From the 2026 Bain & Company hashtag#PE Report: a decade ago, 5% annual EBITDA growth was enough to generate a 2.5x MOIC.
Today it's 12%. Multiple expansion is gone. Cheap debt is gone.
What's left is operational and commercial performance — and most portcos aren't ready to deliver it from Day 1.
𝟭. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗗𝗗 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗱𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻'𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴
In present-day Private Equity, commercial due diligence has one purpose: confirm the thesis. It validates what's in the CIM.
It asks customers, "Why did you choose Vendor X?" and "How satisfied are you?" Supply-side questions that produce surface-level validation and false confidence.
What they don't produce is a growth algorithm.
Demand-side interviews ask different questions: what triggered the change, what nearly stopped you, and how you justified the spend internally.
These nuanced questions surface the repeatable buying patterns that actually drove customer decisions.
When those patterns repeat across 8-10 recent customers, you have the foundation of a Day 1 GTM playbook: a funded, evidence-based commercial plan that arrives at IC approval, not a 90-day post-close discovery project.
𝟮. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗲𝗳𝘁 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲
The EBITDA targets your deal model now requires cannot be achieved through cost reduction alone.
Revenue has to do the work.
But most portco commercial teams are running a supply-side product-push model built around features, capabilities, and awards, a narrative designed for a world where sellers controlled the information and thus had control.
Today, that asymmetry is reversed: buyers control the journey.
They complete 70-80% of it before they engage a sales team.
By the time your portco shows up, the frame is already set. Your messaging didn't set it.
Demand-side buyer research replaces assumptions with evidence.
It builds a commercial motion around the struggling moments that actually move buyers from inertia to action, and that's what closes the gap between Year 1 targets and Year 1 results.
𝟯. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
LPs now want value creation plans they can describe in one sentence and back with data.
"We'll hire a better CMO and fix the messaging" is not a plan."
We interviewed 8 recent customers during CDD, identified three repeatable buying triggers, and built a Day 1 outbound playbook, website messaging and overhauled our brand narrative around the highest-signal segment" is a plan.
The gap between those two sentences is a Year 1 miss waiting to happen.