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You don’t hire an agency. You hire whoever still works there this month.

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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Everyone loves a roll up until the “synergies” meeting turns into an intervention.

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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It all tastes the same in the dark.

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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If you’ve ever tried to explain to someone why you hate your agency, you end up sounding petty.

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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If I was building a private equity firm for the next decade, I wouldn’t start with a fund. I’d start with a platform.

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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Every board deck says “pricing power” like it’s a personality trait.

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

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PE loves “strategy” because it sounds expensive and it fits nicely on slide 7.

The problem is most portfolio companies don’t have a strategy gap, they have a basics gap. Digital foundations first. Every time. Because you can’t “vision” your way out of a broken funnel. Start with the stuff nobody wants to own because it’s unglamorous and measurable. Website speed

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Most PE returns were the tide going out. Now you get to find out who can swim.

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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In portfolio companies, execution doesn’t fail in the boardroom.

It fails on Tuesday morning, when nobody is quite sure who’s allowed to fix the problem. You see this constantly in home services and other PE-backed, multi-location businesses. Leads slow down in a few markets. Close rates start drifting. CAC creeps up. Field teams complain the quality is off.

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Everyone in PE has a “value creation plan”.

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

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People notice the tech before they notice you.

In most rooms, your devices have already told a story by the time you start talking. This isn’t about brands or preferences. It’s about signalling. The tools you carry quietly telegraph how you think, how you work, and where you sit in the system. People form an opinion

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“How did you go bankrupt?” "Gradually, then suddenly.”

That’s not just bankruptcy. That’s basically how most value gets destroyed in business. It rarely shows up as a big, cinematic disaster. It’s smaller and more boring than that, which is why everyone ignores it. A few “one time” discounts become the new price. Lead quality slips