PE-backed CEOs face a brutal path to exit. Most never make it. Here's how not to be one →
How I keep a CEO, sponsor, and board aligned when the company expands through deals—shared definitions of the number, capacity tradeoffs, and honest kill criteria.
The operator questions I ask before serious diligence starts—thesis fit, base health, absorb capacity, walk-aways, and when not to open the CIM at all.
What breaks when you buy too many add-ons too fast—and the operator rules I use to protect the base business while a platform expands.
An operator CEO’s decision system for when to expand a platform through acquisitions—thesis fit, absorb capacity, bolt-on sequencing, and when to hold instead of buy.
Multiple expansion is dead, and I could not be happier about it. For most of my thirty years in and around private equity, a large share of the industry’s returns came from a trade that
I prepare a company to be sold by working backward from the close date, starting about five hundred days out. Not ninety days, when the bankers show up and everyone starts scrambling — five hundred,
Price is the cheapest EBITDA you will ever find because it requires no capital, no acquisition, no new hires, and no eighteen-month integration plan. It requires a decision. I have run price programs at companies
I explain every plan I run — a $1.5B industrial platform, a turnaround, a bolt-on thesis — to every board I face with one page: the EBITDA bridge. Starting EBITDA on the left. Exit EBITDA
Before any company I run, chair, or advise spends a dollar on growth, I apply one test: take material margin — revenue minus the direct cost of materials — and divide it by total employee
The Three Locks are how I get a board, a plan, and a team to agree — and to stay agreed when the first bad quarter shows up. Board Lock: the exit number in writing,
