founder succession is a key question from LPs, as for many PE firms it’s unproven. 

ECI has benefited from having solved the problem early, putting in place a managed succession model in 1999. That means there are four Managing Partners, with a new one joining and another moving into a non-exec role over a cycle. That means there are constantly fresh perspectives at the table, plus a clear roadmap to a leadership role for Partners, allowing the firm to deliver steady evolution and retain its top talent.

0%

of top 50 mid-market
PE firms are founder led

ECI Partners has had five successful leadership transitions over the last 20 years and has never experienced a team spin out in its 50-year history. In comparison, 52% of the top 50 mid-market PE firms are the product of a spin out, and 26% have had a spin out since they were founded. This is an inevitable product of GPs having a founder model where one or two Founders might stay for 15-20 years in a leadership role. ECI research shows that only 38% of the top 50 UK PE firms are non-founder led.

3. Evolution and investment

You don’t last fifty years in private equity by standing still. We continue to evolve. We were the first UK mid-market private equity firm to build out a dedicated Origination team and then a value creation team in our Commercial Team. Sean Whelan comments on the founding of the Commercial Team: “We designed the Commercial Team as we recognised that great management teams don’t always have the luxury of having time or spare people to help progress new ideas. An independent team that starts working with them during the deal, right in the commercial due diligence, straight into the strategy post-investment. It helps management teams move faster and grow quicker.”

And today we’re at a great catalyst point for investors being able to help management teams leverage the opportunities of AI and scale faster than before. Not only does our AI and Data toolkit help management teams directly, but it’s transforming how both ECI and its portfolio source deals as well.

Suzanne Pike from ECI comments: “To win in today's market, it’s essential to get relationships right - with management teams, founders, advisors, and subsector experts. Additionally, you need to make the best use of data, and this is a key ECI strength. Our CRM system was established more than 35 years ago, before many PE firms were even founded. Today our Origination Team is systematised, data- and AI-driven, and we have what we believe is the best AI origination platform in the market, Amplifind™. We saw the power of what we had built, and we wanted to be able to offer that to our portfolio to support their M&A activity as well, so we launched Amplifind™360. We’re the only mid-market PE firm to offer a proprietary tool like this to their portfolio.”

Looking ahead to the next 50 years

Gareth Southgate has long acknowledged that selecting your squad is the hardest part of the Manager’s job. "Whenever you name a team… that is when you have to make the most difficult calls." Selecting who's in and who's out shapes everything that follows on the pitch.

For CEOs, it’s no different, albeit with slightly less interference from the press and pundits! Getting the right people in the right roles is the single biggest lever for growth for a business. And it’s not just about individual brilliance; it’s approaching hiring with a whole squad mentality. Here are some key lessons we’ve learned from helping management teams get the best out of their people (and we’ve loosely tied it to football as we approach the eve of the 2026 World Cup).

1. Leaders grow people; they don’t manage them

The best football managers know that their role is to set the vision, build the environment, and trust their players to deliver. The same is true of top leadership, and Naz Dossa, CEO of Peoplesafe referenced the quote from Jack Welsh, Chairman and CEO of General Electric, to bring this to life: "Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others." Great football managers leave no room for doubt on their expectations – the values and standards for the team – but it’s about inspiring them rather than managing them. As Alex Ferguson stated, "My job was to make everyone understand that the impossible was possible. That's the difference between leadership and management."

Often this is one of the more challenging lessons for CEOs, who might have been able to leverage manager skills to get a business to £10m EBITDA, but need to evolve those skills as it becomes a £30m+ EBITDA business. If your Board don’t feel empowered and trusted to make decisions and execute on a top-level vision rather than instructions, then it will find it hard to scale.

2. It’s a team sport, and a team trophy

No World Cup is won by an individual, and for every Mbappé golden boot highlight reel, there is a midfielder who did a lot more hard yards. It’s why managers focus on making sure every player in that squad knows their contribution mattered, not just the eleven who started the final or the striker who scored the winning goal.

