Life
Never heard of him? Think of him as the Vince Lombardi of English football... if Lombardi had a sharper tongue, a bigger ego, and had won the Super Bowl with a team no one had heard of. Clough didn’t manage the big-name clubs. He took small, under-resourced,
Theses
Morbid margins, minimal tech, and a $100B generational wealth transfer. The funeral industry is one of the last remaining consumer sectors untouched by modern technology. It’s awkward, analog, and full of friction. And that’s exactly what makes it interesting. Let’s start with the basics: the average cost
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We’ve all seen them. Sleek formatting, lots of arrows pointing in bold directions. They’re the corporate equivalent of a Tinder profile. Great photos, zero substance, and you just know it’s not showing up when it’s time to commit. You get slides like: • “Capture revenue synergies through
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They just don’t realise it yet. In 2021, LPs were piling into funds like it was the last chopper out of Saigon. Fast forward to 2024, and commitments are dripping in slower than a CFO’s reply to a marketing budget request. The data tells the story: • The median
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And in private equity, theatre doesn’t get a second act. Too many portfolio companies are still reporting on impressions, clicks, engagement rates, as if those metrics mean something in isolation. They don’t. Marketing isn’t a creative department. It’s not a vibe. It’s an investment function.
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No one knows what they actually do, and it’s costing the model its best people. Private equity has embraced the OP model. Over 63% of firms now employ them, up from 46% just five years ago (EY, 2023). But here’s the kicker: The average tenure of an Operating
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They build compounding engines. Buying is the easy part. There’s a banker, a CIM, a competitive process, and if you’ve got a fund and a decent track record, you’ll probably win something. That’s not the hard bit. The hard part is what happens after the champagne.
Theses
The invisible infrastructure of the American household has a ton of business opportunity Say you’re scaling a single-product home services business, pest control, lawn care, maybe appliance repair. You centralize ops. One call center. One CRM. But you’re still selling one service. One category. One shot at
Views
Most private equity firms still operate like it’s 2005. They invest time and capital building outbound sourcing teams, but spend almost no time building a voice in the market. Meanwhile, firms like Andreessen Horowitz and 20VC have proven that in venture, content is capital. Their media presence is their
Theses
Home services are a hot space in PE right now, and for good reason. Recurring demand, fragmented markets, and operational levers make them attractive. But too many firms stop at the basics: backend consolidation, procurement savings, and cost control. The real alpha is in premiumization. Transforming a commoditized service into
Value Creation
Most value creation plans start with org charts and synergy maps. But in lower mid-market PE, speed kills and nothing drives enterprise value faster than early revenue acceleration. Every portco should launch a 90-Day Revenue Lab on Day 1. What is it? A focused sprint to: • Pressure-test
Value Creation
Time to First Win In private equity, we live and die by IRR, MOIC, and LTV:CAC. But there’s one metric that rarely makes the dashboard, and yet can make or break a value creation plan: Time to First Win. It’s the speed at which a new investment