Zombie portfolio companies is the phrase private equity has settled on for its $860 billion problem. The roughly 4,500 U.S. businesses now classified as zombie portfolio companies are sitting in sponsor portfolios well past the exit dates their investment theses assumed. The industry is describing this as a liquidity problem, a timing problem, a market problem, essentially…

Every business owner I meet has a value number in their head. Usually, it is a multiplier they heard at a conference that they applied to last year’s EBITDA and rounded up. It is the number they will expect when the letter of intent to purchase their business arrives. It is almost never the number…

Why business needs fewer promises, fewer theories and a clearer path from diagnosis to measurable results. I was going through my Google Alerts for enterprise value creation when I came across an article with the rather ambitious title, “Galactic Alignment through Collective Evolution.” I clicked, not exactly sure what I expected. What I found was…

America’s innovation conversion rate, not its supply of ideas, is the number I could not stop thinking about on the drive home from Las Vegas. In early July I served as an investor judge at FreedomFest’s Principled Business Pitch Competition’s first round. Twenty-two founders with ninety seconds each to move from round one into the…

The proposed $81 billion Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger has been framed around one headline number: $6 billion in projected synergies. But does synergy alone create enterprise value? This article argues that financial models measure outcomes—not the structural alignment that determines long-term success. By examining the deal through the EVCR lens, it explores why durable merger…