Private equity has spent forty years systematically professionalizing one thing after another, and producing one wave of returns after another from each iteration.
Financial engineering came first. Le...
Every year, accomplished corporate executives decide private equity is the natural next chapter. Smaller companies. Faster pace. Greater impact. Bigger upside.
On paper, they look ideal. Brand-name em...
The most useful private equity question is also the least asked.
Operators spend their time on what they will build. Funds spend their time on what they will measure. Almost no one spends time on the ...
Most executives think the compensation negotiation is about compensation.
It is not. It is about behavior. The dollars are real, but the dollars are downstream of a question the sponsor is silently as...
Pilots train in simulators before they carry passengers. Surgeons practise before they operate. Traders run paper books before they run real ones.
Private equity has no equivalent. People learn to al...
Most diligence asks the wrong question.
The question is usually some version of, is this a good management team. The answer is some version of yes, with footnotes. The deal closes. Twelve months later...
Every PE-backed CEO is one of three people, and the difference matters more than tenure, industry, or pedigree.
There is the founder, who built the company and stayed.
There is the hire, who was recru...
When a value creation plan fails, the post mortem almost always lands on the plan. The assumptions were optimistic. The market moved. The diligence missed something. The timing was unfortunate.
Occas...
The 100-day plan is a corporate artifact that quietly migrated into private equity and never had to defend itself.
It is comforting. It feels rigorous. It maps to a calendar quarter. It is also wrong ...
The investment thesis is the most expensive document in private equity that almost no one reads after Tuesday of close week.
It sits in three places. The deal model. The IC memo. The board deck. None ...
The retail capital wave entering private equity is one of the most significant structural shifts in the asset class in a generation. Mass affluent investors who were historically excluded from private...
The energy transition story in private equity has been dominated by a category that captures the imagination but represents a small fraction of where the actual capital needs to flow. Climate tech, de...
Most value creation frameworks are lists. Five levers, seven pillars, ten plays. They are satisfying to read, easy to present, and they fail in the same way every time.
They tell you what you could d...
For most of the past decade, defense and defense-adjacent technology sat in the exclusion column of mainstream private equity. The reasoning was familiar. ESG screens flagged the category. LPs preferr...
Most private equity firms have a talent network. They maintain relationships with executives across industries, function specialists who can be deployed for specific projects, advisors who can be brou...
Practice private equity like a pilot trains
