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The gym sessions you skip. The calls you make. The habits you tolerate. The people you surround yourself with. It’s all compounding, every day, quietly, without fanfare. In business, we obsess over financial compounding......IRR, MOIC, reinvested profits. But the real magic (or destruction) is happening elsewhere. Culture compounds.
Life
Freeze the lemon and shove it as far back up life as you can. Elbow deep. Because in business, you don’t win by coping, you win by counterattacking. Most people have been trained to absorb problems politely. They call it “resilience.” They think if they just keep calm, manage
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You’ve been there. You just walked into the best party in Vegas. Perfect music, open bar, crowd full of people who all look like they’ve made it. The room hums with self-importance .........everyone telling each other how great things are. You feel it too. You’ve made
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Short answer? You don’t. You get invited. It’s one of the most opaque, relationship-driven roles in private equity—and it doesn’t follow a normal recruiting process. You don’t apply. There’s no job board. No clear path. It’s more secret society than career ladder.
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The problem is no one updates the plan. A deal gets signed. The spreadsheet gets built. Revenue projections go up and to the right. EBITDA margin magically improves by year three. And everyone agrees to it because, well, it has to pencil. But here’s the issue: Six months in,
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Capital is commoditised. So is M&A. Everyone has access to debt. Everyone’s getting banker decks. Everyone’s playing the same playbook from 2012, just with higher entry multiples. The last true edge? Talent. Not the “we’ll bring in a new CEO post-close” kind of talent.
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I’d spend 5 minutes on past returns and 25 on how we actually create value. Because past returns don’t win the next deal. And they certainly don’t justify 2 and 20 in a market where PE is getting harder. The days of buying low, levering up, cutting
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Why? Because the call center model is a perfect storm of inefficiency: • High cost, low value-add: Average U.S. call center agent wage is ~$38k. Add training, turnover (30–45% annually), and management overhead… the true cost per seat is easily $60k+. • Customer experience is broken: Long waits, scripted
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The format is almost predictable. Everyone goes around the table, venting: • “The deal team doesn’t listen.” • “The CEOs won’t follow through.” • “We don’t have real authority.” • “We’re treated like consultants on retainer.” Nods of sympathy, stories swapped, maybe even a war wound or two. And then
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The sharp associate who spotted the hidden growth lever in diligence. The partner who intuitively backed a founder others passed on. The ops lead who made the 51/49 call and unlocked 3 turns of multiple. This was the game: pattern recognition, gut feel, reps. And it was a moat…
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Most roofing CEOs will tell you: “I run a roofing business.” The smart ones say something else entirely: “I run a sales and marketing business that happens to sell roofs.” That distinction is the difference between a $10m local contractor and a $500m platform. Because operations are table stakes. You
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In business (and private equity especially), the danger isn’t always in the obvious losses. It’s in the near-wins. The times when you think you’ve got it wrapped up, only to watch it slip away through complacency, ego, or poor execution. I’ve seen deals where the