Shahar Yona '27
Shahar Yona is an MBA candidate and Private Equity Program Fellow at Columbia Business School. Before CBS, he spent five years at Grit Mind Partners, a private equity firm in Tel Aviv, where he worked on roll-up strategies in education and healthcare services. He sourced deals directly from founders, ran diligence and post-merger integration across platform and add-on acquisitions, sat as a board observer, and helped build executive teams for portfolio companies. At CBS, that work has continued. As Summer Chief of Staff at Wheelhouse, a Trivest-backed home services platform, he worked alongside the CEO on two add-on acquisitions that closed during his summer, and helped build the integration playbook now used across the platform's locations. He also worked on the investment team at MFG Partners, evaluating new platform and add-on acquisitions in industrial services, and currently advises the sale of a founder-owned California remodeling company, where he recruited the executive team. Earlier, Shahar served as an officer in an Israeli special forces unit, where he led teams and later a full company. Years of deals have convinced him that people and integration are the most important parts of buy-and-build, and the army is where he first learned to lead people through hard situations. He is the Teaching Assistant for the Private Equity Deals course.
Connect with Shahar Yona on LinkedIn.
After enough deals, you learn that signing is the easy part. Winning a deal is mostly about earning the trust of a founder who built something over twenty years, and executing it well means knowing what you're going to do on day one after closing, not just what the model says. Integration is where returns are actually made, and it comes down to people, keeping the team you bought, and getting them to believe in where you're taking the company. I started learning that in the army, leading people through hard situations long before my first deal, and it's still the lens I bring to every company I look at. That's also how I spend my time at CBS: TAing the Private Equity Deals course, staying close to live deal work through the Fellowship, field study, the different clubs, and spending time with investors and operators who've done this longer than I have.