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When LPs win, GPs get paid. When LPs wait, GPs also get paid. That is either genius or theft with better stationery. The industry is sitting on a giant pile of companies it has not yet sold, distributions are still under pressure, and LPs are being asked to re-up
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It normally appears while people are comparing firms, career prospects and the likelihood of ever seeing their carried interest. It is not an official category. Nobody proudly adds it to the fundraising deck. It is an insult. JAMBOG stands for Just Another Middle Market Buyout Group. You will also see
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This is the reframing most sponsors miss. They buy a facilities management company and see cleaners, supervisors, contracts, margins, procurement, labour scheduling, and customer retention. Fine. That is the business on the surface. Underneath, the company is producing thousands of data points every day. Which buildings take longer than priced.
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A Journal of Finance paper finds buyouts narrow pay gaps inside the firm, raise profitability and raise employment. The compression comes from replacing expensive managers with cheaper ones.
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Nearly 70% of PE-backed CEOs get replaced during the average hold period. That statistic should make the industry more uncomfortable than it does. Most people hear it and conclude that portfolio company CEOs are the problem. Wrong lens. If the selection process keeps producing the same failure pattern, perhaps
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The old model is getting squeezed. AI is compressing research. Clients are getting more price sensitive. Private equity wants faster replacements. Boards want more advice, more data, more benchmarking, more comfort blankets with logos on them. So every SHREK firm is making a different bet. Spencer Stuart is turning board
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The spreadsheet goes to three decimal places. The customer research goes to lunch. Every PE firm has a model. Revenue growth. Margin expansion. Working capital improvement. Synergy capture. Exit multiple. Lovely little tabs. Very obedient colours. A base case, a downside case, and a fantasy case wearing sensible shoes. Then
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Which mostly tells you that it stopped being a pure executive search firm before the market fully noticed. FY25 revenue was $2.7 billion. Executive search is now only 35% of the business. The other 65% comes from consulting, digital, assessment, professional search and RPO. Translation, the retained search market
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I enjoy fundraising decks in the same way I enjoy estate agent descriptions. Compact means tiny. Charming means structurally questionable. Proprietary means everyone else has seen it but did not love the price. Private equity has its own dialect. "Proprietary deal flow" often means the company came through
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Russell Reynolds publishes a Global CEO Turnover Index. Very useful. It tracks CEO exits across 13 global stock indices, then gently reminds the market that leadership is unstable, boards are nervous, and someone really ought to help them find the next adult in the room. In 2025, they tracked 234
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They are the people who calculate adjusted EBITDA. Some of them could make a corpse look cash generative by calling the smell “temporary integration friction.” We have somehow built an industry where the most important number in the deal is also the one most aggressively fictionalised. Revenue “normalisations.” Synergy add-
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Which means we got something extremely rare in executive search. Actual numbers. Revenue. Margins. Cyclicality. Growth. Fees. Public filings. The sort of thing search firms usually prefer to discuss in hushed tones over a burgundy carpet. Now Advent and Corvex have taken it private for $1.3 billion. Roughly $1