Reading
Notes.
Short pieces on customer-led EBITDA growth, written for Operating Partners and portco CEOs in DACH. Public companions to the monthly Memos sent to the Customer Capital Circle.
- Method Note6 min read
When upskilling fails to stick, that is a management design problem, not a workforce one
When a portco that chose to upskill rather than hire still misses the VCP, the diagnostic instinct is to blame the workforce. The transfer-of-training literature points the other way: whether training reaches the job is governed by training design and work environment, not by trainee characteristics. Sequencing, channel, and reference are the three management choices that decide whether enablement transfers or accumulates as cost on the EBITDA bridge.
- Reframe7 min read
Most transformations should not be started
Most transformation initiatives never produce measurable EBITDA, and the failure rate has been stable across decades. The argument: organisations optimise for the launch dopamine, not the slow realisation. Momentum is a skill most organisations do not have, and the OPs most respected in DACH have learned to install it by starting fewer initiatives, not more.
- Field Note5 min read
Why the customer who converts can't use the product, yet
A field note from earlier work. The product was good. Adoption was flat. The leak was not at acquisition or conversion: it was at capability transfer, the point where the customer has to do something with what they bought. More common in PE-backed Mittelstand portcos than the dashboards suggest.
- Operating Memo4 min read
Why customer capital compounds, and why most portfolios compound the wrong thing
Most growth scales activity. The work that moves the exit multiple scales value. A marketing budget applied to weak customer capital does not produce muted growth. It produces accelerated value destruction. The year-1 question is not "do more." It is "find the leak."
- Operating Memo4 min read
Why Tinder feels like a scam, and OnlyFans not
Most subscription portcos are evaluated as if the model is a given and the operating question is execution. The diagnostic upstream of churn, NRR, and expansion is simpler: is the customer's underlying problem recurring or terminal? When the customer's success state is exit, no operating intervention closes the gap, because the gap is the model.
- Operating Memo6 min read
How WeWork ran the multiples game, and what lesson can be learned about positioning
WeWork was a real estate business raising at technology-platform multiples. The gap is not a story about deception. It is a story about how multiples are set, what positioning does to the comparable set the market reaches for, and why category arbitrage holds in private capital but breaks under public-market diligence. Two implications for PE operations: in deal evaluation, the category is an active variable; in portco operation, positioning is a multiples lever, not a marketing exercise.
- Reframe6 min read
Why "talk to your customers" is bad advice
"Talk to your customers" collapses three separate questions into one instruction: which customers are representative, which of their stated needs is valid, and how to translate need into offer. Each has a wrong answer that produces confident, wrong conclusions. In a year-1 VCP, confident wrong conclusions are more expensive than no conclusions.