cases

The smartest home-services play of the last decade wasn’t about technicians, it was about traffic.

Lee McCabe

29 Nov 2025 — 1 min read

Wrench Group is what happens when private equity finally understands that in consumer services, the real asset isn’t the fleet, it’s the funnel.

It started in 2016, when Investcorp rolled four strong regional HVAC and plumbing players into a single platform across Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix. A classic buy-and-build: fragmented market, recurring revenue, sticky customers.

But the next phase turned it into something bigger.
In 2019, Leonard Green & Partners took over and began industrialising everything behind the scenes—centralised marketing, shared tech stack, data-driven pricing, and a single national lead engine.

News (w/e 1/9/26)

Eir Partners Closes $1 Billion Fund Focused on Healthcare Technology Miami-based Eir Partners closed its third fund at $1 billion, blowing past its $800 million target in just a few months. The raise reinforces a clear LP preference: specialist healthcare investors with repeatable playbooks still get paid attention, even as

Deals (w/e 1/9/26)

Veritas Capital Buys Majority Stake in Global Healthcare ExchangeVeritas Capital is acquiring a majority stake in Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX), the healthcare supply-chain software platform used by hospitals and suppliers across the U.S. GHX sits in the unglamorous but essential plumbing of healthcare, where scale and data matter more

Private equity has quietly entered a new sport: competitive talent hoarding.

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

AI isn’t coming for middle management. It’s already rearranging the job description.

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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News (w/e 1/9/26)

Deals (w/e 1/9/26)

Private equity has quietly entered a new sport: competitive talent hoarding.

AI isn’t coming for middle management. It’s already rearranging the job description.