The first ninety days after close are the most expensive window in private equity for losing people. Not the people with the loudest titles. The people who actually make the business work. They are us...
Most operating partners intervene before they diagnose. They arrive at a portfolio company with a playbook in their head, a set of standard interventions they have run successfully before, and a presu...
Private equity has a recurring blind spot. It pays a premium for founder-led businesses because they grow faster, decide faster, and convert customers faster than their corporate equivalents. Then it ...
There is a number that almost no portfolio company tracks consistently and that turns out to predict an unreasonable share of commercial performance. It is the elapsed time between an inbound lead arr...
The 100-day plan is one of the most universally adopted, universally underperforming artifacts in private equity. Every fund has one. Every IC memo gestures at one. Every operating partner is handed o...
The CEO who succeeds in a private equity owned mid-market business is a specific archetype. She is distinct from the founder who built the business from scratch. She is distinct from the corporate exe...
Consider a landscaping company in the southeast. Standard mid-market deal. Twelve trucks, a hundred and twenty customers, mostly residential, some light commercial, the founder still showing up on Sat...
Every board meeting in 2026 contains the same scene. The chair turns to the CEO and asks the question that has now become ritual. What is your AI strategy? The CEO produces a slide. There is a vendor ...
The most overused word in private equity portfolio company communication in 2026 is transformation. Every portfolio company is undergoing one. Every CEO is leading one. Every board pack opens with pro...
For the past three years, the consensus across private equity has been that multiple arbitrage is finished. The cycle of buying small platforms cheaply, rolling up adjacent businesses, and selling the...
Most mid-market portfolio companies have invested meaningfully in their brand. They have refreshed their websites, modernized their visual identity, hired marketing leadership, built content engines, ...
A common mistake in private equity hiring is to assume that the deal team and the operating partner team are doing variations of the same job. Both work on portfolio companies. Both engage with manage...
For most of the modern private equity era, the grammar of the business was financial. Price the asset correctly. Structure the deal cleanly. Layer in the right capital structure. Align management ince...
AI has produced visible step changes in several industries over the past five years. Insurance underwriting accuracy has improved measurably. Fraud detection in payments has gotten dramatically better...
The most expensive sentence in private equity right now is, what is your AI strategy. Not because the question is wrong, but because the answer almost always describes a stack of vendor tools rather t...