It’s tempting in business too, to lionise the rainmaker in sales, or even to have a ‘what-the-founder-says-goes’ mentality. The best businesses are those where leadership recognises that brilliant team members excel at what they do best and success is celebrated across the business. This often is something that needs to be deliberately set up – if left to our own devices, we tend to celebrate the shiniest new logo wins and remember the loudest voices. We’ve seen companies deliver this through end-of-year internal awards covering not just commercial milestones but also personal goals. At Ciphr, Sion Lewis shares regular CEO Insights on Linkedin, communicating success and milestones from across the business, shining a light on what teams are doing and some of the great successes and challenges. As our keynote speaker at our ECI Unlocked Performance Summit highlighted: “Messages take a long time to land, so if you think you’re over-communicating, you’re probably at about the right level.” Doing this well boosts engagement, which leads to better collective results.

3. A great individual can still throw off a great team

For every story of a talisman taking their country to glory, there’s a cautionary tale of a world-class talent disrupting the dressing room. Think back to France in 2010, when an argument between striker Nicolas Anelka and manager Raymond Domenech led to his expulsion, and the whole team boycotting a training session in protest. Or a player who is phenomenal on the pitch but rubs players up the wrong way off them (Maradona might not be who you want around your Boardroom table). The conductor Phil Meadows touches on this when he talks about the conditions great teams need to perform, which translates across music, football and business: "When working with virtuoso musicians (or highly skilled teams), risk is accompanied by vulnerability. People open themselves up to criticism, putting their insecurities on display to develop their skill sets or contribute something new… People who feel secure in their risk-taking, are more likely to contribute groundbreaking ideas." A single star who makes the rest of the orchestra feel they can't speak up shuts that environment down, and the music suffers for it.

This can be one of the least discussed challenges of scaling a team. A brilliant hire who doesn’t fit well with the broader dynamic. At ECI, we look at psychometrics alongside hiring roles, as it’s not just what an individual can do, but how they will work alongside the team. In the book Mastering Uncertainty, Matt Watkinson and Csaba Konkoly highlight that CEOs need to be cognisant of this. "Surround yourself with people who have different skills and behaviours to you, rather than those who will support or replicate your own outlook." The right question to ask of any standout candidate isn't just "are they brilliant?" but "will they make everyone around them better?”

4. Build the pipeline

It isn’t just about who is in front of you today; top-performing teams think years ahead about their academy pipeline. Football Managers are all too aware of this dynamic, spotting and backing talent early, with the likes of Jude Bellingham progressing through the England age-group ranks from under-15 level upwards before stepping into the senior squad as a teenager.

Now, we’re not expecting CEOs to attend graduate fairs any more than Thomas Tuchel is going to go to your five-a-side game, but strong People functions in businesses should have good visibility of the high performers in their business with potential to progress into C-Suite roles. As Tamsin Webster, Head of People at ECI, comments, modern HR is about "unlocking human potential and creating a high-performance culture," and a critical part of that is using data on engagement, performance and retention to spot who's ready for the next step. Otherwise, a vacancy ends up forcing the question, and teams aren’t able to absorb the loss of a key hire without losing momentum. If you have credible next-generation talent, you have people stepping up who already have a solid understanding of your company, its culture and processes. Having a view of the roadmap also creates a better understanding of gaps and where teams need to invest.

Neal Griffith, ECI's CFO, discusses his unconventional route into private equity - from law degree to interning at a bank at the start of the global financial crisis -  and how he’s learnt to not catastrophise.

Q: You studied law, worked at a bank and then moved into private equity. What has driven your career decisions?

Over the years I have been asked a lot why I read law to then not pursue it as a career. The answer is that I didn’t have a concrete plan at 18 years old to be a lawyer, but rather considered that the degree sounded like a good one that would provide career optionality. I hoped it would teach me valuable skills around how to think critically, write succinctly and articulate thoughts clearly. I’m certainly not perfect at all of these things but I do think the degree helped! I frequently use those skills now in many aspects of my role.

