Latticework Capital Adds Four Investment Pros in Growth Push

Latticework Capital Management, the Los Angeles-based private equity firm, has added four investment professionals across its deal sourcing and portfolio operations functions — a talent build-out that effectively doubles the firm's core team as it scales its mid-market platform. The hires span roles from origination to value creation, signaling the firm's intent to raise deployment velocity while tightening its grip on portfolio performance.

The new team members include Kaitlyn Crnkovich as Principal, Peter DeRosa as Senior Associate, Caitlin Kirshner as Senior Associate, and Aidan McGrath as Associate. The firm announced the additions on January 15, 2025, positioning them as foundational to its next phase of growth following the launch of Latticework Fund II — details of which remain undisclosed but are expected to push the firm deeper into control buyouts of founder-led services businesses.

For a firm that's been quietly operating since 2017 with a lean team, the quadruple hire isn't just headcount expansion — it's a statement about where Latticework sees bottlenecks and where it plans to win. Crnkovich and DeRosa join the investment side, tasked with deal flow and execution. Kirshner and McGrath land in portfolio operations, where the messy work of actually improving companies happens.

The move comes as mid-market PE firms face a dual mandate: find deals in an overheated market, and make sure the ones you've already closed don't blow up. Latticework's approach — adding capacity on both fronts simultaneously — suggests it's betting it can do both at once. Whether that's optimistic or overdue depends on what's sitting in the portfolio.

Kaitlyn Crnkovich steps into the Principal role with a background in corporate development and M&A advisory, most recently at Raymond James. Before that, she spent time at Deloitte in transaction services — the kind of foundational training that teaches you how to read a balance sheet and spot the footnotes that matter. Her hire suggests Latticework is elevating its diligence function and wants someone who's seen enough deal structures to know when something's clever and when it's just risky.

Peter DeRosa joins as Senior Associate from Citizens, where he worked in commercial banking. That's not a traditional PE pedigree, which makes it interesting. Commercial bankers understand cash flow in a way that pure investment bankers sometimes don't — they've underwritten actual operating businesses, not just sold them. If Latticework is sourcing deals from relationship-driven channels rather than just auction processes, DeRosa's network and credit lens could matter more than a Goldman stint.

On the portfolio side, Caitlin Kirshner arrives from EY-Parthenon, the strategy consulting arm of Ernst & Young. She's joining as Senior Associate focused on operations — the role that tends to mean "figure out why EBITDA isn't growing as fast as the model said it would." EY-Parthenon is known for post-deal value creation work, which means she's likely spent the last few years embedded in portfolio companies trying to fix supply chains, renegotiate vendor contracts, or rebuild sales teams. That's real work, not deck-building.

Aidan McGrath rounds out the new class as Associate, also in portfolio operations. His background is less disclosed in the announcement, but the timing of his hire — alongside Kirshner — suggests Latticework is building a true ops team rather than just assigning deal professionals to portfolio duty when things get messy. That's a structural choice: it means the firm believes operational improvement is a repeatable muscle, not a one-off rescue mission.

Latticework Capital targets founder-owned and family-run businesses in the lower and core mid-market, typically with enterprise values between $25 million and $150 million. The firm's stated focus is on services businesses — think professional services, business services, niche industrial services — where operational improvement and professionalization create value more reliably than growth alone.

This is the part of the market where deals don't show up in Pitchbook headlines. Companies aren't running formal auctions. Owners are deciding whether to sell based on relationship, timing, and whether they trust the buyer to treat their employees well. It's a sourcing game as much as a capital deployment game, which explains why Latticework is hiring for both origination (Crnkovich, DeRosa) and value creation (Kirshner, McGrath) at the same time.

The firm's model depends on finding businesses that are profitable but undermanaged — companies where the founder is still approving every purchase order and the CFO is also the head of HR. In those situations, the playbook isn't financial engineering. It's installing systems, hiring a real finance team, digitizing workflows, and maybe making a few bolt-on acquisitions if the market's fragmented enough.

That's exactly the kind of work Kirshner and McGrath are being brought in to execute. And it's why DeRosa's banking background — built on underwriting relationship-driven deals rather than competitive auctions — might be more relevant than a traditional M&A resume.

The table above breaks down where each hire is being slotted — and it's a clean 2x2 split. Two people to find and close deals, two people to make sure those deals don't implode. That's not accidental.

Latticework didn't disclose the size of Fund II, but the timing of these hires — early 2025 — suggests the firm either just closed the fund or is deep into deployment. Either way, it's adding capacity at a moment when mid-market deal volume is still suppressed compared to the 2021 peak, but competition for quality assets remains brutal.

While headlines focus on mega-funds like Apollo and KKR launching credit arms and raising $20 billion funds, the real talent scarcity is in the mid-market. There aren't enough people who know how to source proprietary deals, underwrite without perfect information, and then roll up their sleeves to fix what's broken post-close. The skills are different. The comp is lower. The upside is harder to sell.

Latticework's hires reflect that scarcity. Crnkovich's M&A advisory background, DeRosa's commercial banking experience, and Kirshner's consulting tenure are all adjacent to traditional PE — but not redundant with it. These are people who've done the work that comes before and after the deal, not just the deal itself.

And they're being hired into a market where the traditional PE career path — analyst to associate to VP at a mega-fund — is overcrowded and increasingly commoditized. Mid-market firms like Latticework can offer faster advancement, broader responsibility, and a closer connection to actual company-building. The trade-off is less brand prestige and smaller carry checks. Whether that trade-off is attractive depends on what you want your career to look like in 10 years.

