Leads come in. The system leaks them between stages. So the company buys more demand to paper over the leak.
Three shifts moved go-to-market from the portfolio company's job to the partner's underwriting problem.
The longest average hold since 2005. More quarters under your ownership means more quarters where a broken revenue engine compounds against you instead of the seller.
Multiple expansion and cheap debt are off the table. Revenue now has to be manufactured operationally — not bought at entry and re-priced at exit.
Companies running a disciplined 100-day plan see materially better year-one growth. The GTM system either delivers that early ramp or quietly burns your first year.
You already underwrite cost, working capital, and org structure on day one.
GTM deserves the same rigor. Treat the revenue system as a diligence workstream and a 100-day mandate — not something the CEO will get to.
Fix a person and the system still leaks. Fix the system and average people hit plan.
Leads are enriched, scored, and sent to the right rep in minutes.
Leads sit in queues. Speed-to-lead dies. Good pipeline rots. Most leakage is here.
The question is never which function is underperforming. It's where the system breaks — and what that leak costs per quarter.
Target is under 5 minutes. Most portcos are at hours. Price that gap on your own numbers.
Recovery multiples are modeled from response-time bands across 100+ engagements. Move the sliders to your real numbers — the argument should survive your own scepticism.
Ask these six. If the team can't answer cleanly, that inability is itself the finding — it means nobody owns the system.
The flinch: they can't narrate enrich → score → route → assign → follow-up with SLAs. Routing is broken.
The flinch: the answer is in hours, or "we don't track it." You've just found leaked pipeline.
The flinch: under ~70%. Every spend decision in the company is a guess.
The flinch: vague answers. The pipeline data is dirty and the stages aren't real.
The flinch: nobody owns Expand. You're funding a leaky bucket at full price.
The flinch: the honest answer names the true constraint — usually Route or Convert, rarely Capture.
Nine times out of ten, the company is solving a Route/Convert problem by spending more on Capture.
More leads into a leaky system just increases the size of the leak.
| Metric | Weak | Acceptable | Strong |
|---|
Private B2B SaaS CAC payback has drifted to ~20 months and median NRR sits near 82% — not the 100%+ people assume. Only a minority clear Rule of 40.
A red portco is normal. Disciplined system work moves these numbers, and each point of efficiency compounds against your multiple at exit.
You compress a year of GTM buildout into 90 days because your hold is finite.
| The trap | What it looks like | The reframe |
|---|---|---|
| "Just add more leads" | Board pushes top-of-funnel spend while conversion is flat. | Volume without a working system multiplies waste. Fix Route/Convert first. |
| Hire your way out | Every gap answered with a new CMO, CRO, or SDR pod. | You're debugging people. One architect who owns the system beats three functional hires. |
| Tool-first thinking | "We need HubSpot / Salesforce" presented as the strategy. | A tool is not an architecture. Design the system, then implement it. |
| Strategy deck, no execution | A polished plan that sits in a Drive folder. | Strategy without an operator is a PDF. Underwrite build-and-run, not advice. |
| Flying blind on attribution | Every board meeting re-litigates the numbers. | If spend isn't tied to revenue, no decision is defensible. Instrument Measure early. |
The compounding win isn't fixing one portco — it's a repeatable GTM architecture you deploy across the portfolio and hold to a portfolio-wide bar.
In a 6.7-year hold where growth has to be manufactured, that discipline is the difference between an average return and a top-quartile one.
Same team designs it, builds it, and operates it — sprint-based, outcome-measured, no handoffs. We compress a year of buildout into 90 days, instrument the stages that leak, and hold each company to a portfolio-wide standard.
We engineer growth systems. JayOh builds the RevOps architecture, GTM execution and data infrastructure that turn messy revenue operations into predictable pipeline for B2B SaaS and PE-backed teams.
