The ramp assumption
The model had a new rep productive in a quarter. A rep is productive when the process is, and a process half-rewritten by an integration stretches every ramp the plan funded.
Private Equity & VC
The plan priced the hires, not the system they joined.
Commercial value creation in private equity rests on a ramp assumption written at the deal and rarely reopened. The handoffs each hire added, and the ones an add-on doubled, were never in the model.
Sector read
Thirteen in seat, four at quota, month seven.
In a company like this, month seven of the hold opens with a board pack that says hiring is on plan. Fourteen account executives were funded; thirteen are in seat. The plan had them at full quota by month six, and four are. The CRO the fund brought in at month two inherited the founder's process and, at month four, an add-on whose team qualifies deals its own way, so every larger deal now clears two reviews before it reaches a forecast. The hiring line is green. The bookings line is not, and the pack has no line between them.
The value-creation plan priced salaries and assumed a ramp. It did not price the weeks a rep waits while two teams apply one rule differently, the hours the CRO spends re-qualifying what the acquired team had already qualified, or the deals that went missing between two CRMs. Each one lowers EBITDA this year and the growth story at exit. The board pack prices none of it. The buyer at exit prices all of it.
Where the model meets the team
A hiring line on plan can sit over a plan already late.
The pack reports what was bought: heads, tools, an add-on. It cannot report whether the way of working those heads joined was ever built to carry the plan's number.
- 01 · Surface · what gets reported
Hiring on plan, bookings behind it
The heads were hired on schedule; the number they were hired for did not follow.
- 02 · Structure · what produces it
A plan priced on capacity and ramp
The value-creation plan funded salaries and assumed a ramp; the handoffs and the integration were never in the model.
- 03 · System · where it breaks
Two ways of working after the add-on
Each deal passes the rules of two companies, and nobody owns which one applies.
- 04 · Consequence · what it costs
EBITDA and the exit story pay for it
The cost lands in this year's margin and in the multiple a buyer puts on the growth.
The cause and the cost rarely show up in the same place.
What the Diagnosis reads here
The plan's assumptions, read against the team's months since.
Two months in the portfolio company's CRM, comp plans and board packs, from the deal model forward. Every assumption the plan made about capacity is checked against what the team it funded has done.
- The CRO and the leaders under them
- Marketing, customer success and RevOps
- The operating partner and the CFO
- The value-creation and 100-day plans
- Board packs since the deal
- Ramp, quota attainment and the add-on's pipeline
An add-on is a second company dropped into the first; what happens when the people are copied and the way of working is not is read at the expansion stage.
What tends to break first
The ramp goes first; the plan finds out a year later.
A plan written at the deal is the last document anyone reopens. Its assumptions about people fail before its assumptions about price, and the pack reports only the second.
Integrated teams, doubled handoffs
Two sales teams become one on the org chart and stay two in the CRM. Every deal now meets both sets of rules, and the gap between them belongs to no one.
The installed CRO's first year
A CRO brought in by the fund inherits a process built by a founder and a number set by a model. The first year goes to finding out which of the two to change, deal by deal, by hand.
What the pack cannot carry
Hiring, pipeline coverage and ARR are in the pack every month. The hours spent holding those lines up and the deals lost between two ways of working are not. They reach the model as a smaller EBITDA and a weaker story at exit.
The evidence
Four numbers the deal data gives and the pack cannot.
Add-ons, hold periods, spend and what growth is worth at exit, from the people who publish deal data. What the plan assumed about ramp, against what the team has done, sits in the company's own CRM and in none of them.
- 01
72.9%
The share of US private equity buyouts in 2025 that were add-ons, in line with a five-year average of 72.8%: three deals in four drop a second commercial team into the first.
PitchBook, 2025 Annual US PE Breakdown, US buyout count, data as of 31 December 2025
- 02
6 years, and 4
The median hold at exit for US PE-backed companies by the end of 2025, down from a seven-year peak in 2023 and above the 5.5-year pre-pandemic average, while the assets still held had reached a record median of 4 years: a ramp assumption written at the deal has longer to be wrong.
PitchBook, 2025 Annual US PE Breakdown, data as of 31 December 2025
- 03
13% against 30%
Median ARR growth at PE-backed SaaS companies against VC-backed ones in 2024, "PE backed companies will sacrifice growth rate in favor of operating profitability": the number the plan has to beat with the team it inherited.
Benchmarkit, 2025 B2B SaaS Performance Metrics Benchmarks, growth rate by financing source, N=149, 2024 actuals, p. 8
- 04
About 2x
The weight of a one-point rise in revenue growth on a public enterprise SaaS valuation, against an equal rise in free-cash-flow margin: the growth story at exit is priced twice as hard as the margin the pack reports.
ICONIQ, State of Software 2025, public enterprise SaaS companies listed 2013 to 2024, 424B4 filings and CapIQ to Q2 2025, September 2025, slide 14
What happens next
The Diagnosis fits early in the hold; two doors sit beside it.
Diagnosis
€15,000 flat · two months from the day we get access
The CRO, the sales and RevOps leads, customer success and the operating partner interviewed; the plan's capacity assumptions read beside quota attainment since the deal, early in the hold or before an integration. It ends in the cost of the gap in the company's own numbers, and a fix list ordered by what each fix costs.
Book a strategy callDetails →Operation
€50,000 more within 30 days of the Diagnosis briefing · €65,000 with it included
Nine months carrying the fixes through the value-creation plan with the CRO and the operating partner, each change owned and dated, ramp and bookings read against the quarter the work began.
Explore Operation →Executive Workshop
Three hours for the fund and the portfolio company's leadership, ten people at most, one assumption in the plan put to the test before any record is pulled. €5,000, credited in full against a Diagnosis or an Operation booked within 30 days.
Explore the Workshop → FAQ
Before you assume the plan only needs time.
We ran commercial due diligence before the deal, what does a Diagnosis add?
Due diligence reads the market and the seller's numbers from outside, before anyone owns the company. The Diagnosis reads the team from inside: interviews and stage history say what the plan's capacity assumptions do in practice, which no data room shows.
When in the hold does this fit?
Early, once the 100-day plan has met the team and before the hires it funds are all in seat; or before an add-on's commercial teams are merged, while the two ways of working can still be read apart.
Does the fund or the portfolio company commission it?
Either. The work happens inside the portfolio company with its leadership, and the CEO signs off the interview list. What the fund receives is the same figure, priced in that company's own numbers.
Can one Diagnosis cover several portfolio companies?
No. Each company has its own records and its own team, and the figure only means something in them. What carries across is the way of reading, not the finding.
Get started
The plan has a number. The gap under it does not, yet.
Thirty minutes on the value-creation plan, the hires it funded and what the monthly numbers have shown of them since. The call ends in a first hypothesis about where the gap sits.