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A covenant-lite loan, often shortened to "cov-lite", is a leveraged loan with fewer of the protective clauses that lenders traditionally used to monitor borrower performance and intervene early if things went wrong. Traditional leveraged loans included "maintenance covenants" that required borrowers to periodically meet
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A tax receivable agreement, or TRA, is a contractual arrangement where a company agrees to share future tax savings with pre-IPO shareholders (often the private equity sponsor and the pre-IPO founders or managers). When a PE-backed company does an IPO using an "Up-C" structure,
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"Two and twenty" is shorthand for the fee structure most private equity and hedge funds use to compensate the General Partner: a 2% annual management fee charged on committed capital, plus 20% of profits after a hurdle rate has been met. The 2% pays the firm's
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A subscription line facility is a short-term loan to a private equity fund, secured by the fund's LP commitments. Instead of calling capital from LPs immediately when the fund wants to do a deal, the fund borrows from a bank, does the deal, and then either repays
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Private equity works by raising money from institutional investors, using that money (plus a lot of borrowed debt) to buy mature private companies, improving those companies over 4-7 years, and then selling them for a higher price. The detailed mechanics involve fund structures, capital calls, portfolio operating plans, leveraged
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Private equity is one of the most misunderstood industries in finance. Ask ten people what it is and you will get ten different answers: "the guys who bought Toys R Us", "the investors who own my dentist now", "some kind of hedge fund", "
Operating Partners
A private equity operating partner is a senior professional at a PE firm whose role is to work directly with portfolio company management on operational improvement, rather than sourcing new deals. Where investment partners focus on buying and selling companies, operating partners focus on what happens during the hold period:
Value Creation
Private equity value creation is the set of operational changes a PE firm makes to a portfolio company during the hold period to increase its value. In theory, these changes include improving pricing, reducing costs, growing revenue, upgrading management, executing tuck-in acquisitions, expanding geographies, and implementing technology. In practice,
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A private equity portfolio company is simply a company that is owned by a PE fund. When a PE firm buys a company, that company becomes part of the firm's "portfolio" for the duration of the hold period, usually 4-7 years. During that time, the
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A dividend recapitalisation, usually shortened to "dividend recap," is when a private equity firm has its portfolio company take on new debt, and uses the cash from that debt to pay the PE firm a dividend. The company is still owned by the PE firm afterwards. The company
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PIK stands for payment-in-kind. It is a type of debt where, instead of paying interest in cash, the borrower adds the interest onto the outstanding loan balance. The loan gets bigger each period, but no cash leaves the company. The lender earns interest that compounds on itself and
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A sale-leaseback is when a company sells a building or a piece of real estate it owns, and then immediately signs a long-term lease to keep occupying that same building. The company walks out of the transaction with cash in the bank from the sale, and a monthly