Private equity opinion pieces | Not Very Private Equity

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Everyone in private equity keeps talking as if the old playbook is just having a temporary wobble.

It isn’t. Hamilton Lane’s 2026 Market Overview basically says the industry is now running on three fumes: no liquidity, manufactured optimism, and everyone pretending the exit market will sort itself out. They call it a liquidity drought. Quite polite of them. Four years in and 2025 still came

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Nothing screams scale like 47 tools and zero instrumentation.

Every portfolio company has the same modern uniform. HubSpot. Salesforce. Segment. A CDP. Call tracking. A BI tool. A “warehouse”. A dashboard someone screenshares once a month. None of it talks to each other. So you end up with a tech stack spreadsheet that looks like progress and behaves like

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Fractional has become a polite way of saying “we won’t commit.”

Every PE-backed company now has the modern executive starter pack: Fractional CFO. Fractional CMO. Fractional RevOps. Fractional People. Sometimes a fractional COO for good measure, because why stop at confusing. The pitch is always the same. Flexible. Senior. “Cost effective.” The reality is usually the same too. A business

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Private equity is entering the part of the film where the easy tricks stop working.

McKinsey’s 2026 private markets report is a nice way of saying the old private equity playbook is starting to look a bit dead. Deal value was up, yes. Everyone can clap for the rebound. But the number of deals fell, entry multiples hit a record 11.8x EBITDA, more

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Nothing says “we’re in control” like a forecast that changes more often than the CEO’s opinion.

Most companies don’t have a forecasting problem. They have an honesty problem, and a consequences problem. This is what it looks like in the wild. Top left is operational cadence. The forecast is a tool, not a fairy tale. You call the miss early. You know why it’s

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The smartest thing most agencies do isn’t marketing.

It’s custody. They run ads through their accounts. They build landing pages in their tools. They own the pixels. They own the dashboards. They “manage” your GA4. They set up call tracking. They keep the creative files. They control access. It all sounds helpful until you try to leave.

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The investor update is now a literary genre.

You know the one. Every month it arrives with the same “pleased to report” tone, like we’re announcing a royal birth, while the bank balance is quietly haemorrhaging in the background. It’s evolved in a very specific direction. It used to be facts. Bookings. Gross margin. Cash. Headcount.

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Culture has become the safest thing to blame.

Miss your numbers? Culture. Churn’s up? Culture. Ops is on fire? Definitely culture. So in walks “The Culture Consultant”. Usually escorted by the CEO’s guilty conscience and a budget line item nobody wants to interrogate. You’ve seen the cast: Values Poster Guy. Prints “Extreme Ownership” in 96pt

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The safest asset class in the room just started checking the exits.

Blackstone’s flagship private credit fund just had investors ask for 7.9% back in a quarter. That’s not “a little noise.” That’s people reaching for the door handle at the exact moment the industry keeps telling everyone the doors are “always open.” In normal person terms: imagine

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A lot of firms sell an operating model. They bought a Trello board.

I keep seeing this new species in private equity: the Operating Model Influencer. Always “rolling out the platform”. Always “standardising value creation”. Always one Notion workspace away from operational excellence. It usually comes with three archetypes: The Playbook Peddler Arrives with a 74 page PDF called “The Playbook”. Leaves before

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Standardisation is what people demand when they don’t trust management.

Local autonomy is what people demand when HQ starts “adding value”. Most multi site businesses die somewhere in the middle, crushed under a beautiful PowerPoint called “The Playbook” that nobody follows, because it has no teeth and even less respect for reality. Here’s the quadrant nobody wants to admit

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Private equity “returning to its roots” is a polite way of saying the party ended and someone finally turned the lights on.

Apollo’s note basically admits what most of us have watched since 2022: a lot of firms mistook cheap debt and multiple expansion for talent. When rates reset, the returns didn’t just wobble. They exposed who was riding beta and who actually knows how to build businesses. A few

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