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How Your Firm Operates
Today

Most firms rely on broker emails and personal networks — none of which auto-populate a CRM. Deals sit in inboxes for days before formal entry, creating attribution gaps and a leaky funnel with no learning loop.

Proprietary deal flow means less competition and better pricing. But monitoring weak signals across hundreds of companies is beyond any human team. Most firms admit this is largely ad hoc and dependent on which sectors individuals happen to follow.

Associates routinely spend 80–100 hours reading documents under time pressure. Red-flag tracking is typically an unstructured Word doc — critical issues get buried, and context is lost when team members rotate off the deal.

Commercial diligence is often outsourced at £100–300k per engagement. The synthesis step — turning 40 interview transcripts into a coherent market view — is enormously labour-intensive. Smaller deals often get no commercial DD at all due to cost.

A typical IC memo takes a VP/Associate 3–5 days, with most of that time on narrative rather than analysis. Templates exist but are rarely followed consistently. Senior partners spend hours rewriting language that should have been templated.

Analysts spend disproportionate time cleaning data — normalising management accounts, stripping one-offs, reconciling to audited figures — rather than analysing. The model is rebuilt from scratch on every deal despite identical structures.

Most portco data arrives as an Excel attachment mid-month, then gets manually entered into Allvue. By the time variances are analysed and escalated, 6–8 weeks have passed since period end. Problems compound silently before anyone acts.

A typical portfolio analyst spends 2–3 days per company per quarter — mostly copy-pasting data into PowerPoint. For a fund with 10 portcos, a full month of analyst time per quarter is consumed by board pack production alone.

Identifying where the levers are — pricing power, cost structure, churn — requires data that management doesn't proactively surface. Operating Partners stretched across many companies rely on gut feel more than systematic benchmarking.

Each DDQ asks 80–200 questions, 70% of which overlap with questions answered six months ago for a different LP — in a slightly different format. Responses are rebuilt manually, often from memory or an out-of-date Word document. Version control is a consistent mess.

Quarterly LP reporting is a firm-wide fire drill. Data flows from portcos → fund accountant → IR → partner review → legal sign-off — a 3–5 week process. LPs increasingly expect faster, more granular reporting. The commentary is largely templated boilerplate that nobody has time to make insightful.

Fund accounting platforms are configured for compliance, not flexibility. Any non-standard structure — complex waterfall, co-investment side vehicle, catch-up provisions — requires parallel Excel modelling. Reconciling platform figures to Excel models every quarter is a multi-day exercise with high error risk.

Mid-market PE firms sit in a regulatory grey zone — large enough for AIFMD obligations and ESG reporting pressure, too small for a dedicated compliance team. The COO or CFO absorbs this. Deadlines are tracked in spreadsheets. External counsel is expensive and over-relied upon for routine work.

SPA negotiation involves dozens of iterations across hundreds of clauses tracked in Word documents with unmanageable comment threads. The risk of a material clause being inadvertently accepted in a redline at 2am during exclusivity is very real — and very expensive post-close.

This is your strategic qualifier — it shapes everything about how you pitch. PE firms are acutely sensitive about data leakage. Resistance may be cultural, technical, or regulatory. The answer determines whether you lead with a back-office pilot or a deal-workflow transformation story.