Chester Dawes is the COO and CFO at Palistar Capital, an alternative asset manager focused on investing in the future of mission critical digital infrastructure.

Launching and growing a private equity firm is not easy. I enjoyed sitting down with Chester to discuss how his experience going from ‘big four’ accounting to industrial to private equity gave him a sense on how to navigate large and small firms from an operational perspective.

We discuss a wide range of topics from using Six Sigma for operational improvement, when to bring in the HR function, standing up affiliates to provide operational leverage, and how the cadence and requirements of portfolio company data has changed over time.