Year six.No exit yet.Find the margin.
Holds are running longer and LPs want distributions. A focused, fixed-fee sprint on third-party spend finds EBITDA the management team can deliver in a quarter or two, documented the way a buyer will check it.
Third-party spend is the lever you still control.
Bain puts the average buyout hold at about seven years at exit, against five to six in 2010 to 2021, and PitchBook counted more than 33,000 PE-owned companies waiting to exit at mid-2026. Growth plans from the original thesis have been spent. Pricing and headcount have been worked.
What is usually left is the vendor base: software and AI tools bought across the hold, agency fees nobody benchmarked, cloud commitments sized for an old plan and contracts that rolled forward. It moves in months, not years, and buyers diligence it. Read where the margin is in years five to seven.
Eight weeks. Evidence a buyer accepts.
Run with the CFO, not around them.
Spend map
Twelve months of payables mapped to vendors, contracts, owners and renewal dates.
Ranked list
The ten to fifteen contracts worth reopening, each with a target and the evidence behind it.
Negotiate
We run the large ones and brief the team on the rest.
Document
Savings tied to invoices and contracts, ready for the quality-of-earnings work and buyer diligence.
Straight answers.
How is this different from the Portfolio Vendor Desk?
The sprint is one company, eight weeks, fixed fee. The Portfolio Vendor Desk runs the same discipline across several companies on an ongoing basis.
Will it disrupt management?
It needs a few hours a week from the CFO and contract owners. We do the analysis and run the negotiations.
Can fees be tied to savings?
For the negotiation phase, part of the fee can be tied to savings above a baseline agreed before we start.
Have a company past year five?
Tell us the company and the timeline to exit. We will tell you where we would look first.
Talk to us