CDR Adds Former Fortive CEO Jim Lico as Operating Advisor

CDR, a lower mid-market growth equity firm focused on industrial and technology companies, announced today that Jim Lico has joined as an operating advisor. Lico spent more than three decades at Danaher and Fortive, most recently serving as Fortive's president and CEO from 2016 until his retirement in 2023. During his tenure, he oversaw the conglomerate's transformation from a $6.2 billion industrial rollup into a $7.3 billion portfolio of professional instrumentation, industrial technologies, and advanced healthcare solutions businesses.

The hire signals CDR's continued emphasis on bringing operational heavyweights into its portfolio company ecosystem rather than relying solely on financial engineering. Lico's track record—20 acquisitions at Fortive alone, plus dozens more during his Danaher years—maps directly onto CDR's buy-and-build strategy, which targets companies generating $10 million to $100 million in revenue and scales them through a combination of organic growth initiatives and strategic add-ons.

It's also a recognition that industrial companies in the growth equity sweet spot need different expertise than software businesses do. You can't apply a SaaS playbook to a precision instrumentation manufacturer or a field services operation. Lico spent his career in exactly those environments—businesses where customer concentration matters, where regulatory compliance isn't optional, and where operational leverage comes from process discipline, not just adding headcount.

What's less clear is how CDR plans to deploy Lico across its portfolio. Operating advisors at growth equity firms often end up as high-priced consultants who parachute in for quarterly board meetings and strategic reviews. The real value comes when they're embedded enough to influence hiring decisions, shape acquisition pipelines, and challenge management teams on operational assumptions before those assumptions blow up P&L forecasts.

Lico's career arc is essentially a case study in how conglomerates extract value from industrial assets through operating model rigor. He joined Danaher in 1996 as vice president of its Videojet inkjet printing business, climbed through roles at Fluke, Tektronix, and Gilbarco Veeder-Root, and eventually became president of Danaher's test and measurement segment. That segment was spun out in 2016 as Fortive, with Lico taking the CEO role.

Under his leadership, Fortive executed a portfolio reshaping strategy that mirrored the private equity playbook: acquire subscale platforms in fragmented markets, integrate them into existing business units, apply the Fortive Business System (a derivative of the Danaher Business System, itself rooted in Toyota Production System principles), and either hold for cash flow or sell at a premium when strategic buyers emerged.

The company's largest moves included the $2.9 billion acquisition of Advanced Sterilization Products from Johnson & Johnson in 2019 and the $5.8 billion sale of its industrial technologies segment to Roper Technologies in 2022. That sale alone generated a 1.8x return for Fortive shareholders who'd held since the spinout and freed up capital for Lico to pivot the remaining business toward higher-margin software and healthcare verticals.

Lico also navigated Fortive through its own portfolio rationalization after the Vontier spinout in 2020, which separated the company's retail fueling, fleet management, and vehicle repair businesses into a standalone public entity. The result was a leaner, more focused Fortive—one that traded at a premium to industrial peers on an EBITDA multiple basis by the time Lico stepped down.

CDR isn't alone in recruiting former public company executives to its advisory bench. Vista Equity Partners has a stable of former software CEOs. Thoma Bravo has Robert Smith's Rolodex. But the industrial growth equity market has been slower to formalize operating advisor programs, in part because the playbook is harder to standardize.

Software companies scale through product-market fit and distribution leverage. Industrial companies scale through operational consistency, supply chain optimization, and customer intimacy. That requires advisors who've actually run plants, managed unionized labor, dealt with environmental permitting, and integrated acquisitions in industries where the acquirer doesn't get to fire half the workforce and migrate everything to the cloud.

Lico's expertise sits squarely in that domain. He's overseen manufacturing footprint consolidations, ERP migrations, and pricing model overhauls across businesses with vastly different end markets—from diagnostic imaging equipment to warehouse automation systems. His appointment suggests CDR is betting that competitive advantage in the lower mid-market comes less from sourcing proprietary deals and more from executing better than the next firm once the deal closes.

