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Every portfolio has someone proudly fixing the CRM. Clean fields. Perfect notes. Mandatory dropdowns. A new stage called “Attempted contact”. Meanwhile the actual business is happening in the call queue. And the call queue is losing. Invoca found 27% of calls to home services businesses go unanswered. That’s not
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Companies don’t fail because they lack ideas. They fail because they outsource thinking. And nothing signals that faster than appointing a Chief Innovation Officer. When you create a role whose job is “innovation,” what you’re really saying is: • Everyone else can keep doing things the old way. • Innovation
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Most don’t survive the first 12 months. Let that sink in. A recent-ish study of large U.S. buyouts found that 71% of companies hired a new CEO under PE ownership. (Source: Gompers, Kaplan & Mukharlyamov “The Market for CEOs: Evidence from Private Equity,” 2022/2023) And PE leadership
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Not the awkward tail end you quietly ignore, the default operating model for managers who can’t raise, can’t exit, but can still invoice. Trilantic just took a very public blood transfusion: Blackstone and Neuberger putting at least $600m into a deeply discounted continuation vehicle. Call it “liquidity”. It’
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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
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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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Everyone gets very excited about the new look. The menu is redesigned. There’s a “digital transformation” slide. Someone says “single source of truth” with a straight face. Meanwhile the basics are still feral. Jobs don’t reconcile to invoices. Inbound calls get treated like folklore. The same customer exists
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Watch how the top creators operate and the resemblance becomes hard to ignore. MrBeast behaves like a diversified holdco. Multiple product lines. Brand extensions. International expansion. A consumer business portfolio that would make most funds blush. Last year he reportedly turned down offers valuing his empire north of $1.5B,
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Same set. Same agenda. Same polite panic. The work doesn’t happen in the room, it gets narrated in the room. And you can spot the archetypes in the first five minutes. The Deck Sommelier Can’t start until the slides “flow”. Will happily burn 30 minutes adjusting a chart
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Translating between the deal team that wants “disciplined growth” (whatever that means this quarter) and the management team that wants to protect their P&L (and their jobs). Half the time, both sides are wrong. The deal team wants 20% growth with no investment. Management wants investment with no
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Most people still credit the pandemic with “inventing” remote work. The early software world would find that amusing. Basecamp, GitHub and Automattic were already proving the model while everyone else was debating dress codes and mandatory fun days. Automattic grew into a multibillion-dollar company without a headquarters, and somehow civilisation
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Everyone nods when it's presented. No one owns it when the quarter misses. Most "commercial excellence" programs in PE are theatre. They're built to look rigorous......frameworks, benchmarks, workshops. But they rarely move the needle. Why? Because they start with PowerPoint, not P&