Having graduated from a good university I had to think about what was next. I had done the usual law vacation scheme placements during my time at university but wasn’t sold on it nor had I received any lucrative training contract offers! Added to this was the fact that it was 2007 and the murmurings of a growing and global financial crisis were getting louder. After a bit of soul-searching I decided to take up the offer of a 12-month graduate internship in New York with the private banking arm of Citigroup. I suppose it was during this period that I realised the financial world did really suit me. The end of my year coincided with the demise of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, though, and it was then clear that we really were in the midst of a proper crisis.

Given I had all but settled on staying within the financial sector in some guise I set about trying to get a job within banking back in the UK. I dare not admit the number of times I was met with the phrase ‘we’re firing, not hiring’. A bit of sage advice from family members about the sense in getting a professional qualification eventually landed and I started my chartered accountancy qualification with Grant Thornton in Belfast in 2009.

So, a slightly more circuitous route than some of my peers but one that I now look back on with a great deal of fondness and appreciation for the lessons learned during one of the more volatile periods in recent history.

Q: And how did you end up in private equity specifically?

Complete luck, really. A colleague in Belfast who was training alongside me at Grant Thornton passed on a message from a recruiter about an entry-level finance role at a private equity house called Vision Capital in London. He wasn't interested but knew I had been talking about moving to London so shared my details. I got the job!

At that point I knew very little about private equity, I was just looking for the next step after audit and wanted to move to London. It ticked all the boxes and everything developed from there.

Q: What made you want to join ECI, and has it been as you expected?

A few things stood out. The culture felt distinctive, the track record and the long-established nature mattered. There is a lot of embedded experience here, and the functions and processes are well-established and tested. I also knew I’d have a proper handover with Philip, my predecessor, which I felt was a significant, and rare, benefit.

I realise it may sound a bit trite, but what I was sold during the interview process has materialised. I suppose one piece that we perhaps had not fully anticipated is the extent to which I would be wearing an AI hat within the firm. Well, two hats – the hat of someone who wants ECI to innovate and grow, and a compliance hat that is responsible for governance and data security. It’s a genuine stretch, but a really enjoyable one, the kind of stretch that ends up being one of the more interesting parts of the job.

Q: What do you think are the key attributes for someone looking to be a CFO in this sort of industry?

Comfort with complexity is essential. There are a lot of grey zones and you need to be at ease with that. Resilience matters too – things don’t go to plan more often than most CFOs would care to admit. And more than anything else, a good team. You can't do this job alone. We have strong internal teams, good advisors and good administrators, all of whom are essential.

I don’t think there’s a particular route in to the role and I view my own as having certain benefits. It forced me not to give up, but it also meant I built a broader set of skills than I might have done through a different path.

Finally, be prepared for the downs as well as the ups – this is a long-term industry and the best people within it tend to have that long-term perspective.

Quick Fire with Neal: 

What was your first ever job

Caddying at Royal Portrush Golf Club. It was a great job for learning to talk to people from all walks of life. I was 17, and I kept doing it through my university holidays. In hindsight it was excellent training for a career that turned out to be quite relationship-driven. It’s for others to judge whether I was actually any good at the caddying part!

Beach holiday or city break?

City break is my default, but these days, with children, beach holiday wins.

What's your best and worst use of AI so far?

The best is probably when we used it to dig quite deeply into a pretty specific legal point, which surfaced some nuanced alternative thinking that allowed us to discuss with the lawyers and ultimately achieve a better outcome. The worst was when we were repeatedly trying to get Copilot to scrape a file and it kept returning the wrong one. There’s something uniquely frustrating about it saying, ‘You’re right, my mistake, here is the correct file’ and returning, yet again, the wrong one.

What's the best piece of advice you've received?

