Private Equity Blog

Building the Exit-Ready Growth Engine
Executive Takeaways
- At exit, buyers judge what they believe can happen next, not just what already happened.
- A durable commercial engine answers the hard diligence questions before buyers ask them.
- Exit-ready growth engines are built during the hold period, not assembled in the final stretch.
- The best exit stories are built into the operating system, not written at the end.
Recent Posts

Hey GP, Where’s Your Digital Transformation?
May 14, 2020, 3:00:00 PM — “Digital transformation” is a phrase we hear and read about constantly. It’s in countless articles and thought leadership pieces targeted at marketers, CEOs, investors, and other business leaders. It’s a topic that’s brought up in almost every meeting we have with private equity firms as well as at most PE-focused events. It gets used so much that it has become one of those omnipresent buzzwords in danger of losing its meaning, like “Big Data” and “The Cloud”.

Private Equity Portfolio Triage During COVID-19 – Are Investors Missing Something Big?
May 4, 2020, 11:38:28 AM — By now, most if not all Private equity firms have done some level of triage on their portfolios as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. As expected, much of the focus has been on determining which companies are at most risk financially and operationally, and steps have been taken to shore up liquidity and protect supply chains among other things. However, scant attention has been spent on assessing the ability of holdings across the portfolio to restart commercial engines post crisis. This shortcoming jeopardizes the ability to take advantage of what may be transformative growth opportunities in my opinion. It also puts overall fund performance at risk in the long-term.