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Local autonomy is what people demand when HQ starts “adding value”. Most multi site businesses die somewhere in the middle, crushed under a beautiful PowerPoint called “The Playbook” that nobody follows, because it has no teeth and even less respect for reality. Here’s the quadrant nobody wants to admit
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Apollo’s note basically admits what most of us have watched since 2022: a lot of firms mistook cheap debt and multiple expansion for talent. When rates reset, the returns didn’t just wobble. They exposed who was riding beta and who actually knows how to build businesses.  A few
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Private equity keeps hiring “value creation” people, then sends them into portfolio companies with zero mandate, zero budget, and the authority level of a polite email. And then everyone acts confused when the plan doesn’t happen. Obvious value creation: We underwrote 300 bps of margin expansion from “procurement synergies.
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Translation for anyone still clinging to 2016: the deal doesn’t work unless you actually run the business. Awful, I know. A decade ago, a “typical” buyout could hit a 2.5x over five years with ~5% annual EBITDA growth because leverage was fat and multiple expansion did the heavy
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I asked a model to launch a $2B services roll up. It named the fund, designed the logo, scraped every founder over 55 within a 50 mile radius of a metro with above average household income, and ranked them by “succession anxiety score.” It built the investment committee memo before
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Capital is a commodity now. Everyone has a logo, a banker list, a lender relationship, and a “proprietary deal flow” story that’s basically networking with better lighting. The firms that win won’t be the ones that can buy companies. That part is easy-ish. They’ll be the
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Most businesses don’t have pricing power. They have a CFO with a spreadsheet, a CMO with a hope, and a sales team quietly discounting in the background. This is the bit everyone skips: pricing power is only half the game. The other half is operational control. And PE loves
Deals
None of the following are announced deals. These are themes repeatedly showing up in recent reporting, earnings commentary, banker conversations, and capital-markets behavior. PE Circling Honeywell’s Carve-Out Pipeline There’s increasing chatter around Honeywell as it continues to rationalize its portfolio, with large-cap sponsors like Advent
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Every deal team has the same comfort blanket in the IC deck: multiple expansion plus strategic buyer interest, because nothing says “value creation” like hoping the market gets horny again. Apollo put numbers on it in their Market Insight, Private Equity Returns to Its Roots (Jan 29, 2026): from 2010
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It’s usually 40 slides of heroic initiatives, and somehow none of them include the two things that actually move revenue in the real world. Retention and the front door. Because the quickest way to create “growth” isn’t another channel, another vendor, another dashboard, another AI pilot. It’s
Deals
Highlander Partners Acquires Tapatio Hot Sauce Highlander Partners acquired the Tapatio hot sauce brand from the founding family in a deal announced this past week. Price wasn’t disclosed, but the logic is pure consumer PE: a cult brand with absurd household penetration, decades of unspent brand equity, and zero
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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