The next euro of return does not come from the term sheet. It comes from the engine room.
Leverage and multiple expansion are exhausted. What moves the sale price today is operational work in the portfolio, hands-on, across an entire, heterogeneous book of companies. ChangeMaker makes that work efficient and effective, and turns it into measurably higher excess return.
$3.8tnof capital locked in ~32,000 unsold portfolio companies
+67%excess return (TRS) when 21–30% of employees carry the transformation
10 daysto productive use
01
The PE game has turned.
Portfolio companies can no longer be sold at the push of a button. The exit channel is clogged, capital stays locked up, and distributions to investors are at a historic low. At the same time the classic financial levers, cheap debt and steadily rising valuations, have fallen away almost simultaneously.
That has moved the bar in fundraising: LPs ask about DPI first, about capital actually distributed, and only then about an IRR on paper. They look deeper than they used to, down to the question of whether operational execution capability sits in-house or gets bought in deal by deal. Anyone who wants to deliver returns today and secure the next fundraise has to create value inside the portfolio, not at the negotiating table, but in the operating business.
What counts in fundraising works one stage earlier, in deal sourcing. In succession and family situations the seller is not only choosing a price but also deciding who takes over a life's work, and a visible, credible operating track record therefore becomes a sourcing argument, not just a returns argument.
~32,000unsold portfolio companies worldwide, a record stock of $3.8tn (Bain 2026)
<15%distributions to investors as a share of NAV, at a record low for the fourth year running (Bain 2026 · McKinsey GPMR)
>7 yrsaverage holding period to exit, up from around 5 years in the DACH mid-market (Bain · PwC · Grant Thornton)
>400“overdue” holdings in the German mid-market alone (Grant Thornton 2025)
Continuation funds (a record secondary market of $240bn, +48%) and NAV financing are a deliberate option for many firms, and they do create liquidity and time. But they address the symptoms, not the cause: they are no substitute for real value creation.
02
Financial engineering is exhausted. Now the operations count.
More than two thirds of the return on older deals came from multiple expansion and leverage, from the market, not from performance. That tailwind is gone.
Yesterday (2010–2021)
Today
EBITDA growth p.a.
~5% was enough
10–12% needed
Debt
cheap credit (leverage)
8–9%, little leverage
Entry multiples
rising
stagnating
Operating business
growth as a bonus
margin & growth are mandatory
Bain: “12 is the new 5”, the operational ambition per deal has more than doubled.
3.3 ×more value from revenue & margin than from multiple expansion, across 13,000+ deals (StepStone)
~66%of value creation at 2022–2025 exits came from revenue growth, roughly two thirds (MSCI Value Bridge)
51%of EBITDA growth at 2025 exits came from operating margin (before 2023: 21.5%; Alvarez & Marsal, Europe)
+2–3 pphigher IRR at GPs that steer operationally rather than financially (McKinsey)
03
More responsibility. The same compact teams.
The importance of operating partners and value-creation teams for fund success keeps growing, yet their capacity per holding stays modest. And the portfolio is anything but homogeneous: different industries, strategies, competitive situations and value levers, from carve-out to buy-and-build (today roughly three quarters of all buyouts by count).
It gets worse: because the teams come from different houses, strategy consulting, Big Four, industry, different ideas about approach, depth and method collide. In practice the approach is effectively reinvented with every holding. None of this makes a compact team any bigger. Our answer is therefore not only a system but also the people who run it.
Carve-out
Machinery maker spun out of a group
No standalone structures, costs are opaque, processes still hang off the former parent.
Value levers: Working capital · Procurement · Standalone costs
Buy-and-build
SaaS platform with add-ons
Acquisitions must be integrated, systems and pricing harmonized, synergies realized.
Value levers: Integration · Pricing · Cross-selling
Margin pressure
Consumer-goods manufacturer
Input costs rise faster than prices, the portfolio is too broad.
Value levers: Pricing · Cost program · Assortment
Consolidation
Multi-site healthcare provider
Many locations, uneven quality and utilization, little best-practice transfer.
Value levers: Standardization · Utilization · Quality
Without shared standards, the wheel is reinvented at every holding.
The result is twice as expensive: not optimally efficient, because economies of scale and templates are missing, and not optimally effective, because without repetition the learning curve and routine never build. Exactly the friction a compact team can least afford.
04
One system that solves both problems at once: efficiency and effectiveness.
