Private Equity Due Diligence: The Workstream Everyone Underprices
For most of the buyout era, due diligence meant two things: financial diligence to confirm the numbers and legal diligence…
Private Equity Value Creation Strategies: The Levers That Still Work
For much of the last two decades, a large share of the value buyout funds handed back came from rising…
Value Creation in Private Equity: Where the Returns Come From Now
Industry decompositions of buyout returns have long carried an uncomfortable message for the people who run the deals. Bain’s Global…
Where Benefits Administration Automation Actually Pays
The benefit enrollment file has had a national standard since the early 2000s. The HIPAA-mandated EDI 834 transaction was supposed…
What Operational Due Diligence Misses in an M&A Deal
Operational due diligence expanded into a formal discipline for a defensive reason. After the 2008 crisis and the Madoff fraud…
How to Run an Operational Efficiency Assessment That Actually Finds the Money
US labour productivity grew about 2.2% in 2025, down from roughly 3% the year before, according to the Bureau of…
AI Governance for Regulated Industries: What Mid-Market Operators Actually Need
In December 2023, US insurance regulators drew a line most mid-market operators still haven’t absorbed: you are accountable for what…
What PE Operating Partners Miss in Portfolio Operations
Bain’s 2026 Global Private Equity Report gave the new math a name: 12 is the new 5. A buyout that…
The Three P&L Numbers That Reveal the Manual Wall
Every CFO knows the theory. As a business grows, fixed costs spread across more revenue and the margin should widen…
The Workflow Nobody Mapped: Why AI Deployment Leaves Human Bridging Intact
The AI platform went live in November. By March, the operations team headcount was unchanged from October, and the throughput…