Earning Credibility on a PE Timeline

Rusty Kennington has led IT through four private-equity-backed companies across manufacturing, building products, and waste management. He is currently CIO at Denali Water Solutions, the largest full-service organic waste recycler in North America, where he was recruited to drive transformation and prepare the organization for exit.

The pattern is consistent. Walk into a recently acquired company where most of the workforce did not ask for the PE ride, earn credibility fast, and align everything IT does to the deal thesis. This transformation muscle was developed long before entering the PE space. At Commercial Metals, a Fortune 500 publicly-traded company, that meant enabling a digital portal that generated over $40 million in new revenue within 12 months. At Denali, the focus is automation, cyber resilience, and EBITDA growth through both back-office efficiency and leveraging AI to accelerate organic growth... a vision of our CEO.

Kennington has done this enough times to know where the pressure comes from and where first-time PE CIOs lose their footing.

Prove It in Months

The first thing Kennington does in any new role is get out to the field and listen. He asks questions, including ones he knows might sound basic, to understand how the business actually works. From there, he looks for champions willing to take a short-term risk alongside him.

"The language I always use is outcome," Kennington said. "How we get there, we can talk later. But really, the outcome I'm focused on... what if we're able to automate some of this? Or pull some of the costs out of this operation?"

At Denali, his first move was mapping the company's cyber posture to the PE firm's own rubric. When he presented the results, the firm's cyber lead stopped the meeting to thank him, noting he wished the other portfolio companies had done this level of work. That kind of early signal earns runway for everything that comes after.

Revenue Is a Business Initiative

Kennington is direct about where credit belongs on technology-enabled revenue. The $40 million portal at Commercial Metals succeeded because a sales executive had the vision and the courage to attach a number to it before launch.

"Most of these initiatives are not IT-led. They're IT-enabled," Kennington said. "The first risk we have of failing is not making it crystal clear to the board, the CEO, and everybody else that this is not an IT initiative."

He applies the same discipline to AI investments. His rubric for the Denali board: go after real money, not hours saved. "Hours saved is a unicorn dollar," he said. Unless headcount is actually being eliminated, the EBITDA impact is zero. He looks for projects with measurable financial impact, available data, minimal process change, and a timeline of three to four months.

Where IT Can Take Away Value

Kennington built the structure for a virtual data room at Denali before he worked on anything else. Every deployment and configuration change is documented and stored. He has been through enough due diligence cycles to understand what buyers look for and what makes them nervous.

"IT doesn't necessarily add value, but it can take away value," Kennington said. At a previous exit, the acquiring firm's due diligence team stopped to say they had never been through an IT review that prepared. That result came from daily discipline maintained from day one, not last-minute cleanup.

Dragon Slayers Who Never Watch Their Back

Kennington describes his team-building philosophy as "Navy SEAL IT." The team does not have to be large, but every person has to operate with full trust and no politics. At his previous company, he inherited nine direct reports who did not talk to each other. By the time he left, the group was cohesive and actually enjoyed operating as a team. This was important given the amount of transformation going on, including ERP replacements, technology overhauls, and dramatic sourcing changes..Kennington is a strong believer in making the investment into team members... it is a force-multiplier. He has been consistent with this over the years such that three of his former reports have since become CIOs themselves.

He gets his people plugged into the Dallas CIO community early, through breakfasts, dinners, and leadership events. One leader he inherited at Denali had been, in his words, "withering on the vine." Kennington loaded him with responsibility, and the results followed.

The Example

For CIOs entering private equity for the first time, Kennington believes the most common mistake is underestimating the pace. The deal thesis was already in motion before the job offer was extended. The team is watching how their new leader handles pressure, ambiguity, and setbacks from day one.

"You start paddling before your boat hits the water," he said. "Understand that you are the example. Whether you like it or not, all eyes are on you."