ChangeMaker is the shared standard for operational value creation across the entire portfolio, from the measure to the board report. Efficient through standards and automation. Effective through the targeted mobilization of everyone.
05
An end to Excel entropy and the PowerPoint beauty contest.
Spreadsheets nobody understands anymore. Versions that drift apart. Nights spent formatting deck after deck that no one questions. Excel and PowerPoint were never meant to be a control system for an entire portfolio, and they do not scale like one.
ChangeMaker replaces both with a single, consistent system: standards and automation along the whole value chain. The fight against Excel entropy and the deck-formatting time sink fall away.
Project templates
Best-practice approaches as ready-to-start templates, no reinventing per holding.
Team workplaces
Measure sheets, project management, KPIs, chat & feedback, file attachments, confidence levels, all in one place.
All data consolidated
One single reliable source instead of scattered files, across every holding.
Automatic reporting
Progress and financial impact flow together automatically, down to a one-pager at the push of a button.
Ad-hoc analyses
Answers for every level of the hierarchy, from measure detail to portfolio view, instantly.
Integrations
Fits into your existing tool landscape instead of creating one more silo.
Why Excel fails as a control system.
88% of all spreadsheets contain errors, from the London Whale to miscounted COVID cases. At the same time, finance teams spend around three quarters of their time on data gathering and admin rather than on analysis. Time and reliability that are then missing from value creation.
06
Value creation is a team sport.
The biggest untapped value lever in your portfolio sits in no data room: the effective participation rate of your employees. The more people actually carry the transformation initiatives, the higher the excess return versus the industry, and excess return (TRS) is tied directly to the sale price and thus to the success of the fund.
ChangeMaker is built for exactly this: behavioral design that turns a handful of owners into a broad, effectively engaged team.
The more employees carry the transformation, the higher the excess return for the owners.
Average 24-month excess return (TRS) versus the industry, by share of employees responsible for transformation milestones or initiatives. n = 60 companies.
The same McKinsey research shows: from as little as 7% of effectively engaged employees the excess return tips positive; for durable culture change the tipping point sits at around 25%. Where leaders and employees are not brought in, only 3% report a successful transformation.
07
Excel does not produce the TRS effect.
The excess-return effect does not come from numbers. It comes from seven key experiences that make people genuinely carry change. Excel conveys and activates none of them, it was built as a calculation sheet, not for human behavior. So no good habit forms, no positive momentum, and therefore no TRS lever.
Concretely, at each of the seven experiences Excel is missing exactly what matters:
1Belonging & recognitionno sense of we
✕
A spreadsheet creates no sense of we. It has nothing that fosters togetherness, the individual contribution is neither made visible nor recognized, no one feels seen.
✓
ChangeMaker:a shared team workplace where every contribution is visible and earns recognition.
2Understanding the systemnumbers without context
✕
Excel delivers numbers without context. Goals, connections and the bigger picture stay invisible, so real understanding of the system cannot form.
✓
ChangeMaker:links measures, KPIs and goals into a coherent overall picture.
3Co-creatingno co-creative flow
✕
Excel offers no co-creative flow. You fill in predefined cells instead of shaping things together, the affected never become the involved.
✓
ChangeMaker:measures are worked out together and in real time, visible to all.
4Seeing the joint effectneither your own nor the collective impact visible
✕
Excel makes neither your own nor the collective impact visible. No one sees what their contribution achieves or how everyone's combined effort adds up to the whole, self-efficacy and collective efficacy stay hidden.
✓
ChangeMaker:visualizes your own impact and the joint impact on the overall goal, everyone sees their contribution and the interplay of all.
5Being efficientno shared, robust source of data
✕
Excel is no shared, robust source of data. Error-prone (88% of spreadsheets contain errors) and lost in version chaos, it creates friction instead of felt effectiveness.
✓
ChangeMaker:a reliable single source of truth with automatic reporting instead of manual work.
6Managing negative emotionsnothing that takes away fear
✕
Excel has nothing that takes away fear. You cannot see that others are pulling their weight, and in doubt you stay alone, uncertainty and helplessness grow rather than shrink.
✓
ChangeMaker:makes it visible that everyone is pulling together, which makes the solution more likely and lowers fear. And through nudges it moves people into action, which reduces fear further.
7Being well ledfosters neither competence nor benevolent leadership
✕
Excel fosters neither competence nor benevolent leadership. It gives leaders no overview to prepare, to give earned praise or fair feedback, leadership happens outside the spreadsheet, or not at all.
