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They’re the cotton candy of marketing metrics.....sweet for about 3 seconds, then you realise you’ve ingested air. Impressions don’t pay salaries. Clicks don’t cover debt covenants. Cash flow does. Customer LTV does. Gross margin does. Yet, I still see portfolio company boards patting themselves on
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But who are we actually serving? LPs, obviously. They give us the money. But portcos… they make us the money. So here’s the uncomfortable truth most GPs won’t say out loud: PE firms treat LPs like customers. But treat portcos like cost centers. You pitch the LPs. You
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Every week I hear a new acronym agencies are peddling: • LLM SEO • Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) • AIO (AI Optimization) • Conversational SEO • Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) • RAI (Retrieval-Augmented Indexing) Pick your flavour of alphabet soup.....none of it has a foundation. I’ve spoken to a dozen agencies in the last
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Plenty think they have. They’ll show you their org charts, explain how value creation is now a “core capability,” and proudly announce that every portfolio company has a VCP tracked in Asana. But scratch the surface, and what you find is usually a muddled mix of consulting theatre, internal
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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 answers,
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We’ve been here before. The dot-com bubble. Social media “revolutions.” Crypto and web3. Same playbook: • Hype attracts capital. • Capital attracts consultants. • Consultants attract grifters. • Then the floor falls out. AI isn’t special, it’s just next in line. Signs are everywhere: • PE firms bragging about “AI initiatives” that
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The old model was deceptively simple: • Load up on cheap debt. • Buy a business at 8x, sell it at 12x. • Slap on a board of grey-haired ex-CEOs. • Add a 100-day plan, mostly cost-cutting and vague “strategic priorities.” • Hope the market bails you out with multiple expansion. That model worked. And
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Not because the people aren’t smart. Not because they don’t want to help. But because they’ve been designed to observe, not build. Most boards in private equity aren’t boards. They’re quarterly compliance checks with catered sandwiches. You get the same format every time: - 100-page
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I’d start with the people who actually do the work: - Operators buried in integration plans - Founders trying to scale without getting fired - Growth-stage CEOs caught between board slides and bank covenants - The associate who just got asked to “benchmark CAC across the portfolio” by 9am
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Every PE-backed company is “undergoing a transformation.” It’s become the universal excuse for underperformance: “We’re not hitting plan... but we are transforming!” Let’s decode what that usually means: – Hired a CFO who finally built a budget – Fired the founder (again) – Finance moved from Excel v95 to NetSuite
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I’d start with buyers. And I definitely wouldn’t copy what exists today, because the current SMB brokerage landscape is terrible. Let’s be honest: The average business broker today is either: — A retired accountant who thinks they understand dealmaking because they did a few taxes — An attorney who’
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AI is already writing emails, building decks, writing copy, designing ads, optimising media… and it’s only getting better. What used to be a 15-person team doing grunt work across SEO, SEM, cold outreach, and reporting? Now it’s a prompt and a feedback loop. But the interesting bit isn’