Matthew Maloney

Founders- do you want to grow fast, or grow forever? Here’s the difference in a nutshell: Growth addiction burns capital. Capital discipline multiplies it. Investors are choosing teams who know how to pause, pivot, and preserve trust under pressure. Check out this week's Black Swan Strategy blog for our analysis on why growth without governance is speculation, not strategy. #InvestorRelations #FounderStrategy #CapitalReadiness

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A fantastic discussion with Glenn Oken, Dan Herr and Matt Rooney on the evolution of a dedicated BD team in private equity. The conversation explores how deal sourcing has transformed over his 30+ year career, examining what truly drives credibility in the market, the importance of empowering genuine decision-makers, and his journey to co-founding one of the first operationally focused private equity funds in the lower middle market. #DealSourceryPodcast

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The deal market is recovering. The execution gap is not. According to Alvarez & Marsal's 2026 Value Creation Survey, 89% of PE investors, operating partners, and portfolio company executives describe the North America deal market as moderately or highly active. That headline reads as optimism. The data underneath it does not. Forty-one percent of those same respondents report realizing less than 75% of planned value creation over the last 12 months. In an environment where holding periods are already extended and exit windows remain narrow, missing three-quarters of your value creation plan is not a rounding error. It is the story of the hold. The gap is not a strategy problem. Most sponsors enter deals with credible theses. It is an execution problem, specifically the distance between what diligence assumes and what the organization actually delivers once the clock starts. Fewer than one in four respondents embed value creation planning before a letter of intent. That means the operational blueprint, the KPIs, the management bandwidth requirements, and the leadership profile needed to execute are all being defined after the commitment has been made. I've seen this sequence play out in healthcare services more than anywhere else. The complexity of running a multi-site clinical platform, managing payor relationships, and retaining a clinical workforce under cost pressure does not reveal itself in a financial model. It reveals itself in year two, when the original thesis meets operational reality and the leadership team that was right at close may not be the right team for what the business has become. The gap is rarely about effort or intent. It is almost always about whether the team's collective capability matches the operational demands of the next phase of the hold. The sponsors closing this gap are not doing anything exotic. They are building repeatable operating mechanisms, moving value creation planning earlier in the process, and treating leadership selection as part of the execution infrastructure rather than a separate workstream. That sequence is not optional anymore. In this environment, it is the margin of difference between a return and a recapitalization.

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2 Comments

This headline is not a warning for retail investors in my view. Redemptions were paid in full. But a warning for asset managers with alt products for retail that individual investors are more volatile (and that volatility can be contagious towards institutional investors). We often talk about retail investors having to better understand the liquidity risk, but the same can be said about managers who are more familiar with institutional products having to make sure they understand the retail ecosystem well to ensure their retail platforms remain accretive to their overall strategy.

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Private Equity or Venture Capital; same universe, very different playbooks. I wrote up the core differences: PE buys into mature, undervalued companies for majority control and drives returns through operational turnaround; VC bets early on high-growth startups with disruptive potential, taking minority stakes on the hope of outsized upside. Both have remodeled industries and created enormous wealth over the last three decades, but knowing which lever you’re pulling (and when) matters. Full breakdown in the link below. 👇 https://lnkd.in/gyTXB5Wq

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