Consistent Effort: Turning Rock Partners’ Drive to Improve DE&I in Private Investment

Turning Rock Partners, a New York based private investment firm with more than $1.2 billion of committed capital, is built upon three core values: collaboration, integrity and creativity. However, when it comes to its work in the area of diversity, equity and inclusion, the company adheres to another tenet: consistency.

“We’ve seen the DE&I area grow quite a bit since we’ve launched, but having diverse leadership is still not common enough within our industry,” Saba Ahmad, president of Turning Rock Partners, says. “The way we make it a core component of our strategy is by practicing it every day.”

Turning Rock Partners’ commitment to DE&I manifests within its workforce, as well as externally with its partners and portfolio companies. On the internal side, as of the start of 2024, 66% of the firm’s partners identify as women, while 100% of its investment team identifies as an ethnic minority and/or a woman.

To ensure it creates a diverse and inclusive culture from top to bottom, Turning Rock Partners takes an active approach to recruiting from a diverse candidate base and invests heavily in a robust professional training program it launched in 2023. This program aims to enhance the skills of future leaders of the company, particularly those from historically underrepresented groups.

“While we are creating a diverse workforce here based on the hiring decisions we’re making, we are also making sure that we continue to move these folks along, and that everybody has the same professional development opportunities, because I think that has historically been inconsistent at companies,” Ahmad says.

The firm holds itself accountable by publishing demographic statistics and progress on its DE&I initiatives each year at its annual general meeting. In April, the company released its first diversity social responsibility report. In addition, the firm is a founding signatory of the Institutional Limited Partners Association’s Diversity in Action Initiative, which brings together limited partners and general partners who share a commitment to advancing DE&I in the private equity and credit industry. Turning Rock Partners uses the association’s diversity metrics template to track its progress on the DE&I front and publishes results on a quarterly basis.

Turning Rock Partners’ DE&I ethos extends to its external partners as well. The firm examines the corporate policies of potential partner companies, evaluating compensation, fair labor and other processes, and also puts each investment opportunity through a rigorous third-party DE&I and environment, social and governance review. In addition, the firm has “no-fly” zones for industries that have not historically been consistent with its own policies around ESG and DE&I. “We invest predominantly in founder-led and managed businesses here in the U.S., and they’re focused on building and growing their businesses,” Ahmad says. “DE&I is not always at the forefront, but as we have the privilege of being capital providers, we can help emphasize this with our partner companies as well.”

Even though Turning Rock Partners has clearly made DE&I an essential part of its operating procedures, both internally and externally, Ahmad knows that it takes sustained effort to ensure such momentum continues, and doing so requires — you guessed it — consistency.

“It’s not just something we think about once a quarter when we’re looking at statistics; we are thinking about it every day as we make decisions,” Ahmad says. “As long as we’re moving forward, I think that’s the consistency we want to see at our firm, as well as within the industry in which we operate.” •