✓
ChangeMaker:delivers an audience-appropriate, holistic overview. Leaders inform themselves in advance and radiate competence; the data lets them praise, give fair feedback and spot development opportunities, the leader is enabled to act with good intent.
The effect of ExcelDoes little to nothing to create or demand good habits
×
Number of participantsScales across any number of employees
=
ResultNo reinforcement of good habits. No reason for positive momentum.
The reason is simple arithmetic: near-zero effect times any number of participants stays zero. That is why an Excel-run program lands on the left side of the TRS curve, at −18% instead of +67%. The effect that matters to PE firms only appears once the seven experiences are actively shaped. That is exactly what a tool like ChangeMaker does, a spreadsheet fundamentally cannot.
08
Every add-on is a new project. Not one of them needs a new approach.
Add-ons account for roughly three quarters of all buyouts by count, which makes buy-and-build the norm rather than the exception. Every acquisition arrives with its own systems and its own set of numbers, plus an integration list that starts from zero. The synergy is calculated precisely in the investment case, and in day-to-day steering it then often stays a statement of intent.
ChangeMaker reverses the sequence. The integration logic sits ready as a template and is copied for the next add-on, with a named owner and a deadline on every line. Platform and acquisitions run in one data model, so the same synergy can be read by entity and by value lever at the same time. And every committed synergy carries a confidence level, from the idea through a robust business case to the effect that actually lands in the P&L. What the integration team closes out on Monday is in the board report the same day, with nobody building a slide.
Integration discipline
A ChangeMaker® client program, a carve-out from a diversified industrial group: 20 topic-specific teams steered 2,500 action items with a named owner and a deadline, the tailored template was ready after two days of no-code customizing, more than 99% of the items were started and 92% completed, 38 percentage points above what ordinary corporate projects achieve.
The very integration list that comes up again with every add-on becomes a reusable template instead of the next new spreadsheet.
Matrix consolidation
A ChangeMaker® client program from a building-technology group present in more than 75 countries: 120 strategic fields of action were run across three matrix dimensions, together with more than 500 initiatives and 2,500 milestones, consolidated fully automatically and delivered as a management-ready report per reporting level.
A platform plus its add-ons is exactly that kind of matrix, so synergies can be read by entity and by value lever at the same time, with nobody assembling numbers by hand.
Confidence-level discipline
A ChangeMaker® client program from a shipyard group: 70 measure owners drove 130 measures with 1,200 tasks through a confidence-level model, over two years total costs fell by 9% and COGS by 14%, with reports at every governance level produced fully automatically.
The synergy promised in the deal gets an owner and a confidence level, instead of staying a statement of intent in the deck.
The three programs come from corporate and mid-market settings, not from a fund portfolio. What transfers is the mechanism: a repeatable template, one data model across many entities, a confidence level on every committed effect.
09
Your value contribution, visible in hard facts.
Beyond the genuinely better effectiveness, the ops team's contribution becomes visible inward: project progress, confidence level and financial impact across the whole portfolio, at a glance. And it is the same data that carries the reporting chain, from the measure sheet through the investment committee to the preparation of the quarterly report to investors.
01
Measure and team
What the level needs
Who delivers what by when, where it is stuck, and which confidence level the impact has already reached.
What ChangeMaker delivers
The measure sheet with ownership, deadline, tasks and confidence level, kept current by the people doing the work anyway.
02
Investment committee
What the level needs
Whether the value-creation case still holds per holding, and where capital and attention belong next.
What ChangeMaker delivers
A portfolio view built from exactly the same measures: progress, confidence level and financial impact per holding, with no deck in between.
03
LP reporting
What the level needs
What actually happened during the quarter, and how solidly the value-creation path is backed per holding.
What ChangeMaker delivers
The underlying data is already consolidated and prepared per reporting level, so the operating substance of the quarterly report does not have to be collected all over again.
The effort today does not sit in the reporting, it sits in the collecting. A ChangeMaker® client program at a shipyard group shows the alternative (sanitized case study with real KPIs): reports ran live out of the system at every governance level, and the time spent on data consolidation and report production fell away entirely. At portfolio level the same mechanism applies once every holding works in the same system, one consolidated source instead of a collection round per holding.
