theses
Luxury is no longer worn. It’s scheduled. The modern affluent parent isn’t showing off with a Rolex.....they’re flexing through weekend fencing tournaments, bilingual tutoring, and elite chess camps. We’re witnessing the rise of child-focused conspicuous consumption. And the numbers are massive: According to the Brookings
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The gym sessions you skip. The calls you make. The habits you tolerate. The people you surround yourself with. It’s all compounding, every day, quietly, without fanfare. In business, we obsess over financial compounding......IRR, MOIC, reinvested profits. But the real magic (or destruction) is happening elsewhere. Culture compounds.
life
Freeze the lemon and shove it as far back up life as you can. Elbow deep. Because in business, you don’t win by coping, you win by counterattacking. Most people have been trained to absorb problems politely. They call it “resilience.” They think if they just keep calm, manage
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You’ve been there. You just walked into the best party in Vegas. Perfect music, open bar, crowd full of people who all look like they’ve made it. The room hums with self-importance .........everyone telling each other how great things are. You feel it too. You’ve made it
theses
One of the most underutilised value creation strategies in PE right now. Buy the education platform. Buy the service companies. Place the grads. Repeat. Think about it: if you’re investing in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, auto repair....any business reliant on skilled labour.....then you already know the bottleneck isn’
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Short answer? You don’t. You get invited. It’s one of the most opaque, relationship-driven roles in private equity—and it doesn’t follow a normal recruiting process. You don’t apply. There’s no job board. No clear path. It’s more secret society than career ladder. Here’
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The problem is no one updates the plan. A deal gets signed. The spreadsheet gets built. Revenue projections go up and to the right. EBITDA margin magically improves by year three. And everyone agrees to it because, well, it has to pencil. But here’s the issue: Six months in,
Value Creation
Chasing looks like hustle. But it’s often panic in disguise. Attracting looks like patience. But it’s really clarity, consistency, and control. In private equity, most firms still chase. They chase deals, LPs, and talent. They run endless outbound cycles, react to auctions, and pitch the same tired “value
theses
America’s housing crisis isn’t creeping up on us. It’s already here and the math doesn’t work. Home prices are up 40% in four years. Mortgage rates have doubled. And nearly half of renters now spend over 30% of their income on housing. Meanwhile, the country is
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Capital is commoditised. So is M&A. Everyone has access to debt. Everyone’s getting banker decks. Everyone’s playing the same playbook from 2012, just with higher entry multiples. The last true edge? Talent. Not the “we’ll bring in a new CEO post-close” kind of talent. A
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I’d spend 5 minutes on past returns and 25 on how we actually create value. Because past returns don’t win the next deal. And they certainly don’t justify 2 and 20 in a market where PE is getting harder. The days of buying low, levering up, cutting
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Why? Because the call center model is a perfect storm of inefficiency: • High cost, low value-add: Average U.S. call center agent wage is ~$38k. Add training, turnover (30–45% annually), and management overhead… the true cost per seat is easily $60k+. • Customer experience is broken: Long waits, scripted answers,