Enterprise value creation has stopped being a back-office afterthought in private equity and become the main event. A new survey from Carpedia International (fifty PE professionals weighing in on how and when they drive operational improvement) confirms it. The headline numbers read like a field that has finally matured, but if you read them a second time, you may come to some uncomfortable conclusions.
The numbers look like progress
The proactive story is real, with sixty-seven percent of respondents treating operational improvement and value creation as proactive disciplines rather than a pre-exit scramble with only 4% still waiting until they’re heading for the door. Nearly three-quarters, 73.5%, said they tackle it early or plan for it on a recurring cadence. Roughly half put the heaviest operational focus inside the first ninety days after close.
When asked what matters most to the investment thesis, the top answer wasn’t a clever capital structure, it was KPI development. Labor productivity, sales effectiveness, and working capital followed close behind. Carpedia’s own takeaway names it plainly: the industry increasingly recognizes value drivers beyond financial engineering.
That’s the shift a lot of us have been arguing for. Operations is no longer the thing you fix if there’s time left over, it’s the thesis. This is encouraging, but here’s where it gets interesting.
Value doesn’t leak all at once
The trouble with most operational improvement programs isn’t effort, it’s timing, and not the timing the survey measures. Firms time their interventions well. What they rarely watch is the order in which value actually disappears.
You can watch this sequence play out in real time. Run our EVCR read of Harley-Davidson’s turnaround through the same lens, and the soft retail numbers everyone fixated on look less like the problem and more like the financial lag of an unprofitable dealer channel that had been quietly starving inventory, service, and the rider relationship for years. The brand still looked iconic the whole way down. The system underneath it was already drifting.
Value doesn’t leak all at once. It leaks in stages.
- First comes structural drift. Market clarity weakens, accountability loosens, capital allocation starts to wander from stated strategy. Nothing on the dashboard moves yet.
- Then operating symptoms spread. Teams work harder for less. Coordination costs rise. Priorities get harder to defend in a room.
- Only then does the financial lag appear. By the time the number finally moves, the pattern has been forming for months, and the cost of correction has compounded the whole way down.
KPI dashboards, quarterly reviews, and post-close scorecards are genuinely useful for monitoring progress against targets you’ve already set. They are not built to diagnose the structural conditions that produce those numbers in the first place. They tell you that something happened. They rarely tell you why, and almost never early enough to act effectively. That’s the gap, and it’s why “we’re proactive” and “we create value early” turn out to be two different claims wearing the same suit.
Why KPIs topped the list for value creation
Looking again at that number-one answer, KPI development beat every operational lever on the board. It was ranked ahead of supply chain, ahead of asset optimization, ahead of the entire AI conversation.
Carpedia is direct about what that reveals: a striking number of portfolio companies simply lack robust systems for tracking and analyzing their own performance. They can’t measure well, so they can’t improve well. Data integrity surfaces again and again across the findings as the quiet foundation everything else stands on. It’s even named the single biggest roadblock in bolt-ons and carve-outs, ahead of process alignment, communication, and talent.
This squares with what we see constantly. You cannot manage a business system you cannot see. Before you optimize anything, you need an honest, structured picture of where the business actually creates enterprise value and where it quietly erodes it — across the whole system, not piece by piece. That structured business system picture helps build the roadmap. The KPIs come after.
The AI skepticism is right — for the wrong reason
The most telling chart in the report might be the one on artificial intelligence. Asked whether AI and automation will play a leading role in value creation, the room split almost exactly in half. For a technology this hyped, that hesitation is striking. The skepticism is well-founded, but the usual explanation that the tools simply aren’t good enough yet misses it.
The constraint isn’t the model, it’s the data underneath the model. AI that is pointed at fragmented systems and unreliable inputs doesn’t create value; it accelerates confusion and dresses it up as insight. The professionals in that survey aren’t wrong to be cautious. They’re early to a conclusion the rest of the market will reach the hard way: clean structure first, automation second.
We build with AI in the loop. The diagnostic engine behind EVCR is AI-assisted, and it should be, but the value was never in the automation. The value is the structured diagnosis algorithms the automation runs on, and the data discipline that makes the output trustworthy. Reverse that order and you’ve bought an expensive way to be confidently wrong.
Operating partners, advisors, and the alignment problem
One more finding deserves attention. Ninety percent of respondents call operating partners or advisors important to value creation, yet while only a third plan to add operating partners, 77% intend to expand their advisor networks. Read between the lines and the pressure is visible: longer hold periods, higher multiples, capital that has to be deployed efficiently, and internal operating talent that’s expensive to carry. So firms are reaching outward for expertise rather than building all of it in-house.
That can work. It can also fracture. External expertise only compounds when it plugs into a shared framework, a common language for what “good” looks like across very different portfolio companies. Without one, every advisor arrives with their own map, and nobody’s reading the same terrain.
This is the win/win test applied to your own operating model. If the system only works when one specific person is in the room, it isn’t a system, it’s a dependency. The durable version is one where operating partners, advisors, and portfolio leadership are all looking at the same business, scored the same way, arguing about the same gaps. Alignment isn’t a soft virtue here, it’s the thing that makes outside help additive instead of fragmenting.
Reading the system, not the symptoms
Strip the survey down and the same theme runs underneath every chart. Diagnose early, build the metrics that let you see clearly, don’t trust the financials to warn you in time, and don’t let outside expertise pull the operating model in five directions at once.
What ties those together is a way of seeing the business as one interconnected system: external, internal, and financial, rather than a stack of separate problems handled piece by piece. Enterprise value creation is what happens when that whole system is aligned and functioning. It erodes when any part of it drifts, quietly, long before the lag shows up in the numbers.
That’s the premise the Enterprise Value Creation Roadmap was built on, and it’s why this survey reads to me less like a victory lap and more like a map of where the real work remains to be done. The proactive firms have the timing instinct right. The next edge isn’t being earlier, it’s seeing structurally and diagnosing the conditions that produce the numbers before the numbers force your hand.
Value creation isn’t an event. It’s a discipline. In this case, the data agrees.
Source: Survey findings referenced throughout are drawn from Value Creation in Private Equity: 2025 Findings & Analysis (Carpedia International). Figures and characterizations are attributed to that report; interpretation and commentary are the author’s own.