The voice here is not from a PE fund but from the global portfolio manager of a logistics group who steered the portfolio through an intensive sales process, exactly the situation in which reports have to hold up across several levels.
“As Global Portfolio Manager at Schenker AG – and especially in the context of the intensive sales process the company has been undergoing over the past few years – it was essential […] to keep a clear eye on Schenker’s value proposition […]. For me […] it was crucial to be able to create dashboards and reports tailored to each target audience: from detailed operational views to precise executive overviews for the global board.”
portfolio · impact overview
Alpha MachineryCarve-out
CL 4 +14.2 M€
Beta SaaSBuy-and-build
CL 3 +8.7 M€
Gamma ConsumerMargin pressure
CL 2 +5.1 M€
Delta HealthConsolidation
CL 5 +19.6 M€
Illustrative. CL = confidence level (Härtegrad). The four rows stand for the four portfolio archetypes from section 03: Carve-out, Buy-and-build, Margin pressure, Consolidation.
10
So simple it is the tool of choice even in a turnaround.
Where there is least time, speed of rollout matters most. Where classic enterprise software takes months and roughly 70% of transformations fail in execution, ChangeMaker is productive within days.
Carried by training on the real data, videos and a digital tutor, in four standard steps:
01
Upload data
Existing measures and KPIs flow in, no sheet of paper is left behind.
02
Customize measures
Tailor templates to your situation, through our customizers, included in the price.
03
Train teams
On real data, with videos and a digital tutor, adoption from day one.
04
Build reporting
In parallel with ongoing work, without interrupting operations.
You do not have to set these four steps up yourself. Setup, data import and training are handled by our team, and the customizing sits inside the license: you supply the content, we handle the mechanics.
10 days
to productive use when all four steps are run, fewer steps means faster still
Fast enough even for a turnaround.
11
The price is a number. What decides is the ratio.
This is the point where you do the math: what the platform costs, measured against the value it is meant to unlock. A price list will not answer that, because every license is calculated per organization, by scope and number of users. So the number that carries the answer is not an amount but a ratio: a shareholder return of 150 times license cost.
150×shareholder return relative to license cost
€8bn+of impact under management, alongside 20,000+ initiatives driven
100+transformations supported, from restructuring through to carve-out
A ChangeMaker® client program in the restructuring of a basic-materials group shows what sits on the other side of that calculation: €65m in annual cost savings steered across 140 measures, team rollout in 10 days, first cost reductions taking effect after three months. The sharpest number sits in the schedule rather than in the result: every week of delay in that program would have meant more than €1m in lost run rate. That is the calculation that matters: the cost of one week of delay against the cost of the system that keeps execution moving at that pace.
The price itself is not a table row. ChangeMaker is licensed per organization as an enterprise license, billed annually and calculated by scope and number of users. There is deliberately no self-service tier, because ChangeMaker is rolled out as a managed program-management platform rather than bought off the shelf. The customizing, the adaptation to your structures, workflows and terminology, sits inside the license and is not a separate consulting project: you do not have to build the method yourself, the product and the customizer carry the complexity. We quote the actual number after a short demo, once scope and user count are clear.
The 150× figure is an order of magnitude, not a return promise and not a number anyone can guarantee for your portfolio.
12
The mandatory questions: solved.
Sensitive portfolio data demands solid answers to the security and compliance questions before there is any talk of benefit. With ChangeMaker they are settled.
ISO 27001certified information-security management
Data in Germanyhosting within the German legal domain
GDPR compliantdata protection to the EU standard
13
That sounded like a lot. What you need to remember: nothing.
You do not need to know any of these mechanisms to benefit from them. ChangeMaker takes care of it, in the background, reliably.
Automatic
Behavioral design that simply works
Optimized templates and built-in behavioral design make sure the right things happen, without anyone having to trigger or remember them.
Guided
Smart decisions included
Our customizers make the good up-front decisions, included in the price: structures, workflows and terminology tailored to your organization, not a separate consulting project.
Full service
The system, and the people who run it
You do not have to set anything up yourself: setup, data import and training are handled by our team as part of the agreed rollout, and the customizing sits inside the license. On request, our consultants then keep an eye on progress, impact and issues, and inform you or step in. Your ops team gets capacity back instead of building it internally.
Frequently asked questions
Why is financial engineering no longer enough in private equity?
