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You see this constantly in home services and other PE-backed, multi-location businesses. New locations are added faster than systems mature. Marketing budgets increase, but lead quality becomes harder to explain. Revenue targets go up, while visibility into what’s actually driving demand goes down. On paper, the business is scaling.
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Somehow we all accept that in every other part of the business. Capex gets a model. Headcount gets a plan. Even the CFO’s “strategic initiatives” get a spreadsheet and a quiet prayer. Marketing gets vibes. That’s why I call the right theory "Investment Marketing". Marketing is
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It’s lost on “good” deals that nobody knows how to run. The model works. The thesis makes sense. The entry multiple is defensible. Then the deal closes. The deal team rotates to the next opportunity. Attention shifts. Execution becomes someone else’s problem. That’s when ambiguity creeps in.
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CFO wants ROI by channel. Marketing says attribution is complicated. Both are correct. One is trying to run a business. The other is trying to win an argument. Attribution is the adult version of astrology. It’s brilliant at explaining the past and useless at predicting the future. And somehow
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It’s evidence you know how to raise a fund. Those two skills get conflated constantly. Conveniently. Raising capital proves you can tell a compelling story, manage a process, and convince LPs. It does not prove you can fix pricing. It does not prove you can scale demand. It does
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You’ve met them. Their superpower is turning reality into a “narrative” and then asking Comms to make it feel “more confident”. This chart is basically the leadership landscape. Top left: doing the actual work. Calling the ugly stuff early. Making decisions that annoy people in the moment and save
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The pitch is always the same. Senior people. “A team”. “Specialists”. “We’ve done this before.” Then the project starts and you meet your real agency. A junior account manager, a rotating cast of channel kids, and one person who seems to have been awake since 2019. And every month
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You buy the platform. You add bolt ons. You put “synergies” in 48pt font and act like you’ve invented fire. Then you discover the truth: You didn’t buy one business. You bought twelve different versions of reality. One CRM that’s basically a diary One CRM that’s
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That is modern private equity marketing in one line. Same agency decks. Same attribution models. Same promises about growth. Different logos, identical output. Turn the lights off and you could not tell which portfolio company you are looking at. This is not a creative problem. It is a measurement problem.
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It’s not petty. It’s death by a thousand paper cuts. Here’s the stuff everyone recognises immediately. Channel silos and finger pointing Paid blames creative. Creative blames the site. The site blames tracking. Tracking blames GA4. Nobody owns the outcome, everyone owns a slide. Test and learn graveyard
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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 ones
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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