Most PE firms now say they create value through operations, not financial engineering. The playbook sounds right: optimize tech stack, align sales and marketing, build repeatable systems.
Some common gaps show up 90 days in. And considering the 100-day post-buy period, it turns the hold period on its head.
1. The portfolio company runs HubSpot, Salesforce, two WordPress instances across acquired brands, along with a Squarespace and a custom framework.
2. Marketing still reports into the legacy CEO.
3. Sales uses a different CRM than the parent company standard.
4. IT is outsourced to the founder’s cousin.
The operating partner has a 100-day plan. What they don’t have is an embedded technical or digital value creation team that can execute it while the company keeps running.
Roll-ups deal with this a lot over the last couple of years. The diagnosis is fast, the order of operations is clear, but execution stalls because the value-creation partner hired to build the roadmap isn’t staffed to implement it, and the portfolio company’s bench is already underwater keeping legacy operations alive.
The firms that close this gap treat technical execution as a permanent embedded function, not a consulting engagement. They staff it like they staff finance: a multi-year operating unit that reports into the value-creation plan, not a vendor relationship that ends when the slide deck is done. That staffing decision is the whole operating model in miniature. How portfolio operations teams are structured decides whether the 100-day plan has anyone assigned to build it, or whether it arrives as a deck the portfolio company is expected to implement on top of its existing workload.
DevriX has operated this way since 2015, a decade before PE’s operational pivot made it table stakes.
We don’t write plans. We become the engineering and revenue operations layer that executes them while your portfolio company’s team focuses on what they actually do well.
The model works when the incentives align: our success is your EBITDA growth and exit multiple, not our billable hours.
Private Equity’s Operating Model Is Only as Strong as Its Execution Layer
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The Author
Mario Peshev is a 5x CEO and operator, founder of DevriX and Growth Shuttle, global value creation advisor, angel investor, and author of “MBA Disrupted.”
His original background in engineering rode the wave of IT entrepreneurship in the last 25 years, from product and service entrepreneurship through acquiring and selling businesses, to investing in global startups like beehiiv, doola, the Stacked Marketer, Alcatraz, SeedBlink.
Peshev spent over 10,000 hours in consulting and training contracts for mid-market and enterprise organizations like VMware, SAP, Software AG, CERN, Saudi Aramco since 2006. His books and guides are referenced in over 50 universities in North America, Europe, and Asia.
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