views
They build compounding engines. Buying is the easy part. There’s a banker, a CIM, a competitive process, and if you’ve got a fund and a decent track record, you’ll probably win something. That’s not the hard bit. The hard part is what happens after the champagne.
Not a junior banker. Not a former consultant. A DTC CMO. Because sourcing deals today isn’t about knowing everyone, it’s about being known by the right ones. Traditional sourcing is still stuck in the Rolodex era: • Conference drinks • Warm intros • “Let’s grab coffee” That’s not a
life
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. No, seriously. It’s not tucked away in HBR. It won’t help you scale your SaaS. But it will teach you something most MBAs never learn. Because if you’ve ever tried to build, scale, or rescue a company, you’ve lived a
theses
The invisible infrastructure of the American household has a ton of business opportunity Say you’re scaling a single-product home services business, pest control, lawn care, maybe appliance repair. You centralize ops. One call center. One CRM. But you’re still selling one service. One category. One shot at retention.
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Most private equity firms still operate like it’s 2005. They invest time and capital building outbound sourcing teams, but spend almost no time building a voice in the market. Meanwhile, firms like Andreessen Horowitz and 20VC have proven that in venture, content is capital. Their media presence is their
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It’d look like a black ops unit with strategic operators. No layers of “strategy directors” and “engagement leads” filling up the Zoom tile gallery like it’s Hollywood Squares. No buzzword bingo. No 20-slide decks explaining why engagement was up 7%. Too many roles, too little accountability. Too many
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What if a fund had an LTV:CAC ratio? Would you raise another fund or shut it down? Private equity loves to run portfolio companies like SaaS businesses. Dashboards. Monthly metrics. Efficiency ratios. But the PE firm itself? It’s often flying blind by comparison. Let’s play this out:
theses
Home services are a hot space in PE right now, and for good reason. Recurring demand, fragmented markets, and operational levers make them attractive. But too many firms stop at the basics: backend consolidation, procurement savings, and cost control. The real alpha is in premiumization. Transforming a commoditized service into
Value Creation
Most value creation plans start with org charts and synergy maps. But in lower mid-market PE, speed kills and nothing drives enterprise value faster than early revenue acceleration. Every portco should launch a 90-Day Revenue Lab on Day 1. What is it? A focused sprint to: • Pressure-test ICP and value
Value Creation
Time to First Win In private equity, we live and die by IRR, MOIC, and LTV:CAC. But there’s one metric that rarely makes the dashboard, and yet can make or break a value creation plan: Time to First Win. It’s the speed at which a new investment
Value Creation
One of the most effective filters I use when evaluating an investment is this: Would I buy this company if I had to personally operate it for the next five years. No shortcuts, no exits, no flipping it to the next buyer, just full accountability and ownership? It’s a
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Private equity firms love to talk about operational rigor, long-term strategy, and steady hands on the wheel. But if you look at Formula 1, where decisions are made in seconds and competitive edges are measured in tenths of a second, you start to see a playbook that PE could borrow