Cheap debt and rising entry multiples fell away almost simultaneously, and over two thirds of the return on older deals came from exactly those two sources. Financial engineering has not disappeared, it simply no longer carries the return on its own: where around 5% EBITDA growth a year used to be enough, 10–12% is needed today. Unlike in earlier cycles, this cannot be waited out, because the exit channel is congested at the same time and holding periods keep rising.
What is the TRS effect?
TRS is the excess total return to shareholders versus an industry benchmark. A McKinsey analysis of 60 listed companies shows that where 21–30% of the workforce carries transformation initiatives, the 24-month excess return averaged roughly +67 percentage points, against −18% where involvement stayed below 7%. The distinction matters: what is measured is not sentiment but the share of people who own milestones and initiatives, and the finding is a correlation, not a promised return.
Why is Excel unsuitable as a control system for a portfolio?
As a calculation sheet, Excel is hard to beat. As a control system it fails on reliability, 88% of spreadsheets contain errors, and on people, because a spreadsheet activates none of the seven key experiences that produce the TRS effect. Across a portfolio a third problem appears: every holding builds its own file, so every comparison across the portfolio turns into translation work instead of a single click.
How many holdings can be steered in parallel?
ChangeMaker is built as a standard across several programs, not as a silo per holding: every holding works in its own team workplaces, and consolidation runs automatically, per reporting level. The scale the mechanism carries is visible in a ChangeMaker® client program at a building-technology group, with more than 500 initiatives and 2,500 milestones in a matrix of function, country and product category; in another, from the basic-materials industry, 140 measures of a restructuring program were steered in parallel. The sensible number therefore follows your portfolio and the capacity of your ops team, not the setup effort per holding. Only the identity of these programs is sanitized, the numbers are real.
How quickly is ChangeMaker productive?
With a best-practice template a team starts the same day; the full standard rollout with data import, customizing, training and reporting takes around 10 days, fewer steps correspondingly faster. The difference from classic enterprise software is organizational rather than technical: setup, import and customizing are handled by our team, not yours. Trained users are typically productive from week 2.
What does ChangeMaker cost, and how does the pricing model work?
ChangeMaker is an enterprise license, billed annually and calculated per organization based on scope and number of users. There is deliberately no self-service tier, and customizing is part of the license rather than a separate consulting project, which takes the implementation line item out of the equation. We name the concrete price after a short demo, once scope and user count are clear; on the return side stands a shareholder return of 150 times the license cost.
Is ChangeMaker secure and GDPR compliant?
Yes. The information-security management system is certified to ISO 27001, hosting is within the German legal domain, and processing is GDPR compliant to the EU standard. What is certified is the management system, the organization behind the product, not a single feature, and that is the more robust evidence when your IT and the IT teams of your holdings run their review.
The market figures cited come from the third-party studies referenced below and relate to the periods and samples stated in each case. Product and program figures are our own numbers from ChangeMaker® client programs: only the identity of those programs is sanitized, the KPIs are real. The 150× ratio is an order of magnitude, not a return promise, and the TRS relationship reflects averages across 60 companies and is likewise not a promise of returns.
Sources
[1]
Bain & Company, Global Private Equity Report 2026. bain.com
[3]
Bain & Company, Private Equity Outlook 2026 – “12 is the new 5”. bain.com
[4]
StepStone; MSCI, Buyout Value Bridge; Alvarez & Marsal, European Value Creation; McKinsey, Bridging PE’s value creation gap. msci.com
[5]
McKinsey & Kotter on the transformation failure rate (~70%). mckinsey.com
[6]
PitchBook, Global PE Report; Goodwin, Add-On Acquisitions (add-ons ~73–76% of buyouts by count). goodwinlaw.com
[7]
Raymond R. Panko, Spreadsheet Errors: What We Know. What We Think We Can Do. (2008), arXiv:0802.3457. arxiv.org
[8]
APQC (with the Association for Financial Professionals), Moving to the Next Level of Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A). FP&A / finance teams spend around 75% of their time on data collection and administrative work rather than analysis. apqc.org
[9]
McKinsey & Company, How many people are really needed in a transformation? (24-month excess TRS, n=60). mckinsey.com
[10]
McKinsey & Company, The people power of transformations / Seven percent solution (7% threshold, 25% tipping point, 3%). mckinsey.com
Next step
See the TRS effect on your own portfolio.
In a short demo we show you, on real data structures, how ChangeMaker measurably raises the efficiency and effectiveness of your value creation, and how quickly you are productive.
