Thanks for a fascinating article - any glimpse into the secretive world of LBOs and PEs is always fun.

I tend to agree with you that it is more of a timing issue. But then, why do you say that trying again is stupidity? Trying again with different targets makes all the more sense. Two deals is too small a sample size to conclude anything. Of course, I don’t know about the effort required to investigate each deal and your time frames, so my comments maybe completely off-base.

Since you have done all the hard work already and have a set of valuations in place, why wouldn’t you just wait patiently for the right conditions? As you said, the pain is not there right now. But it might develop due to any number of external /internal shock factors. In fact, if you wait for a while, I am sure it will develop. At that point, you are in the best position to jump in.

The key question in my mind is this. If your search strategy brings up such deals regularly (say once a quarter), can you afford to have the default strategy of do-nothing?

If you can, you are in Warren Buffett’s league

All the best,
Ravi

I am enjoying reading your columns regularly though I never got into discussions before.

On the point of your two failures, I liked one simple change function defined by an analyst and I found it always works. Here it is and it is very simple…

Change function = f(user crisis, user’s total perceived pain of adaptation)

A great article, after reading the document, I could not resit myself to create a high level diagram represeting the four part transformation strategy.

Check my blog

Regards,
Santosh Gurlahosur