For Latticework, the bet is that hiring people who've already worked adjacent to PE — rather than trying to poach from larger funds — gives them professionals who are hungry, operationally fluent, and less likely to bounce after two years when Goldman calls.

It's also cheaper. A Principal from Raymond James costs less than a VP from Blackstone, even if the skill sets are comparable. In a mid-market fund where management fees are measured in millions, not tens of millions, that math matters.

The decision to hire two dedicated portfolio operations professionals — Kirshner and McGrath — signals that Latticework views value creation as a distinct function, not something deal teams do on the side. That's increasingly common among mid-market firms, but it's still not universal.

The traditional model had deal professionals managing portfolio companies while also sourcing new deals. That works when markets are forgiving and companies mostly run themselves. It breaks when interest rates rise, growth slows, and the margin for error narrows. Suddenly, every portfolio company needs hands-on support, and your deal team is too busy firefighting to source anything new.

Reading between the lines of a press release is usually a fool's errand, but the structure of these hires tells a story. Latticework is preparing to deploy capital faster than it has in the past — hence the investment-side hires. It's also preparing for those deployments to require more operational support than a lean team can provide — hence the ops hires.

That suggests the firm expects to be busy. Either Fund II is large enough to demand a higher deal cadence, or the existing portfolio is complex enough to require dedicated operational resources, or both. The firm hasn't disclosed its current portfolio in detail, but if it's been buying founder-led services businesses since 2017, there's likely a mix of companies at different stages of professionalization — some thriving, some stuck, some in need of serious intervention.

The other reading: Latticework is professionalizing its own operations. Moving from a small, founder-driven team to a multi-layered organization with distinct functional roles is a milestone for any PE firm. It means the partners are delegating more, which can unlock growth — or introduce new coordination costs. The next year will reveal which.

One thing that's conspicuously absent from the announcement: any mention of exits. If Latticework were gearing up for a string of realizations, you'd expect to see that highlighted alongside the team expansion. Its absence suggests the firm is still in accumulation mode — building the portfolio, not harvesting it. That's fine if the fund is young. It's a yellow flag if it's not.

Los Angeles isn't New York or San Francisco when it comes to private equity density, but it's quietly become a meaningful hub for mid-market and growth equity firms. Latticework's expansion is part of a larger pattern: firms that can operate outside the traditional coastal PE ecosystems often find less competition for talent, better access to relationship-driven deal flow, and portfolio companies that aren't getting pitched by ten other funds every quarter.

The city's proximity to both tech (via Southern California's aerospace and tech clusters) and traditional services businesses (logistics, healthcare, business services) gives firms like Latticework a broader hunting ground than a pure-play software fund or an industrial-only shop. That diversification matters in a market where sector rotation is happening faster than ever.

What Latticework hasn't disclosed — and what would actually tell us whether this team expansion is strategic or reactive — is the fund size, the deployment pace, and the portfolio composition. Without those numbers, it's hard to assess whether four hires is ambitious or just catching up.

Here's what we don't know but should watch for:

If Latticework announces three new platform deals in the next six months, the investment-side hires look prescient. If the next year is quiet on the deal front, it suggests the hires were more about portfolio support — which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's a different story.

The same logic applies to the ops team. If Kirshner and McGrath are embedded in portfolio companies within weeks of joining, it suggests there's a backlog of operational work waiting for them. If they spend the first six months building playbooks and processes, it suggests the firm is investing ahead of need — a luxury, but also a risk if the portfolio doesn't grow as planned.

Latticework's team expansion is a data point, not a trend. But it's a data point that reflects broader tensions in mid-market private equity right now. Firms are trying to scale without losing the relationship-driven, operationally intensive model that differentiated them in the first place. They're hiring for roles that didn't exist five years ago because the old model — lean teams, heavy partner involvement, high-touch everything — doesn't scale past a certain fund size.

The challenge is cultural as much as operational. Adding layers between partners and portfolio companies changes how information flows, how decisions get made, and how quickly problems get surfaced. Some firms handle that transition well. Others end up with the cost structure of a larger fund and the decision-making speed of a startup run by committee.

For Latticework, the next 18 months will reveal which path it's on. The hires are the setup. The deals, the exits, and the portfolio performance are the punchline.

One thing's certain: if you're a mid-market services business in Southern California and you've been getting cold emails from PE firms, there are now four more people who might be sending them.

Track Latticework's deal activity over the next two quarters. If the investment team is growing, they should be deploying. If deployment doesn't accelerate, the hires were either defensive (portfolio support) or anticipatory (building for a fund that hasn't fully closed yet).

Watch for operational upgrades at existing portfolio companies. If Kirshner and McGrath are doing their jobs, we should see signs: new C-suite hires, bolt-on acquisitions, system implementations, or process overhauls. Those won't always be public, but LinkedIn and industry publications eventually surface them.

Pay attention to whether Latticework starts showing up in competitive processes it historically avoided. If DeRosa and Crnkovich are effective, the firm should be winning deals that never made it to a banker's desk — the kind of proprietary sourcing that separates mid-market winners from everyone else fighting over the same auction processes.

And finally, watch the next round of hires. If Latticework adds more people in the next 12 months, it confirms this is a scaling phase, not a one-time build-out. If the team stays static, it suggests the firm is testing whether four new hires can actually move the needle before committing to further expansion.