As I’ve watched firms ebb and flow over the course of the last 20 years, finding ways to be innovative in the Private Equity context really hasn’t been that easy.  The industry generally runs along a well-defined set of rules and expectations and it’s rare that we see any truly fresh ideas or approaches.  To […]

Like many of you, I’m a movie buff.  I’m a sucker for great storytelling and hold many of the Classics in a special place.  As a guy who grew up in Youngstown, Ohio in the 1980s, the mob movie genre has particularly held my attention.  No surprise then, The Godfather trilogy is a long term […]

If you happen to be a sports fan, and in particular a college football fan, then you most likely have heard about the NCAA Transfer Portal.  Created in 2018, it’s a database where collegiate athletes can test their marketability to other college programs to potentially improve their situation as a student athlete.  There’s been quite […]

In December, I spent time with multiple clients who were in the process of thinking through their 2023 budgets.  Each of them runs a Portfolio Operations team inside a PE firm.  The firms for whom they work are quite different… ranging in AUM from $4 billion to $350 billion, and many in between.  They were […]

And How can that Dynamic Impact Firm Culture? “Do your Operating Partners take Board seats, or not?”  I feel like this is one of those questions in our community which doesn’t always necessarily elicit an authentic answer.  I don’t mean that people are untruthful in their responses, but I do think they may be following […]

This Spring I was working on a big assignment searching for someone to run the internal Portfolio Operations Group for a top 5 blue chip firm.  It was likely the most impressive deal I’d ever had, and it garnered a tremendous amount of interest from the candidate community.  I had the attention of both F500 […]

In May I had the privilege of speaking to a collection of GPs and LPs about what the future might hold as it relates to the impact of data and analytics in PE.  Markets Group asked me to speak at their Tenth Annual PE Forum in NYC.  I enjoyed the two-day event as the roster […]

Now that I have drawn a line in the sand around the superiority of housing industry specific Operating Partners alongside the deal teams who focus on those sectors, I need to examine the reasons why I arrive at this conclusion.  I’ll start at the macro level, and progress down with more granularity as we dive […]

I ran my first Operating Partner search in 2006 for TPG. We wanted an executive who would come in and contribute across the firm’s Technology related deals. Back then, I really didn’t know what an Operating Partner role was all about, but the folks at TPG sure did. I’m grateful to have been in that situation so […]

While there was a period in 2020 that gave us all a “pregnant pause” I think the market has spoken as to whether 2021 can “deliver” the returns we’ve all become accustomed to in PE. What a wild ride it’s been for the last 18 months.  In so many ways, January 1, 2021 felt like […]