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Twenty people on a Zoom. You know maybe half their names. You’re paying all of their salaries. Five vintage band t shirts. Four beanies. Eighteen fake backgrounds carefully designed to look accidental. This is not collaboration. It’s cost leakage in HD. Modern agency structures are built for selling
News
NGP Energy Capital Plans Bigger Investment Push After Restructuring With Carlyle NGP Energy Capital Management told LPs it plans to accelerate new investments after returning $2.58 billion last year and restructuring its long-standing partnership with Carlyle Group. Under the reset, NGP will keep a larger share of fees
Deals
Dallas-based private equity firm Highlander Partners acquired the Tapatio hot sauce brand a top-5 U.S. condiment with a cult following, from its founding family. The purchase price wasn’t publicly disclosed, but the strategic logic is clear: consumer food brands with deep loyalty and retail shelf presence
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I’ve sat in too many reviews where CAC is down, everyone relaxes, and then three weeks later we’re back arguing about why revenue didn’t move and sales “can’t close these leads”. Nothing mystical happened. The funnel just got gamed. If you optimise hard enough for CAC,
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Business has never had more communication tools and somehow never communicated less effectively. Entire projects now die in group chats. Deals stall in inboxes. Relationships drift because everyone is too busy “circling back” to actually speak. Messenger and email have their place, but they’ve also created an entire generation
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You can pick a new vendor or agency, and the first month will look immaculate. Perfect decks. Charming calls. Everyone “aligned.” By month three, you find out whether they can actually deliver anything beyond enthusiasm. Hiring works the same way. Month one is onboarding and optimism. Month two is settling
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Here’s the thing: you can run a private equity firm on Outlook and Excel and do just fine. PE isn’t starving for dashboards, copilots, or a 40-tab “deal OS.” PE is starving for better decisions, and no software has ever replaced judgment, pattern recognition, or the ability
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Nothing says “we’re modern” like a 14 point AI strategy slide no one can ship. You know the one. It appears at the end of the board deck, stapled on after the real agenda, right between “Talent” and “Other”. A handful of buzzwords, a diagram with arrows, and a
News
Private Equity Recruiting Machine Roars Back After Six-Month Pause U.S. private equity on-cycle recruiting restarted after a long pause, with megafunds back to running compressed interview processes for future associate classes. The break didn’t cool demand, it just produced more seasoned candidates and reinforced how competitive
Deals
GI Partners Agrees to Acquire Netwatch GI Partners announced this week that it has agreed to acquire Netwatch, the AI-enabled security monitoring business. Netwatch sells into retail, logistics, and commercial real estate—places where theft, liability, and insurance premiums make “doing nothing” the expensive option. This is private equity
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Every portfolio has someone proudly fixing the CRM. Clean fields. Perfect notes. Mandatory dropdowns. A new stage called “Attempted contact”. Meanwhile the actual business is happening in the call queue. And the call queue is losing. Invoca found 27% of calls to home services businesses go unanswered. That’s not
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Companies don’t fail because they lack ideas. They fail because they outsource thinking. And nothing signals that faster than appointing a Chief Innovation Officer. When you create a role whose job is “innovation,” what you’re really saying is: • Everyone else can keep doing things the old way. • Innovation