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I’ve sat in too many reviews where CAC is down, everyone relaxes, and then three weeks later we’re back arguing about why revenue didn’t move and sales “can’t close these leads”. Nothing mystical happened. The funnel just got gamed. If you optimise hard enough for CAC,
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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
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You can pick a new vendor or agency, and the first month will look immaculate. Perfect decks. Charming calls. Everyone “aligned.” By month three, you find out whether they can actually deliver anything beyond enthusiasm. Hiring works the same way. Month one is onboarding and optimism. Month two is settling
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Here’s the thing: you can run a private equity firm on Outlook and Excel and do just fine. PE isn’t starving for dashboards, copilots, or a 40-tab “deal OS.” PE is starving for better decisions, and no software has ever replaced judgment, pattern recognition, or the ability to
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Nothing says “we’re modern” like a 14 point AI strategy slide no one can ship. You know the one. It appears at the end of the board deck, stapled on after the real agenda, right between “Talent” and “Other”. A handful of buzzwords, a diagram with arrows, and a
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Every portfolio has someone proudly fixing the CRM. Clean fields. Perfect notes. Mandatory dropdowns. A new stage called “Attempted contact”. Meanwhile the actual business is happening in the call queue. And the call queue is losing. Invoca found 27% of calls to home services businesses go unanswered. That’s not
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Companies don’t fail because they lack ideas. They fail because they outsource thinking. And nothing signals that faster than appointing a Chief Innovation Officer. When you create a role whose job is “innovation,” what you’re really saying is: • Everyone else can keep doing things the old way. • Innovation
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Most don’t survive the first 12 months. Let that sink in. A recent-ish study of large U.S. buyouts found that 71% of companies hired a new CEO under PE ownership. (Source: Gompers, Kaplan & Mukharlyamov “The Market for CEOs: Evidence from Private Equity,” 2022/2023) And PE leadership
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Not the awkward tail end you quietly ignore, the default operating model for managers who can’t raise, can’t exit, but can still invoice. Trilantic just took a very public blood transfusion: Blackstone and Neuberger putting at least $600m into a deeply discounted continuation vehicle. Call it “liquidity”. It’
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Every firm now appears to be stockpiling operators the way children collected Pokémon cards. Operating Partners, Senior Advisors, Venture Partners, EIRs—hand out a title, add them to a slide, declare victory. LPs love the imagery. It signals “capability.” It looks sophisticated. It gives the impression of a tightly coordinated
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The layer of people whose primary function is aggregating information, writing summaries, building decks, and “managing up” is about to feel the shift first. Not because AI is more insightful than they are, but because it’s cheaper, faster, and doesn’t need three pre-meetings to prepare for the meeting.
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Everyone gets very excited about the new look. The menu is redesigned. There’s a “digital transformation” slide. Someone says “single source of truth” with a straight face. Meanwhile the basics are still feral. Jobs don’t reconcile to invoices. Inbound calls get treated like folklore. The same customer exists