Most mid-market portfolio companies ($30M to $250M) share one trait: they can’t grow organically without throwing more money at the engine.
And there’s nothing wrong with paid media at all. It’s the rising costs + inefficient “owned” funnel that’s adding up – and tanked hundreds of thousands of businesses in 2023 and 2024 with hectic prices, ZIRP disappearing, or Google SEO shutting down for a while.
I recently worked with a PE-backed $85M professional services company. $10M+ on paid media in 12 months. Almost zero organic pipeline.
Website was a brochure from 2019. CRM had no lifecycle stages. Nine handoff points between marketing, sales, and CS. Zero SLAs. None of that showed up in a board deck, because nobody had looked. [The portfolio company audit] is the longer version of the same exercise, covering the website, CRM, handoffs and spend in one pass so an operating partner can see where the money is going before deciding what to fund next.
In this week’s Growth Shuttle Insider, I break down the four structural reasons it keeps happening, plus a 5-day diagnostic any operating partner can run on a portco this week:
Growth Shuttle InsiderGrowth Shuttle Insider
Why Mid-Market Companies Struggle With Organic Growth Today
Mario Peshev