The data backs that thesis. According to a 2024 McKinsey study of private equity value creation, operational improvements now account for 45% of total returns in industrial buyouts, up from 28% a decade ago. Multiple arbitrage and leverage have diminished as sources of alpha. What's left is blocking and tackling: fixing pricing, rationalizing SKUs, improving on-time delivery, reducing working capital cycles.

Lico's hire reflects that shift. He's not a dealmaker. He's a builder.

One of Lico's most transferable assets is his fluency in the Fortive Business System, a continuous improvement methodology that shares DNA with the operational frameworks private equity firms love to tout—KKR Capstone, Bain Capability Network, Apollo OpCo—but was actually developed inside a public company and stress-tested across dozens of acquisitions.

Operating advisors at growth equity firms typically fall into one of three archetypes: the board member who shows up quarterly and nods approvingly, the on-call consultant who gets activated for specific projects, or the embedded operator who becomes a de facto co-CEO during the first 12-18 months post-close.

Based on Lico's background, the third model seems most likely. CDR's portfolio companies—names like ProAmpac (flexible packaging), Vallen (industrial distribution), and Kodiak Building Partners (building materials distribution)—are operationally intensive businesses where CEO coaching and M&A diligence are ongoing needs, not one-time interventions.

Lico's probably getting pulled into acquisition pipeline reviews early, helping CDR's deal teams assess whether a target's operations are salvageable or whether integration risk is being underpriced. He's likely sitting in on CEO candidate interviews, since CDR's model often involves professionalizing founder-led businesses and bringing in operators with scaling experience. And he's almost certainly reviewing 100-day plans for new platform investments, stress-testing whether management's growth assumptions hold up when you model in working capital needs, capex cycles, and customer concentration risks.

The question is whether CDR compensates him accordingly. Operating advisors are expensive—often commanding retainers plus success fees tied to specific portfolio company exits. If Lico's incentives aren't aligned with value creation at the portfolio company level, he becomes a branding asset rather than an operational one.

That matters because industrial businesses are unforgiving. You can't slash-and-burn your way to margin expansion when your largest customer does an annual RFP and your second-largest supplier just got acquired by a competitor. You need someone who's lived through those dynamics and knows which levers to pull first.

CDR's current portfolio skews toward companies in the middle innings of a buy-and-build strategy—platform businesses that have done two or three add-ons and are starting to strain under the weight of integration complexity. That's precisely where Lico's experience becomes most valuable.

Take a hypothetical portfolio company in the industrial distribution space. It's acquired five regional players in three years, each with its own ERP system, pricing model, and customer contracts. Revenue is up, but margins are flat because no one's rationalized the warehouse footprint or renegotiated supplier terms at the combined entity level. The CEO knows what needs to happen but doesn't have the playbook or the credibility with the board to execute it without blowing up customer relationships.

Since retiring from Fortive, Lico has joined the boards of Dover Corporation, a diversified industrial conglomerate with $8.1 billion in revenue, and Roper Technologies, the same company that bought Fortive's industrial technologies business. Both are serial acquirers. Both operate in fragmented markets. Both run decentralized operating models where business unit presidents have significant autonomy but are held to rigorous financial and operational KPIs.

That's not a random collection of board seats. It's a deliberate curation of roles where Lico's expertise matters most—companies that grow through M&A, operate in industrial end markets, and need directors who can challenge management on acquisition integration and capital allocation.

His move into the private equity advisory world is the logical next step. Public company boards meet four times a year. Private equity portfolio companies need help every week.

CDR manages approximately $1.2 billion in committed capital and has invested in more than 25 platform companies since its founding in 2015. Its portfolio spans building products, environmental services, specialty manufacturing, and value-added distribution—sectors where Lico spent his entire career. The firm's model is explicitly anti-financial engineering: it targets companies with strong management teams, defensible market positions, and opportunities for organic growth, then layers in acquisitions once operational fundamentals are solid.

