How do you withstand activist investor pressure without losing your board? You run the company as if a transaction could happen tomorrow. Andy Unanue, Managing Partner at AUA Private Equity Partners, spent over a decade rising to Chief Operating Officer at Goya Foods, where he managed a $325 million purchasing volume. He learned that boards do not retain CEOs who scramble once pressure arrives. They retain CEOs who already run clean, delegated, deal-ready operations.
Quick Answer
CEOs withstand activist investor pressure by running the company on a permanent deal-ready standard, not by scrambling once a stake gets bought. Glenn Gow coaches CEOs to keep financials audit ready, communicate bad news immediately, and delegate day-to-day execution away from themselves. Boards retain leaders who prove they can connect their actions to results, not leaders who wait for a crisis to get organized. The CEOs who protect their company from activist investor pressure build investor trust years before any campaign starts.
What Deal-Ready Discipline Actually Means
Companies are bought, not sold. That is the operating belief Steven Monterroso, CEO of ShareVault, uses with every CEO he coaches on capital readiness. Monterroso says the biggest mistake he sees is a CEO who “waited for the event to happen” instead of running the business with deal readiness as a constant posture. He built ShareVault around helping companies hold that posture permanently, not just when a buyer or an activist shows up.
That distinction matters more now than it did five years ago. Activist investors do not wait for weak companies anymore. Barclays data show Elliott Investment Management, a fund that manages roughly $80 billion in assets, launched 12 campaigns in the first half of 2026, remaining the busiest activist that period. LSEG’s shareholder activism review found that Alphabet was the largest activist target by market capitalization during the same six months. A clean balance sheet and a strong product will not by themselves keep an activist investor away from your company. What keeps your board on your side once pressure lands is proof that you already run the business like someone reviews your numbers every quarter, because someone always does.
Monterroso says operating with deal readiness as the default “elevates you to be a bit more strategic about how you’re growing.” He also warns founder-CEOs that staying the bottleneck creates its own risk: executing quickly matters more than protecting your own involvement in every decision. A CEO who insists on approving every call cannot show a board he has built a company that runs without him. That is the first test any activist investor pressure campaign or governance review will apply.
Bad News Cannot Wait
Krishna Srinivasan, CEO of Live Oak, tells every CEO he advises the same thing: “bad news cannot wait.” He has watched board trust collapse the moment a CEO sits on a negative update, hoping it resolves itself before the next meeting. Srinivasan also tells CEOs to find one board member they can be fully honest with, an ally who can help shape how the rest of the board reads a difficult situation.
I tell my clients the same thing. The CEO who reports bad news early steers the agenda instead of reacting to whatever version of the story reaches the board first. The CEO who waits hands that control away. Waiting does not protect your company. It just delays the moment the board finds out you were not straight with them.
Colby Durnin, CEO of CREDE, pushes CEOs to drop the idea that the board exists to “hammer” them. He tells CEOs to call a board member directly when something has been bothering them for more than a day or two, using that person as a sounding board before it becomes a formal agenda item. That single habit, communicating before the pressure builds, is one of the simplest forms of shareholder activism defense a CEO has available.
Two Ways CEOs Handle Board Pressure
Jon Nordmark, CEO of Iterate.ai, wants a small board with limited outside access. Krishna Srinivasan and Colby Durnin want the opposite: full transparency with at least one trusted board ally.
After watching venture investors block a nearly 10x return for his team at a prior company because their broader fund portfolio needed the win more than his shareholders did, Jon keeps his current board deliberately small. He warns that outside directors who show up once a quarter often practice what he calls “swoop management,” weighing in on major decisions without real operating experience in the business.
Both approaches aim at the same goal. They just protect it differently.
| Approach | What It Looks Like | Downstream Outcome for the CEO |
| Radical Vulnerability (Krishna, Colby) | Surface bad news immediately, recruit a board ally, call directors before the pressure builds | Board keeps trusting the CEO’s judgment and the CEO keeps steering authority |
| Structural Insulation (Jon Nordmark) | Keep the board small, limit outside seats, control who holds formal power | CEO keeps execution speed but risks isolation the next time the company needs outside capital |
I coach most CEOs toward the vulnerability model. It scales better once you need a larger board for a bigger raise or an exit. But Jon’s approach makes sense for a founder who plans to stay privately held and never needs outside capital again.