It came from my dad, after I got some exam results that weren't what I had hoped for. He said: “It's not what you wanted, but just remember you're the same person today that you were yesterday and will be tomorrow. You'll get past it”. I'd always been fairly good at things up to that point, so it was the first time something had gone off-plan. I was catastrophising well beyond what was warranted. That advice – or really, that perspective – has stuck with me. Things still go off plan, and I'm still not perfect at dealing with that, but I'm better than I was.

What would your colleagues be surprised to learn about you?

That I do actually have a sense of fun! I think when you join a well-established organisation in a role like mine you probably lean with your more serious side. I hope that they have seen I do have a more fun side as well!

In the early stages of your business, culture tends to look after itself. The team is small, they joined because they are engaged with the mission, and they naturally absorb values from the founding team. But as headcount grows, and people start working in different offices and regions, how can companies keep that shared purpose and culture?

This was one of the topics at our ECI Unlocked: Performance Summit, where our keynote speaker Ronan Harrington described it as "like a DNA strand unravelling." Ronan discussed how companies can protect their “secret sauce” as they scale, and here are 4 key things to think about:

1. Codify and communicate your “secret sauce” early?

The first step is making the invisible visible. The purpose, values and behaviours you want within your organisation need to be defined. Most large companies like Netflix and Spotify have a written down cultural design, incorporating these items alongside the company’s strategic priorities.

This then enables you to reiterate and embed the behaviours through onboarding, managerial actions, performance reviews. If you want your people to be trusted, you need to make sure managers are setting that example and not micromanaging. If you have a ‘move fast, break things’ culture as at Facebook, you can’t combine it with managers who blame team members when things go wrong. Defining what it means to work at your company is the first step to ensuring it’s ready to scale with you.

2. Culture is communication

Every new starter needs to buy into your culture. While the hope might be that your company culture is so strong they will just absorb it, this is often where cultural drift happens. Don’t forget to talk about your culture, it should be something to be proud of! Messages take a long time to land, so if you think you’re over communicating, you’re probably at about the right level.

People want to hear from leaders within the business. For example, Sion Lewis, CEO of Ciphr, regularly shares CEO Insights on LinkedIn, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the business but also communicating to Ciphr’s people about the thinking behind various product or organisational decisions. This serves a direct line of communication but brings to life their value of Authenticity to life, Sion drawing on learnings from previous roles and openly sharing both successes and areas for growth.

3. Integrate acquisitions and new geographies with care 

M&A and international expansion are a turning point for company culture. Your culture is now competing with an already established way of working, a distinct localised set of values, and sometimes with international M&A, both.

Integration in either instance should never be incidental. It’s important to have trusted leaders in place within your organisation who understand the company culture and can percolate that through new offices or geographies, and to act quickly on negative behaviours that don’t reflect your business.

As Gurman Hundal, Founder of MiQ, recognised when they expanded into the US, you have to commit fully. Gurman moved to the U.S. to spearhead MiQ’s expansion and ensured that the values and culture of the ‘mothership’ were reflected. For Gurman, this meant a culture where mistakes were not discouraged, something all the more important as a satellite office where people needed to be trusted. MiQ also established a set of “anti-values” - behaviours such as ego or territorialism which were discouraged to foster a collaborative environment.

4. Reinforce culture and equip everyone to defend it

Ronan describes how one of the problems with company culture is that no one is ever formally mandated to protect it. That is why it requires everyone at a local level to feel invested enough to do it anyway. To do this you need to make sure values are made tangible through recognition and issues or feedback can be effectively surfaced.

It should be all staff, not just leaders who are engaged on this. And it should be a deciding factor in hiring, and firing, decisions. It is important to steer clear of what Ronan calls the “brilliant jerks” problem – people who deliver results but flatten morale or introduce bad behaviours into the wider pool. Toxic rockstars are difficult to manage as they bring in revenue and senior leaders often look the other way. It is important not to fall into this trap, cultural damage compounds over time, and if you haven’t defined and stuck to what you won’t tolerate, and the company culture that you initially set out to achieve may well have drifted.