Value-Creation Input — Software Carve-Out

The 100-day plan assumed the carved-out entity could rebuild go-to-market and back-office capability at a pace the deal team had never independently tested. Underestimating stranded costs or the time to rebuild a standalone sales motion is where carve-out returns quietly leak. The fund needed pattern recognition from people who had lived the same separation.

• +Prioritised the plan's riskiest assumptions: standalone GTM rebuild, stranded cost and key-talent retention
• +Sourced eight operators who had led post-carve-out separations in comparable software businesses
• +Ran working sessions against the draft 100-day plan rather than generic interviews
• +Converted each operator's lessons into concrete edits to the plan, not just commentary

• +A red-teamed 100-day plan with the fragile assumptions flagged and re-sequenced
• +A realistic timeline for rebuilding the standalone sales motion, benchmarked to operators who'd done it
• +A stranded-cost and key-talent retention checklist drawn from prior separations

• +The fund re-sequenced the first 100 days around the separation risks operators ranked highest
• +The GTM rebuild timeline was extended to a pace the operators considered survivable
• +The value-creation team carried the operator checklist into the portfolio company post-close

This is a representative, anonymised composite of a typical private equity engagement. Client identity is removed and the figures illustrate the format and scale of the work — they are not a record of a single named mandate. Every expert call is scoped to general market knowledge, screened for material non-public information before findings reach a deal team, and documented for audit. See our compliance framework for full detail.