Meet the Team: Ruby Biring

Why Private Equity?

Private Equity gives you a broad range of exposure to various sectors and very different business models; it allows you to work with, and to shape best practice specifically for that business. Everything that you do has a huge impact on the business’ performance – what comes with this is a huge sense of responsibility to make the right decisions. You don’t get that in the corporate world.

Why Livingbridge?

They embrace the fact that they don’t know what they don’t know. It doesn’t matter what happened in the past, they want a new roadmap for moving forwards, embracing the latest thinking. The team we have are all very open-minded and are incredibly ambitious on what they want to achieve.

How has the industry changed?

The process for attracting and onboarding great leadership talent in PE has become more sophisticated and is now a key pillar across most houses. The key differentiator is that we’ve been doing this for over 15 years - we’ve been able to craft the Livingbridge methodology to help portfolio companies build strong leadership capability to deliver the value creation strategy they’ve committed to. We focus on aligning the people strategy to the operating model of the business, and it is a key lever of exit value.

The best piece of advice you've given or received

The search and implementation of new talent is part science, part art. When you hire a talent partner, you’re hiring them for their judgement and as such you need to empower them. In my role, it’s important to know and understand what good leadership looks like in the context of that situation, for that specific business. We cannot just go through the motions finding top talent – we must constantly invest in our network, in new tools and methodologies and adapt them for each business.

Favourite book?

My favourite book is “A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth. I’m fascinated by post-partition India and this offers an interesting insight into that period.