What Does a CxO Do at WAD Capital? Role Explained
A CxO at WAD Capital is an experienced executive who works inside the firm’s operations function, supporting the fund’s M&A and operational activities across its portfolio companies. It’s a fixed-term, operating-level position, a CxO doesn’t source, negotiate, or acquire a company; that’s the CEO-in-Residence’s job. The CxO role sits alongside it, giving an incoming operator hands-on exposure to how WAD Capital’s existing portfolio companies actually run, before or in parallel with their own path toward the CEO-in-Residence programme.
The sequencing isn’t fixed. Some executives move straight from selection into their own acquisition search; others, like Álvaro Novoa, WAD Capital's CxO, take on the operating role first. His path illustrates how the function can work, not a fixed rule for how it always works..
Why Does WAD Capital Have an Operating Role Between Selection and Search?
Sourcing a company and running one are different skills. An executive can build a sharp sector thesis and map a hundred target companies, then discover on day one of ownership that operating an SME at this scale, payroll, supplier relationships, a management team that’s never worked with private equity, is nothing like anything on their CV.
The CxO role gives some incoming operators a way to close that gap before they need it. Rather than learning SME-level operations for the first time as a new owner, a CxO gets that exposure inside a company that is already part of the portfolio, working alongside a CEO-in-Residence who has already been through acquisition and is now running the business day to day.
This is the kind of structural detail that’s genuinely hard for a competitor to replicate. A self-funded search fund has no operations function to place someone inside, and no existing portfolio company to learn from, because there’s no portfolio yet. The bridge only exists because WAD Capital already has acquired, operating businesses and a standing operations team supporting them
What Does a CxO Actually Work On?
Day to day, a CxO supports the fund’s M&A and operations activities, work connected to the operations function, not deal sourcing for their own future acquisition. The specific projects depend on what the portfolio needs at the time. What stays constant is the position itself: a defined, fixed-term seat inside a functioning business, not a training exercise or an observation period.
For Álvaro, the plan is straightforward: spend a period supporting the operations side, then move into the search phase of the CEO-in-Residence programme. Part of the appeal, he says, is getting practical experience at SME scale before he’s the one accountable for a company’s operating results.
Who Becomes a CxO? Álvaro Novoa's Background as an Example
Álvaro Novoa is Spanish, though he’s had an international upbringing and career: secondary school in Ireland, a Master’s in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Manchester, then back to Spain to build a career spanning technical, consulting, and institutional investment roles. He started at Abengoa, at the time one of Spain’s flagship infrastructure and energy multinationals, first as an electrical engineer, then as an energy investment analyst, before three years as a senior consultant in KPMG’s Global Strategy Group. He then completed a full-time MBA at IESE Business School before joining Fisterra Energy, an energy-infrastructure platform founded by former Iberdrola management and Blackstone, as a Private Equity Associate on its M&A and Financing team.
That’s a fairly typical operator profile for WAD Capital, not because the sector is prescribed, but because the combination of technical grounding, consulting-style problem structuring, and institutional investment experience tends to produce someone who can hold their own inside a portfolio company’s operating reality. The 2024 IESE International Search Fund Study found international searchers outperforming the 63% domestic (US/Canada) success rate, with a record 59 new search funds formed globally in 2023. An internationally mobile background like Álvaro’s is not incidental to that pattern.
Álvaro describes the pull toward WAD Capital in direct terms: ownership was always the goal, but the sectors he’d built his career in made that hard to reach on his own. Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) changes that equation, and he points specifically to WAD Capital’s pace of institutionalising the model as what made this the place to make the jump, rather than staying in a conventional investment career.
How Does the CxO Role Lead Into the CEO-in-Residence Programme?
Once the CxO period ends, the executive moves into the search phase alongside the rest of their cohort intake, building a sector thesis, mapping target companies, and eventually negotiating and closing an acquisition, the same as any other CEO-in-Residence. Cohort peers who came in direct-to-search and those who spent time as a CxO first end up running the same process, in the same programme, once the search phase begins.
What differs is the starting point: a CxO enters their own search having already worked inside a real, acquired SME, not just studied the model from the outside. Whether that produces a faster or smoother search isn’t something to claim in advance, but it is, at minimum, a different kind of preparation than most executives get before their first ownership role.
Is the CxO Path Right for Every Incoming Operator?
Not necessarily, WAD Capital doesn’t treat it as mandatory. An executive with deep, current operating experience in a comparable business may have less to gain from the bridge period than someone from a purely analytical or advisory background. The CxO role exists as an option WAD Capital can offer where it makes sense, matched to what a given incoming operator actually needs. Álvaro’s decision to take that path reflects his own read of what would prepare him best, a fit assessment, not a default step every CEO-in-Residence is expected to pass through.
For executives weighing whether WAD Capital’s model has real structural depth or is closer to a marketing claim, the CxO role is a useful data point, one more piece of standing infrastructure, alongside the cohort model and the operations function, that only exists because there’s already a portfolio of acquired companies to plug someone into
Executives considering their own path into the CEO-in-Residence programme can review how the search phase and the wider process work , or apply directly for Cohort 2026.
