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Private Equity Firms

You Are

You are accountable for outcomes that compound over time, not quarters.

You underwrite risk, deploy capital, and expect performance to improve through better governance, sharper incentives, and focused execution. The thesis is sound. The plan is clear. Management teams are capable.

And yet, value does not always materialize the way the model suggests it should.

Not because of one bad decision, but because a series of reasonable decisions quietly compound into friction, delay, and underperformance.

What Pressures You

Between diligence and exit, a lot has to go right.

Leadership teams inherit systems built for a different ownership structure. Decision authority shifts faster than operating reality. Incentives change on paper before they change in behavior. Execution absorbs friction that governance was meant to remove.

From the outside, progress looks acceptable. From the inside, timelines stretch, initiatives stall, and explanations multiply.

You are left asking questions that models cannot answer.

Where is value being lost?
Why are capable teams underperforming expectations?
Which risks are structural versus situational?

These are not operational questions. They are decision-system questions.

Where It Quietly Breaks

The failure rarely sits with talent or effort.

It sits in inherited decision logic that no longer matches the capital structure, growth expectations, or governance reality. Systems still enforce old assumptions. Incentives reward local outcomes instead of enterprise value. Accountability diffuses across functions while urgency increases.

As a result, value erodes quietly.

Missed EBITDA targets.
Delayed initiatives.
Failed senior hires.
Reorganizations that do not change outcomes.

By the time this shows up clearly, optionality has narrowed.

How We Help

We work with Private Equity firms when value creation is stalling for reasons that execution alone cannot explain.

We examine how decisions are actually being made inside portfolio companies, not how governance intends them to be made. We identify where inherited systems, incentives, and authority structures are misaligned with the investment thesis.

This work does not replace management teams. It protects them.

By surfacing decision risk early, we help firms avoid locking in structural failure through well-intentioned hires, reorganizations, or initiatives that cannot succeed inside the current system.

The outcome is clarity about where value is truly at risk and where intervention matters.

Why This Matters Now

Capital moves faster than operating systems.

When decision structures fail to keep pace, value leakage becomes normalized and difficult to reverse. Each quarter that passes without clarity reduces the range of available actions.

We exist to surface these risks early, while the window for deliberate choice remains open.

Next Steps for Us

When value creation depends on decisions behaving differently post-close, the next step is not more oversight or urgency.

We do not rush to answers. We are genuinely curious about how value is being governed, where friction is accumulating, and which assumptions may no longer hold. The next step for us is a conversation that allows you to walk through what you are seeing across the portfolio, without pressure or agenda.

No pitch. No performance. Just a clear conversation grounded in how value is actually created and lost.

Let's think through this together

Talk through what’s on your mind. No agenda. No pitch. Just two operators thinking out loud about your business.

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Pendel & Brathwaite
Address
529 Liberty Hill, Cincinnati, OH 45202
Contact
+1 (215) 820-1868
andy@pendelbrathwaite.com
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