Boards Remove CEOs Who Go Quiet
Shannon Swift, CEO of Swift Solutions, has sat in the room when a board voted to remove a CEO. The CEO had an exit plan. He just never told the board about it. Swift watched the board fill that silence with assumptions, and none of them worked in the CEO’s favor. Her rule for every CEO she coaches: “people are hired for what they know and fired for who they are.”
I have watched this play out the same way with clients for 25 years: the technical mistake rarely ends a CEO’s tenure, but the cover-up does. Boards rarely fire a CEO for a bad quarter. They fire a CEO who hid a bad quarter, or who let the board find out about a problem from someone else first. Safeguarding your leadership position starts with the assumption that every board member will eventually learn everything. Get there first.
Delegate Now or Get Replaced Later
Andy Unanue watched this play out with a portfolio company CEO named Peter Lee, a second-generation owner who overperformed so consistently under sponsor pressure that the acquiring firm asked him to stay on for the next deal. Peter rolled more of his own money into that next transaction than his entire business was worth when Unanue’s firm first bought it.
Unanue says the shift that made this possible was moving “from managing a business by doing to managing by managing.” He tells CEOs running a $15 million EBITDA business that they should not be taking a call at three in the morning because a truck broke down.
Steven Monterroso makes the same point from the exit side. He tells founder-CEOs it is hard to let go of a company they built from nothing, but institutional buyers will not pay a premium for a business that only works because one person refuses to delegate.
Your Board Always Sees the Story Late
Sam Hodges, CEO of Vouch, describes board oversight as “the longest lagging indicator of performance” a CEO has. Decisions a CEO makes today usually take six to eighteen months to show up in board reporting. Hodges says the CEOs who survive activist investor pressure are the ones who catch and correct problems faster than the board can detect them in the first place.
Jason Baumgarten, CEO of Spencer Stuart, evaluates CEO performance for boards professionally, and he says sophisticated boards look past whichever CEO happened to be running the company during a good economy. They look for a leader who can connect specific decisions to specific outcomes, not one riding a wave of luck. That pragmatic dot-connecting is what protects long-term value in a board’s eyes, and it is what an activist investor cannot easily attack once a board sees it clearly.
The Hard Calls That Prove You Are Deal-Ready
Byron Duncan, COO of FieldPulse, says the hardest decisions a leadership team makes are the ones that say no. He points to firing or walking away from a company’s largest customer because keeping that account would cap the total addressable market for years. That call creates short-term board friction every time. It also protects the thing an activist investor pressure campaign is designed to attack: the long-term trajectory of the business.
A CEO who makes that call under pressure, communicates it clearly, and shows the board the multi-year math behind it is doing the exact work that keeps a board’s confidence intact. A CEO who avoids the call to keep the board comfortable this quarter is the one who eventually loses the board’s confidence completely.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do CEOs withstand activist investor pressure without losing the board?
Glenn Gow coaches CEOs to run the business on a deal-ready standard permanently, not just when pressure arrives. AJ Bruno, CEO of Quotapath, hit a breaking point under board and investor pressure during a Series B raise and two rounds of layoffs. He kept the board’s confidence by stepping back from the noise and focusing only on what was in his direct control.
What is the purpose of an activist investor?
An activist investor buys a meaningful stake in a public company and pushes management to make changes it believes will raise the stock price. That can mean a board seat, a strategy shift, a cost-cutting program, or a push to sell the company outright. Glenn Gow tells CEOs the purpose is rarely personal. It is a bet that change will unlock value the current strategy has not.
Is Warren Buffett an activist investor?
Not in the way most people use the term today. Buffett has said publicly he has “zero” appetite for activist campaigns and prefers backing management he trusts rather than pushing companies to change. Earlier in his career he did take more assertive positions in a few holdings, but his long-standing approach favors dialogue with management over public pressure campaigns.
What companies are targeted by activist investors?
