If I were building a PE firm from scratch today, I wouldn’t start by chasing capital.

I’d start by building something that can actually improve a business without needing a spreadsheet to do the heavy lifting.

The old model worked when money was cheap and time was short. Buy it, lever it, tidy up a few costs, sell it in five years, tell everyone it was “operational excellence”. Now holding periods are stretching and the exit queue looks like Heathrow on a Sunday night. In 2025, average buyout holding periods were cited around 6.4 years. That changes the job. A lot.

So the firm I’d build would look less like a deal machine and more like a factory.

Not a fluffy “platform” page on the website with stock photos of serious people pointing at dashboards.

A real operating system you can drop into a portfolio company on day one.

The starting team would be boring in the way that makes money:

• A pricing and promo killer who can stop margin leakage in week one
• A CRM and lifecycle operator who knows how to turn a database into cash
• A data person who can actually connect systems, not just buy another tool
• A RevOps builder who fixes handoffs, speed to lead, and conversion mechanics
• A product or automation operator who ships, measures, repeats
• A ruthless finance partner who speaks fluent ROI and hates “marketing vibes”

Then you build the playbook and the stack once, so you are not reinventing the wheel in every board meeting like it’s an artisanal hobby.

Centralised demand gen. Standardised reporting. A data model that works across businesses. A cadence that forces decisions. The kind of stuff that feels slightly oppressive, which is usually a good sign.

Then you go buy businesses where this matters. Unsexy, fragmented, operationally messy, cash flowing. Places where small execution gains compound. Home services is the obvious one. If you can raise call conversion, fix dispatch, clean up financing offers, and stop the lead sources from fighting each other, you do not need magic. You need competence.

Once that engine is proven, the capital part is easy. Capital always shows up eventually. It just prefers turning up after someone else did the hard work.

That is the gap now. Not access. Not brand. Not another partner retreat about “transformation”.

Capability at scale. The rest is theatre.