By Mario Peshev, DevriX
Most consulting pitches aimed at private equity firms are written for the wrong reader. They describe capacity, process, and deliverables. The person holding the checkbook, whether a deal partner, an operating partner, or a portfolio CFO, is not buying any of that. They are buying a change in enterprise value and a defensible answer to a question they already have on their desk. When the two do not line up, the engagement stalls, the invoice gets contested, and the firm quietly writes the vendor off.
I have sat on both sides of this. DevriX runs engagements inside portfolio companies, and I advise sponsors and operators on where commercial value actually leaks. What follows is a working list of what the buyer in a PE firm needs to decide, and how you (as the buyer) should judge whether a consultant can help you decide it. If you are the one selling into PE, read it as a specification. If you are the one buying, read it as a filter.
1. Know which stakeholder you are actually serving
The single most common failure in PE consulting is treating “the firm” as one buyer. It is not. A deal partner, an operating partner, and a portfolio CFO have different clocks, different fears, and different definitions of a good answer.
The deal partner wants thesis, risk, and exit
A deal partner is deciding whether the investment thesis holds, what could break it, and how the story reads to the next owner. They do not want a description of engineering activity or a marketing audit. They want to know if the revenue is real, whether it is defensible, and what threatens the exit multiple.
The operating partner wants speed and repeatable adoption
An operating partner is judged on how fast a change lands across the portfolio and whether it sticks. They want playbooks that transfer, not bespoke theory. Bain’s Global Private Equity Report has tracked for years how operational value creation has moved from a nice-to-have to the primary lever now that leverage and multiple expansion do less of the work.
The CFO wants cash, covenants, and forecast reliability
A portfolio CFO cares about quality of earnings, cash conversion, covenant headroom, and whether the forecast will survive the next board meeting. Translate every recommendation into those terms or expect it to be ignored.
If you cannot name the stakeholder in the room and the decision on their desk, you are not ready to pitch or to hire. I wrote more on the difference between advice and P&L accountability in this breakdown of consultants versus operators.
Example. A sponsor asked us to “improve the website” of a newly acquired B2B services business. The real decision was whether the company’s inbound pipeline could support the growth line in the deal model. Once we reframed the work around pipeline reliability rather than site quality, the CFO engaged, and the scope tripled because it now answered a question that mattered.
2. Judge the offer against enterprise value, not activity
Hours, tickets, features, campaigns, and traffic are the vendor’s register. None of them is an outcome. The buyer’s register is revenue growth, EBITDA expansion, cash-flow improvement, faster integration, reduced operating risk, better management visibility, higher multiple, and a shorter path to exit.
A good consultant leads with the financial consequence and treats the activity as the mechanism. A weak one inverts that, describing the mechanism at length and leaving you to infer the value. When you are judging a proposal, cross out every sentence that describes what the vendor will do and see if a business case survives. If nothing is left, you are looking at a staffing arrangement dressed as value creation.
This is also why I keep arguing that PE value creation needs embedded partners, not arms-length advisory. I made that case in full in this piece on embedded partners versus advisory firms. An advisor who leaves a deck and walks has not accepted any of the risk that value creation actually requires.
3. Demand a claim classified by type, not a vague promise
Not every dollar a consultant points at is the same dollar. Before you accept a number, force it into one of five buckets: realized, run-rate, forecast, enabled, or risk avoided. A pipeline uplift you can see in closed revenue is realized. A pricing change annualized forward is run-rate. A model projection is forecast. A capability that makes future growth possible is enabled. A diligence issue caught before close is risk avoided.
The mischief happens when a consultant lets a forecast or an enabled benefit read like realized cash. That is how value-creation plans get inflated and how boards get surprised. When someone tells you an initiative is “worth” a number, your next question is always the same: realized, run-rate, forecast, enabled, or risk avoided, and on what baseline and method?
Example. A firm was told a portfolio company’s new sales motion had “added two million in value.” Under questioning, it turned out to be a forecast built on an assumed close rate that had never held. The honest classification was enabled at best. Two very different numbers, two very different board conversations.
4. Separate commercial diligence from post-close operating work
These are different jobs with different buyers and different burdens of proof, and blending them creates confusion on both sides.
Diligence answers “should we buy, and at what price”
Pre-close, the consultant’s job is to test the thesis and surface what could sink it. Customer concentration, churn masked by expansion accounting, a pipeline that depends on one departing rep, revenue that is really a handful of renewals waiting to lapse. I keep a running list of the ones that recur most in commercial due diligence red flags in B2B businesses. The output here is a decision and a price adjustment, not a plan.
Operating work answers “now that we own it, what changes and when”
Post-close, the buyer wants a sequenced plan with owners and dates. This is where a 100-day go-to-market plan earns its keep. McKinsey’s private capital research has consistently found that the early period after close sets the tone for the entire hold, and that value plans which slip in the first hundred days rarely recover the lost time.
When you hire, be explicit about which job you are buying. A great diligence shop is not automatically a great operating partner, and vice versa. The skills overlap less than the marketing suggests.
5. Test whether they can read the numbers a CFO lives in
A consultant who cannot hold a serious conversation about adjusted EBITDA, add-backs, and cash conversion will not survive contact with a portfolio CFO. This is not about credentials. It is about whether their recommendations translate into the financial statements the deal actually runs on.
Add-backs are where a lot of nonsense hides. Every consultant claiming to “improve EBITDA” should be able to tell you whether they mean a durable operational change or a one-time adjustment that a buyer’s quality-of-earnings team will strip out on the next transaction. I laid out the difference in adjusted EBITDA and the art of add-backs. The AICPA & CIMA standards on quality of earnings are the reference point here, and a serious advisor knows them.
