The Do-Nothing Baseline: How to Tell Whether a Value Creation Team Actually Created Value

The Do-Nothing Baseline is what a portfolio company would have been worth if its sponsor had bought it and simply held it. Four subtractions, one residual, and why the residual is usually smaller than the deck says and larger than zero.

The PE Firms With the Best In-House Value Creation Teams (2026)

Sponsors staff operating capability three ways: an in-house portfolio operations group on the management fee, a bench of operating partners paid from deal economics, or external firms rented per situation.

What Is a Management Incentive Plan (MIP) in Private Equity? How Sweet Equity Actually Pays

A management incentive plan is the equity a sponsor grants management at investment. What it pays, when it pays, and why so many plans written for a four-year exit are worth nothing at year eight.

Deals

Warburg already sold McGill and Partners once. To itself.

EQT is paying $2 billion for the specialty broker Warburg seeded in 2019. The more interesting sale happened in December 2024, and the buyer was Warburg.

Value Creation

What Is DPI in Private Equity? Distributions to Paid-In Capital, Explained

DPI is the private equity return metric that counts only the cash investors have actually received. The formula, a worked example, what a good DPI looks like by fund age, and how it compares with IRR, TVPI and RVPI.

Deals

CVC said Glendower would keep its name. The name went. The fund hit $10 billion.

CVC bought a secondaries firm managing $8 billion in 2021 and promised it would keep its name. Five years on, one fund alone is $10 billion, and the name is nowhere in the press release.

Deals

Veritas won Bodycote by 25 pence, and the market wants a recount.

Two bids sat a penny apart for a month. Veritas found 25 more, and the shares now trade above the price that won.

Views

Every CEO exit is a sales lead with better stationery.

Russell Reynolds publishes a Global CEO Turnover Index. Very useful. It tracks CEO exits across 13 global stock indices, then gently reminds the market that leadership is unstable, boards are nervous, and someone really ought to help them find the next adult in the room. In 2025, they tracked 234

Views

The most creative people in private equity are not operators.

They are the people who calculate adjusted EBITDA. Some of them could make a corpse look cash generative by calling the smell “temporary integration friction.” We have somehow built an industry where the most important number in the deal is also the one most aggressively fictionalised. Revenue “normalisations.” Synergy add-

Views

Heidrick spent 22 years as the only publicly listed SHREK firm.

Which means we got something extremely rare in executive search. Actual numbers. Revenue. Margins. Cyclicality. Growth. Fees. Public filings. The sort of thing search firms usually prefer to discuss in hushed tones over a burgundy carpet. Now Advent and Corvex have taken it private for $1.3 billion. Roughly $1

Views

Every line below is said about you, in a room you are not in, by someone with the budget.

These are the five stages of management perception. Or, more accurately, the five stages of halo decay. Stage one: Nobody knows who you are. Stage two: Everyone is relieved you arrived. Stage three: You have become the safe pair of hands. Stage four: People start wondering what you actually do.

Views

Partners Group can raise money faster than it can give it back

A record $16 billion raised, carry guidance cut to 20-25%, and gates on the funds clients most want out of. The fee machine is fine. The exit machine is guiding for 2027.