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Last week it launched its new Total Return Strategy: control private equity, lower leverage, up to 12-year holds, mid-teens gross return targets, and an initial annual dividend yield of roughly 5 to 8%. In other words, actual cash flow. Disgusting behaviour. Someone alert the IRR police. The interesting
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Which is usually where the money is hiding. In 2021, KKR bought Global Atlantic. At the time, it looked like another sensible adjacency. Asset manager buys insurance balance sheet, gets permanent capital, originates credit, collects spread. Everyone nods politely and pretends they were already saying it. Then the numbers started
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A carry winter is going to make private equity very weird. Not dead. Not broken. Just weird. For years, the industry has talked about DPI, exit backlogs, continuation vehicles, NAV loans and LP liquidity as if they are mainly investor issues. They are not. They are compensation issues. And compensation
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It is an insurance company with a private equity costume department. That sounds glib, but the chart is doing something useful. For years, Apollo looked like the classic alts model. Fees grinding along underneath. Carry bouncing around like a drunk analyst after bonus day. Great when markets are open. Less
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Zombie fund was a useful phrase for about five minutes. It describes what these funds look like from the outside: old, tired, wandering around with unrealised assets and no obvious way home. Very dramatic. Slightly Halloween. Not especially useful. The real issue is structural. A hostage fund is a fund
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The chart is the whole story. The gold area is fee related earnings. Recurring. Scalable. Predictable enough that public market investors can squint at it and pretend it is a software company with nicer shoes. The grey dashed line is total distributable earnings, including realized carry. That is the bit
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When we start working with a PE backed business at Claymore, the first thing we ask is very simple: Where does revenue actually come from? Not the high level version. Not the board deck version. Not the one where everything is neatly grouped into channels, segments, and growth buckets that
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Private equity is not one operating philosophy but several. A neutral field guide to the five you will actually encounter, what each believes, who runs it, and when it works.
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An EBITDA bridge is a waterfall analysis that explains the change in a company's EBITDA from one point in time to another by breaking the total movement into its component drivers: organic volume, pricing, cost inflation, acquisitions, one-time items, and operational initiatives. In private equity, the EBITDA
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Operating partners embed inside a single leadership team. Fractional executive firms deploy a roster across many. Here is when each one wins.
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What a Value Creation Plan is in private equity, the six lever categories, who builds and owns it, how it maps to the EBITDA bridge, and why most VCPs fail.
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Private equity has a duration problem. Hold periods have stretched. Everyone knows it. Fewer exits. More waiting. More assets sitting in portfolios far longer than the original model expected. And yet a lot of value creation plans still read like the business is going to be sold in the same