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Jason Phillips

Senior PartnerBay Area

Partners with private equity firms and their portfolio companies to drive performance and generate alpha across the full investment lifecycle

Jason leads McKinsey’s Private Equity & Principal Investors Practice on the West Coast of the United States and leads our global effort to help private-equity investors and portfolio company leaders drive above benchmark performance.  He also convenes our engagement with private equity operating groups through a series of thematically-focused operating partner roundtables and bi-annual benchmarking surveys.

Jason’s work focuses on helping private equity-owned portfolio companies achieve their full potential, either through thematic transformations of specific functional areas or holistic cross-enterprise performance transformations. He also serves private equity firms on due diligence, strategy, organization and operations topics.

Examples of Jason’s recent client work include leading holistic performance transformations of private equity-owned portfolio companies in the transportation, oilfield services, and ecommerce sectors, driving commercial and operational improvements to deliver increases of more than 50 to 100 percent in EBITDA and enable commensurate enterprise value appreciation.

Jason has deep experience serving companies across several industries including transportation and logistics, aerospace and defense, industrials, building materials, consumer products, e-commerce, furniture, home goods, oilfield services, and retail, among others. Functionally, he advises on topics including strategy, commercial growth, organizational health, finance, lean manufacturing, procurement, design-to-value, M&A, and consumer technology.

Prior to joining McKinsey, Jason served as president of a vertically-integrated designer home furnishings company in a major portfolio with production operations in seven countries and distribution in 35, from 2003 to 2010.  Before that, Jason was an investment banker with three other organizations, where he provided financing and advisory services to leading growth companies in the retail and consumer sectors as well as private equity firms focusing on these categories.

Published work

Bridging private equity’s value creation gap,” McKinsey & Company, April 2024

Chief performance officers can be a secret ingredient for private equity success. Here’s why,” McKinsey & Company, November 2022

A playbook for newly minted private equity portfolio-company CEOs,” McKinsey & Company, September 2021

“Seeing the savings: Toward transparent management of portfolio companies,” McKinsey & Company, August 2020

“How private equity operating groups are taking on the challenge of the coronavirus,” McKinsey & Company, April 2020

Private equity operating groups and the pursuit of ‘portfolio alpha’,” McKinsey & Company, November 2018

Past experience

McGuire Furniture
President

WIT Capital
Principal, investment banker

Montgomery Securities
Principal, investment banker

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney
Principal, investment banker

Education

Harvard Business School
MBA

Williams College
BA, history; religion and art