You underwrote the growth. Nobody underwrote where it comes from.
Your line of sight is real — you can name the customers, the products and the markets behind it. Your objective is real too; it's in the model that priced the deal. What sits between them has no bottoms-up plan attached, and it doesn't close by working harder on the part you can already see.
Every growth plan names a number. Fewer can name where it comes from. The wedge between the two is the part nobody planned.
Scroll the chart sideways on a narrow screen.
You plan everything except this
The model assumes twelve percent of growth that nobody has planned the way you planned the rest. It's the one number in the deal still resting on an assumption — and the assumption got more expensive while you weren't looking. A decade ago, roughly 5% annual EBITDA growth carried a 2.5x; today it takes 10–12% (Bain Global PE Report, 2026). The returns that used to come from multiple expansion and cheap leverage — 59% of them between 2010 and 2022 — aren't coming back (McKinsey Global Private Markets Report, 2026).
So the growth has to be real, and real growth is planned, not hoped for. DPI sits at the lowest level on record and the average hold has stretched to 6.6 years (McKinsey GPMR, 2026); the earlier in that hold you plan the growth, the more of it you have left to deliver.
Everything on the menu points backward
So you look for help, and most of what's for sale points the wrong way.
Commercial diligence expired at close. Technology diligence is priced for deals twice your size — 3 to 5% of the target's annual EBITDA — and at this size it comes out of your own pocket rather than the deal. Your money, on a target you might walk away from. Which is why almost nobody at this size buys it (RA Buyer Profile v2). A strategy firm sends a partner who trusts the model over the shop floor, leaves a deck, and moves on. Your operating partners are already spread across the portfolio; the hours this needs disappear into reporting — a $500M fund spends 20 to 25 of them a month, per company, inside a spreadsheet (RA Buyer Profile v2). Management knows its customers cold, but no one at a $40M company is systematically tracking patent filings, technology shifts, or the adjacent market a competitor is about to enter from.
The pattern is the tell. Everything you can buy is point-in-time, backward-looking, person-dependent, or subtractive. None of it is a structured, forward plan for where growth comes from — one your leadership teams can keep running after the invoice clears.
It isn't one problem. It's two.
Give it structure and it stops being a worry and becomes a plan.
That wedge has a dollar value, and it has two causes. What feels like one problem is usually two, with different fixes. The first is a Vision Gap: direction without a tested thesis, where every adjacency looks equally plausible because none has been scored. The second — quieter, and more dangerous because it goes undiagnosed — is a Capability Gap: the intent to grow, but no one inside who has run the licensing deal, the acquisition, or the partnership from term sheet to integration. Together they are the growth gap: the distance between the number you underwrote and the muscle to reach it.
Gain.pro, across 10,000+ investments.
Planning growth isn't a line on the budget. It's the difference between quartiles.
A plan your leadership teams can run
Closing the gap is a method, not a personality — and it looks a lot like the diligence you already trust.
Rapid Alpha runs a real growth initiative alongside your team: market, technology, IP, and customer evidence scored against a defined thesis; KPIs tied to where growth actually comes from; adjacencies chosen with named kill criteria; scenarios your SMEs and portfolio leadership can test before a dollar of capital moves. See how the method works →
The point is what stays behind. The capability is installed through execution, so when we leave, your leadership teams own the way of deciding — not a slide. Every conclusion traces to a primary source with a date, so the deliverable carries the credibility instead of the logo. The analytical load rides on EVOS, the system we run on ourselves: it compressed a patent claim-charting job from months to two days with a single analyst. What EVOS is →
Check the work
You don't take diligence on faith, and you shouldn't take a method on faith either.
We built and ran a full-lifecycle IP program at Element3, and stood up patent capability at Adeia's scale — 4,000+ patents across 68 domains. On a live transaction we carried a technology from voice-of-customer through a signed term sheet, a field trial, and an ERA grant strategy — the whole arc, not a slide about it. Every figure on this page has a dated source; the case files have the rest. Read the case files →
See where your growth comes from
The diagnostic scores your Vision Gap and your Capability Gap separately in about four minutes — one portfolio company, no call, no pitch. You'll know which gap is load-bearing before you decide whether to talk to us.