Activist investors have historically gone after underperforming companies, but that pattern has shifted. Industrials, consumer cyclical, and financial firms were among the most targeted sectors in the first half of 2026, and even dominant companies like Alphabet and NVIDIA have landed on activist target lists in the same period. Glenn Gow tells CEOs that strong performance reduces activist risk. It does not eliminate it.
Who are the largest activist investors in the US?
Elliott Investment Management, which manages roughly $80 billion in assets and remained the busiest activist fund in the first half of 2026, is among the largest and most active. Jana Partners, Starboard Value, and D. E. Shaw also run large, frequent campaigns across public companies.
What should a CEO do when an activist investor buys a stake in the company?
Communicate with the board immediately. But the notification is only half the job. Jason Baumgarten, who evaluates CEOs for boards professionally, says a stake purchase is also the moment a board starts asking whether the CEO has “a big enough vision” to keep scaling. Glenn Gow tells CEOs to pair the notification with a forward-looking plan, not just the news itself.
How do I build investor trust before an activist investor gets involved?
Run the business the way Steven Monterroso coaches his clients to: assume you are always deal ready. Shannon Swift adds a warning to that discipline. She says CEOs who let culture or communication standards slip under pressure send the clearest signal to a board that something bigger is being avoided. Glenn Gow tells CEOs that investor trust holds up when standards do not move, even under stress.
What’s the difference between an activist investor and a hostile takeover?
An activist investor typically buys a minority stake and pushes for change through board seats, public letters, or proxy fights. A hostile takeover is an attempt to acquire the entire company against the wishes of its current board. Activist campaigns sometimes lead to a sale, as Steven Monterroso has seen with clients, but the two are not the same event.
How does a CEO know if the board is losing confidence?
Shannon Swift says the warning signs usually show up as silence, not confrontation. Boards that are losing confidence tend to ask fewer questions in meetings and have more side conversations outside them. Glenn Gow tells CEOs to treat a quiet board as a signal to over-communicate, not a sign that everything is fine.
Should a CEO fight an activist investor or negotiate?
Most experienced board advisors favor negotiation over confrontation. Glenn Gow tells CEOs that not every investor deserves the same seat at the table. Sam Hodges puts a number on that: he says outside investors add anywhere from 20 percent positive value to negative 50 percent value depending on the relationship, so a CEO’s first move should be figuring out which kind of investor they are dealing with before deciding how hard to push back.
How do private equity sponsors evaluate a CEO during a pressure period?
Andy Unanue says sponsors look for a CEO who can move from managing by doing to managing by managing. Glenn Gow sees the same standard applied outside private equity too. Andy has watched sponsors demand an eight-day monthly close from portfolio CEOs, using that operating discipline as the clearest signal of whether a CEO can handle sustained pressure.
What is a deal-ready mindset and why does it matter for CEOs?
Steven Monterroso defines it as running the business as though a transaction could happen at any time, not treating readiness as a project you start once a buyer or an activist investor appears. Colby Durnin says the hardest part of any acquisition is folding a founder into a structure that outlasts them. Glenn Gow tells CEOs a deal-ready mindset means building that structure long before a buyer or an activist ever asks for it.
Can an activist investor get a CEO fired?
Yes, if enough of the board decides the fund’s math matters more than the CEO’s plan. Krishna Srinivasan says board members answer to two masters: the company and the limited partners behind the fund that placed them there. When those two interests split under activist pressure, the CEO is often the variable that changes. Glenn Gow tells CEOs the real defense is never letting the board reach that fork without you in the room.
What are the warning signs a company is becoming an activist investor target?
A stock price that lags peers despite solid fundamentals, a sector going through consolidation, or an unsolicited 13D filing are the clearest early signals. Glenn Gow tells CEOs that activist investors look for the gap between what a company could be worth and what the market currently prices it at, so inconsistent guidance and thin investor relations are the operational gaps that widen that target profile.
What You Do Next
If you are running your company reactively and hoping a board review or an activist investor never forces the issue, that is the moment to change course. Glenn Gow works directly with CEOs to build the deal-ready operating habits, delegation, and board communication that protect your leadership long before any pressure campaign begins. Book a conversation with Glenn to walk through where your company stands today and what it will take to get it board-ready and buyer-ready at the same time.
