Meet Jamie Roberts

From working in a bank restructuring team through the 2008 crash to leading YFM’s own buyout, Jamie Roberts on what he’s learned about backing founders.

When you’re thinking about taking on investment, it’s easy to picture the “private equity” people across the table as a type: polished, privately educated, never put a foot wrong.

Jamie Roberts, managing partner of YFM Equity Partners, isn’t that type, and he’s the first to say so. “My route into private equity is not a traditional route,” he explains. Today he leads the whole firm, across both the VCTs and the Buyout Funds.

Jamie recently sat down for a long, relaxed conversation on a London podcast. He talked about growing up in an old steel town, Corby in Northamptonshire, working for a big corporate bank during the middle of the 2008 crash, leading the buyout of YFM itself, and why he describes himself as a “toxic optimist”. Here’s what he shared, and what it means for the founders and management teams YFM backs.

• Jamie grew up on a council estate in Corby and describes his route into private equity as anything but traditional.
• He learned his trade in a corporate bank working with PLCs who had too much debt and needed to restructure during the 2008 financial crisis in his mid-twenties.
• Jamie joined YFM 14 years ago, started working with portfolio companies on their value creation plans, moved into leading new investments, running the Southern team, and then leading all of the investment business as chief investment officer in 2022.
• In 2025 he became managing partner, leading the whole of YFM. With the leadership team, he bought out YFM’s original partners, going through the same kind of scrutiny founders face.
• He believes YFM’s job is to back management teams, not to run their businesses for them.

Jamie grew up in Corby, Northamptonshire, an old steel town that struggled after its steelworks closed in the late 1970s. His dad worked for the bus company and later a taxi firm, and his mum stayed at home before working part-time in a school.

When Jamie was 14, his mum died of cancer, which affected his schoolwork. He credits a small group of friends, who he still sees today, with getting him through his GCSEs. A part-time job at Iceland Frozen Foods was, he admits, more fun than his A levels, not least because it meant money to spend.

He went on to university to study banking and finance, having realised he liked how businesses worked. Meeting his now wife, who was very driven, helped him knuckle down. He left with a 2:1.

Jamie’s first job, on a small bond trading graduate scheme, lasted nine months. He moved into credit analysis at RBS and then Lloyds, before joining the bank’s restructuring team in 2006. Plenty of people told him not to, because the market was booming and restructuring was the “bad part of the bank”. He went anyway because he liked the people.

Then 2008 arrived. Jamie describes the team growing from around half a dozen people to roughly a thousand in a couple of years, and he found himself working on major restructurings in his mid-twenties. “We used to call it training with live ammo,” he says.

Why it matters to you: That experience left Jamie with a lasting focus on cash and not being a big fan of using lots of bank debt to generate equity returns. A business can be profitable on paper and still run into trouble if there isn’t enough money in the bank at the end of the week.

As the market recovered, he moved into the team in the bank that lent money to private equity firms. It taught him how to sell and build relationships, but he didn’t enjoy it. He wanted to be closer to the businesses themselves.

“I interviewed at 17 different places,” Jamie says. Without the usual background of top grades, a top university and an accountancy qualification, he found it a hard industry to break into.

He ended up with two offers and chose YFM over a bigger name because of the people and the story they were telling about where the firm was going. He joined 14 years ago on the portfolio side, sitting on boards and supporting businesses after investment, before moving to the new investment team.

Asked why private equity appealed, he calls himself a frustrated entrepreneur: “it’s the closest that I’m ever going to get to starting or running a proper business”.

What it means in practice: Jamie is clear about the limits of an investor’s role. “We don’t know how to run businesses operationally,” he says. Instead, “we back management teams to run their businesses, and we try and bring the experience and shared knowledge from the portfolio to those management teams.”

Jamie joined YFM’s board in 2019, became chief investment officer in 2022 and was made managing partner at the start of 2025. One of his first jobs was helping the firm’s original partners, who had led YFM’s own buyout years earlier, step back and sell their stake in the business.

Rather than sell to a competitor, Jamie and the leadership team chose to keep YFM independent and buy the original partners out, funded by bank debt. That meant going through the same kind of scrutiny YFM applies to the businesses it backs.

It gives him a founder’s-eye view of the process.

He’s also clear about his responsibility to the firm. “My job when I retire is to make sure YFM is in a better position than it was when I took it over. Luckily for me, I had a good role model, as it is the same ambition that Dave Hall, who was the former managing partner, had when he took over. He did a great job and we are not going to fail that legacy.”

Jamie is clear that investing money is the easy part. The hard part is backing businesses that go on to do well, so no single person ever makes an investment decision at YFM. A small core team works on each opportunity, colleagues from across the firm are brought in to challenge and test the thinking, and the investment committee makes the final call – but the whole investment team joins those meetings and can have a say.

YFM invests £3m–£15m in ambitious UK businesses, either as growth capital to fund their next stage or by backing management teams to buy the business they run and take it further. The smallest investment, Jamie says, gets as much scrutiny as the largest, because every pound matters to YFM’s investors.

Timescales vary. The quickest investment Jamie remembers took eight weeks and the longest around two years, because “it depends how ready the business is”. Have a read of the helpful content in the Private Equity series for more advice on getting your business ready.

One piece of advice has stayed with Jamie. His first mentor in the corporate bank, the late Simon Palmer, told him that at some point he’d have to choose between being a “shop steward” who moans, and being a leader who changes the things that need changing. “If you want to be a leader, stop moaning and lead.”

Jamie admits it took him a while to take that in. Not long ago, sitting at lunch with colleagues, he found himself agreeing that part of YFM’s process should change, until one of them pointed out that he was the person who could change it,  it was a good reminder!

He’s quick to stress it isn’t a one-person show. “I don’t run YFM. There’s a team of us.” He runs the firm alongside Eamon Nolan, head of Investor Relations and fundraising, and Marcus Karia, CFO and COO.

YFM brought in a full-time AI specialist in 2026, and Jamie says it has changed how the firm hires. Junior investment roles used to be about modelling, analysis and writing papers first, with people skills taught later. Now YFM looks for emotional intelligence first. AI can take on much of the number-crunching and research. What it can’t do, in Jamie’s view, is make the call on whether a management team feels right: “they can’t do judgment yet”.

YFM has also built an internal tool that reviews each new opportunity against the firm’s history, drawing on decades of past investments, papers, board packs, financial information and minutes.

Practical advice: For founders, Jamie believes “the hurdle with AI isn’t the technological hurdle”. The cost is tiny for the upside, and the technology is readily available. The real barrier is people’s willingness to change. Plenty of successful businesses still run on spreadsheets and will do so for a long time, but they do probably risk getting left behind.

His friends gave him the name. Jamie gets frustrated by how negative the headlines are, and how much more attention bad news gets over good news.

He doesn’t pretend business is easy. “It’s always hard. It should always be hard,” he says. To him, “it’s just a different hard each time”, whether that’s a recession, a crisis or a jump in costs.

For all the numbers, Jamie keeps coming back to people. When an investment goes well and the team behind it does well too, it’s the part of the job he enjoys most. “There’s nothing nicer than seeing somebody succeed – either a management team we have backed or someone at YFM. Two of our partners joined us as investment managers, and seeing them achieve what they achieve every day is a highlight of my role.”

If you’d like to talk to Jamie or the team about your plans, you can meet the YFM team or get in touch. For more on what working with YFM looks like after investment, look out for Jamie’s new series on life after investment coming soon.