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Every conference list is a calendar. This one tells you which rooms are full of operators, which are full of the people selling to them, and which three are worth the flight.
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The best books for PE operating partners, grouped by the job each one does, from capital allocation to running the company. Plus the shelf to skip.
Value Creation
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.
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One is capital, the other is capability. Why sponsors searching for growth execution get growth-equity league tables, and how to tell the two categories apart.
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Legal sources define the TSA as a contract. Operators experience it as a countdown clock. What a TSA covers, what it costs, and why the exit is the first value-creation deadline of a carve-out hold.
Toolkit
A portfolio operations group (also called a portfolio operations team, value creation team, or portfolio resources group) is the in-house team a private equity firm uses to improve the operating performance of the companies it owns, as opposed to sourcing and structuring the deals. The deal team buys the
Toolkit
Ask two private equity investors what happens after the wire hits and you will get two different answers. One buys a company to keep it: hold it indefinitely, keep the people, take the cash flows, and let compounding do the work. The other buys a company to change it: install
Toolkit
Every private equity deck in 2026 says the same thing. Returns will come from operations, not leverage. The financial-engineering era is over, the operating era has begun, and the numbers now back the slogan: in S&P Global Market Intelligence's 2026 Private Equity Survey, 71% of
Toolkit
We treat a continuation fund as what it is: a tool, not a verdict. The same vehicle that lets a genuinely strong company keep compounding under an owner who understands it can also let a tired one dodge the markdown it has already earned. Nothing in the structure tells you
Value Creation
A plain-English glossary of the 14 operating and value-creation terms private equity investors actually use in 2026, each defined in two sentences with links to the full explainer.
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The return math in private equity quietly reset. The growth a deal needs has roughly doubled, and it has to come out of the business, not the cap table. The seat that clears it is the CFO, redefined.
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Both promise to fix a portfolio company, but they answer different questions. If the business needs to grow, you want an operating partner. If it needs to stop bleeding, you want a turnaround firm.