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The global men’s grooming market is already roughly $65B in 2025 and still grinding upward at a steady clip. Premium prices are sticking because the customer has changed. Men now buy routines, not just products. The market has “platforms”, but not the one this thesis wants. Unilever buying Dr
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They just have not processed it yet. 2021 was fundraising season tickets. LPs were throwing commitments around like it was Taylor Swift presale and they had a spare bot army. Now it is more like trying to get a decision out of an investment committee in August. Lots of “active
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Most people actually want data to show up in a board pack once a month so they can point at it and continue doing whatever they were going to do anyway. This is the difference between dashboards and advantage. Top left is dashboard theatre. Beautiful charts. Live dashboards. Eight filters.
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The weather changed and a lot of firms discovered the “operating model” was mostly just cheap debt, forgiving exits, and a decent haircut. That was the core of my keynote at SuperReturn Operating Partners Miami. For years, PE could get away with governance theatre and call it value creation. Quarterly
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They read like this: “Fix pricing. Improve sales. Add AI. Grow faster.” Brilliant. Someone call the Nobel committee. What they usually miss is the boring stuff that creates the actual value: Baseline numbers, not vibes. Timing, because “Q3” isn’t a plan. Investment required, because everything costs something, even “quick
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You can have a brilliant product and still lose. Quietly. With great NPS and no revenue. The graveyard is full of “best in class” products that nobody could actually buy, find, or understand without a 45 minute demo and a prayer. This quadrant is basically the market telling you what
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Lovely. Most of them still cannot answer three quite basic questions without a minor archaeological dig through spreadsheets, CRM exports, call logs, and somebody from finance doing a heroic amount of guesswork. What happened to revenue last week. Which channels actually drove it. Where margin leaked on the way through.
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It isn’t. Hamilton Lane’s 2026 Market Overview basically says the industry is now running on three fumes: no liquidity, manufactured optimism, and everyone pretending the exit market will sort itself out. They call it a liquidity drought. Quite polite of them. Four years in and 2025 still came
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McKinsey’s 2026 private markets report is a nice way of saying the old private equity playbook is starting to look a bit dead. Deal value was up, yes. Everyone can clap for the rebound. But the number of deals fell, entry multiples hit a record 11.8x EBITDA, more
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You know the one. Every month it arrives with the same “pleased to report” tone, like we’re announcing a royal birth, while the bank balance is quietly haemorrhaging in the background. It’s evolved in a very specific direction. It used to be facts. Bookings. Gross margin. Cash. Headcount.
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Blackstone’s flagship private credit fund just had investors ask for 7.9% back in a quarter. That’s not “a little noise.” That’s people reaching for the door handle at the exact moment the industry keeps telling everyone the doors are “always open.” In normal person terms: imagine
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I keep seeing this new species in private equity: the Operating Model Influencer. Always “rolling out the platform”. Always “standardising value creation”. Always one Notion workspace away from operational excellence. It usually comes with three archetypes: The Playbook Peddler Arrives with a 74 page PDF called “The Playbook”. Leaves before