Lico retired from Fortive in March 2023. It's now late April 2026. That's a three-year gap—longer than most executives wait before jumping into advisory roles. The delay suggests either Lico was genuinely retired and got pulled back in, or he was selective about which firm to join.

If it's the latter, CDR had to outcompete other firms for his time. That probably required a combination of compensation, cultural fit, and strategic alignment. Lico doesn't need the money. He needs interesting problems to solve and a team that actually listens to his input.

Adding Lico is a signal to sellers, management teams, and limited partners that CDR is serious about operational value creation—not just financial structuring. In a market where every growth equity firm claims to be "operationally focused," having a former Fortune 500 CEO on the advisory team is differentiation that matters.

It's especially relevant in competitive auction processes, where sellers have multiple term sheets at similar valuations. If CDR can walk into a management presentation with Lico and credibly say, "Here's the executive who's going to help you integrate acquisitions and scale operations," that's a harder value proposition to dismiss than the typical PE pitch about "strategic resources" and "network access."

For limited partners, it's a data point in CDR's favor when evaluating whether the firm can continue generating returns in a higher-rate, lower-multiple environment. Operational improvement isn't optional anymore—it's the only reliable path to alpha. Having someone with Lico's resume formalize the playbook across the portfolio is the kind of structural advantage that compounds over time.

But it also raises the bar for CDR internally. If you hire someone of Lico's caliber and he's not actively engaged with portfolio companies, it becomes obvious quickly. Operating advisors are most effective when they're given real authority—not just advisory status. That means CDR's deal teams and portfolio company CEOs need to be willing to listen when Lico pushes back on an acquisition target, a hiring plan, or a strategic initiative.

The firms that get operating advisor programs right build them into the investment process from day one—diligence, deal structuring, 100-day planning, CEO recruiting, board governance. The firms that get it wrong treat advisors like trophies to show LPs at annual meetings.

Over the past five years, there's been a visible migration of former public company CEOs and CFOs into private equity operating roles. Some of it is compensation-driven—advisory retainers plus success fees can rival public company pay without the regulatory burden. Some of it is lifecycle-driven—executives in their late 50s and early 60s who aren't ready to fully retire but also don't want another full-time CEO job.

But a lot of it is intellectual challenge-driven. Running a public company in 2026 is an exercise in stakeholder management, ESG reporting, and quarterly earnings choreography. Running—or advising—a private equity-backed company is about deploying capital, building businesses, and exiting at a premium. For operators who came up in the 1990s and 2000s, when public companies could still behave like private equity portfolios, that shift is a regression to a more familiar environment.

Lico's move is part of that pattern. But it's also distinct. He's not joining a mega-fund with 200 portfolio companies and a standing army of operating partners. He's joining a firm with a concentrated portfolio, a specific sector focus, and a model that requires deep engagement rather than superficial oversight.

That suggests he's optimizing for impact, not just compensation or brand association. The question is whether CDR's platform gives him the tools—capital, deal flow, portfolio company receptivity—to deliver it.

CDR's announcement doesn't specify the scope of Lico's role, the number of portfolio companies he'll work with, or how his compensation is structured. Those details matter. If he's spread across 15 companies, he's doing quarterly check-ins. If he's focused on three to five platforms, he's doing real work.

The other thing to track is whether CDR starts winning more competitive processes in the industrial sector. Operating advisors are valuable, but they're most valuable when they help you win deals you otherwise wouldn't—either because sellers trust the operational support or because the advisor's network surfaces proprietary deal flow.

Lico has relationships across the industrial ecosystem—suppliers, customers, intermediaries, board members. If CDR's sourcing activity shifts toward more proprietary deals or negotiated transactions in the next 12-18 months, that's a signal the hire is working.

Finally, watch for portfolio company exits. If CDR's next few realizations show margin expansion, successful integrations, and premium valuations in competitive sale processes, it'll be evidence that having a former Fortive CEO in the building made a measurable difference. If exits look the same as they did pre-Lico, it means the firm hired a credential, not a catalyst.