You cover more companies than hours. This is the part that scales.
Diligence is bought one target at a time and most of it is written off — the deal dies, or it closes and the file goes in a drawer. The market evidence underneath it does not have to work that way.
The constraint is your calendar, not your judgement
An operating partner covering six to ten companies is not short of views on where each one should grow. What is missing is the hours to build the case for any of them to a standard an investment committee will act on.
The hours that do exist go the wrong way. At a $500M fund, 20 to 25 hours a month per company go into monitoring and reporting rather than looking forward, and that work lands in a spreadsheet (RA Buyer Profile v2). Backward-looking work crowds out the forward kind because it has a deadline attached and the forward kind does not.
So the growth thesis stays a conversation. Everyone in the room agrees it matters. Nobody owns the sixteen weeks it would take to make it decidable.
What the growth line is now worth
A decade ago roughly 5% annual EBITDA growth carried a 2.5x. Today it takes 10–12% (Bain Global PE Report, 2026). Revenue growth is the single largest driver of buyout returns — 54% of them, ahead of multiple expansion and margin combined — and companies growing 30%+ exit at 4.0x MOIC against 2.3x for everyone else (Gain.pro, across 10,000+ investments).
Read as a managing partner, that changes what the diligence question is. Whether the asset is worth the price is now the smaller half of it. The larger half is whether anyone has established, on evidence, where the next ten percent comes from — because the entry multiple assumes an answer that nobody has written down.
One spend, and the part of it you keep
Technology diligence at this size comes out of the fund's own pocket rather than the deal, on a target you may walk away from. That is the real reason it gets declined, and it is why we structure the work so that the durable output survives a no-go.
A target file expires the moment you pass. The value chain map, the competitive dataset, the patent and standards position of a technical space, and the customer evidence about what that market will pay for — none of that belongs to the target. It belongs to the sector, and the sector is where your next three looks are.
Which means a diligence you paid for on a deal you did not do still leaves you better positioned on the one you will. How the diligence engagement works →
It deploys once and applies across what you own
The method is the same on every company, which is the whole argument for a fund buying it rather than a company buying it. The first engagement pays for building the apparatus; the second and third pay for running it.
Practically: the same evidentiary standard, the same scoring, the same kill criteria discipline across every company on the system, which makes two portfolio companies comparable for the first time. When several are on it, the evidence base and the decision record consolidate to fund level, and the quarterly question stops being what did each company report and becomes which of these bets is still valid. What EVOS is →
The analytical load sits with the system; the judgement stays with your operating partners and the leadership teams. That split is what makes this affordable on a $40M company at all — and it is why the capability stays after we go rather than leaving with us.
The point isn't the plan. It's that everyone can run it without you in the room.
A lever isn't a plan until it has a policy attached — how many bets of each risk profile the company carries, what a ticket looks like, the return expected, and the condition under which it gets dropped. Written once, it makes the next fifty decisions faster.
Written down, the policy does something a strategy document can't: it makes the company's appetite legible to the people who encounter opportunities first. The sales lead knows which deals are on-thesis. The engineering lead knows which capability requests have a home. The CEO can decline something credible in the meeting it's raised in, and cite the reason. Leadership stops adjudicating each opportunity from scratch and starts checking it against criteria it already agreed to.
That's also what makes the portfolio auditable at exit. A buyer pays for the number; a buyer pays a premium when you can show what was considered, what was rejected, and what the evidence said at the time. Revenue growth is 54% of buyout returns, and companies growing 30%+ exit at 4.0x MOIC against 2.3x for everyone else (Gain.pro, across 10,000+ investments).
Where we are not useful
We do not run the transaction. No sell-side process, no financial diligence, no quality of earnings — your bankers and accountants are better at those than we will ever be, and we are not adjacent to them.
We do not assess management. The work scores markets, technologies and adjacencies, and there is no section about the team, because we were not asked to write one and would decline. That is deliberate: the leadership team has to be able to use the output, and they will not use a document that graded them.
And we do not work on a company that has not proven its first business model. Without a core to grow from the exercise becomes speculation, which is a bad use of sixteen weeks and worse use of your capital.
Start with one company, not the portfolio
Either a live target inside its diligence window, or the company you already own where the growth question has been open longest. One is enough to judge whether the method is worth extending, and a fund that commits to a portfolio before seeing an engagement land is not being careful.
The company-side argument — what the leadership team gets and why it is worth their own budget — is written out separately, so you can forward it rather than relay it. For portfolio companies →
Score one company before you commit an hour
The diagnostic separates the Vision Gap from the Capability Gap in about four minutes. One portfolio company, no call, no pitch — and you keep the score whether or not you speak to us.