How to test it. Ask a candidate to walk you from their proposed initiative to the specific line it moves, then to how a QoE review would treat that movement. If they cannot, they are selling activity again.
6. Insist on baselines and measurement before work starts
The most expensive mistake in value-creation consulting is starting work without agreeing on what “before” looked like. If you cannot state the baseline, you cannot claim the improvement, and you certainly cannot defend it in a data room three years later.
A credible consultant fixes the baseline, the measurement method, and the attribution logic on day one. That means agreeing on how you separate the effect of the intervention from market movement, from other initiatives, and from luck. Our own outcome claims carry an account, a period, a baseline, and a method, or we do not make them. That discipline is not bureaucratic. It is what lets you put a number in front of a next buyer and have it survive scrutiny.
This is also the antidote to the vendor problem I described earlier. When measurement is agreed in advance, activity theater stops being an option, because the only thing that counts is the movement against the baseline you both signed off.
7. Find the revenue leakage before you fund new growth
Sponsors love a growth story, and consultants love to sell one. But most B2B portfolio companies are leaking existing revenue faster than any new campaign can replace it. Fixing the leak is usually cheaper, faster, and lower risk than buying growth, and it shows up in the numbers sooner.
Leakage hides in renewal handoffs, discount discipline, win rates on qualified deals, and customer segments the company keeps serving at a loss. I built a full revenue leakage diagnostic for exactly this reason. A consultant worth hiring will want to run that diagnostic before proposing to spend money on top-of-funnel, because the fastest EBITDA improvement is often the revenue you already earned and then quietly gave away.
A related point on the growth side. When the leak is in the commercial engine itself, a fractional CRO who fixes win rate and CAC beats a strategist who delivers revenue theory. Judge growth proposals by whether they touch the specific mechanics of win rate, deal size, and acquisition cost, or whether they stay comfortably abstract.
8. Require the commercial KPIs that actually predict the exit
Board decks are full of vanity metrics that move without predicting anything. What a deal partner needs is the small set of commercial KPIs that a next buyer will underwrite: net revenue retention, gross margin by segment, sales efficiency, pipeline coverage, and the durability of the top accounts.
A consultant who reports on impressions and MQLs while the retention curve quietly bends the wrong way is actively harmful, because they are creating the appearance of progress. I keep the list of metrics that matter in operating reviews tight for that reason, and I explained the shortlist in this piece on operating review KPIs.
PitchBook’s research and data on holding periods is worth keeping in view here. As holds have stretched, the metrics that hold up across a longer ownership period matter more than the ones that flatter a single quarter. Judge a consultant by which metrics they choose to put on the wall.
9. Watch for the value-creation pitfalls that repeat
Some mistakes show up in almost every portfolio I see. The team funds growth before fixing retention. The GTM plan assumes a sales motion the company has never actually run. The consultant optimizes a channel that was never the constraint. Every one of these looks like progress on a slide and produces nothing in the accounts.
I catalogued the recurring ones in this guide to PE GTM value-creation pitfalls. The pattern underneath them is always the same: a solution chosen before the constraint was diagnosed. When you are judging a proposal, ask what the constraint is and how they know. If the answer is a capability the vendor happens to sell, be careful.
The broader discipline of staying ahead of these traps is something I treat as a leadership habit, not a one-time fix, which is the argument in my lessons on future-proofing organizations.
10. Confirm they will accept accountability, not just deliver advice
The final filter is the hardest one, and the one that separates a real value-creation partner from a well-dressed advisor. Will they stand next to their recommendation while it gets implemented, and will they carry some of the downside if it does not land?
Advisory that ends with a deck transfers all the execution risk back to you at the exact moment execution risk is highest. Governance research collected on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and the M&A work on Harvard Business Review both keep circling the same finding: value in deals is destroyed in execution far more often than in the thesis. So the consultant who is only accountable for the thesis is accountable for the wrong half.
Ask the direct question in the room. What part of your fee is at risk against the outcome, and what does it take for you to be here in six months? The answer tells you almost everything.
Takeaways for the buyer
- Name the stakeholder and the decision. If you cannot, do not commission the work yet. Deal partner, operating partner, and CFO are three different buyers.
- Cross out the activity and check for a business case. If nothing survives, it is staffing, not value creation.
- Classify every claim. Realized, run-rate, forecast, enabled, or risk avoided. Never let a forecast wear the costume of realized cash.
- Separate diligence from operating work. They are different jobs with different proof burdens.
- Fix the baseline before work starts. No baseline, no claim, no defense in the next data room.
- Fix the leak before funding growth. Retained revenue beats acquired revenue on cost, speed, and risk.
- Demand exit-relevant KPIs and accountability. Metrics a next buyer will underwrite, and a partner who stays for implementation.
Conclusion
Consulting for private equity firms is not a category of vendor. It is a test of whether someone can connect their work to enterprise value, classify what they claim honestly, and stand behind the result while it gets built. The firms that get value out of consultants are the ones that judge on those three things and ignore the deck. The firms that get burned are the ones that bought activity and hoped it would become outcome.
If you are a sponsor or an operating partner deciding whether an engagement will move the number that matters, or you want a second read on a value-creation plan before you fund it, that is the work I do. Start with a business advisory conversation, and if you need the execution to sit inside the portfolio company rather than outside it, the DevriX services team runs it embedded, on your baseline and your clock.
