Enterprise value creation has quietly moved from a back-office afterthought to the center of the private equity deal thesis. A new survey from Carpedia International, which polled fifty private equity professionals on how and when they drive operational improvement, captures the shift. The headline numbers read like a field that has matured. Read a second time, they raise harder questions.
The Numbers Look Like Progress
The proactive story is real. Sixty-seven percent of respondents now treat operational improvement and value creation as proactive disciplines rather than a pre-exit scramble, with only 4 percent waiting until exit looms. Nearly three-quarters, 73.5 percent, say they tackle it early or plan for it on a recurring cadence. Roughly half concentrate their heaviest operational focus inside the first ninety days after close.
Asked what matters most to the investment thesis, respondents placed KPI development at the top, ahead of any clever capital structure. Labor productivity, sales effectiveness, and working capital followed close behind. Carpedia’s own takeaway is blunt: the industry increasingly recognizes value drivers beyond financial engineering.
It is a shift operators and advisors have argued for over several years. Operations is no longer the thing firms address if time allows. It has become the thesis itself.
Value Rarely Leaks All at Once
The difficulty with most operational improvement programs is not effort. It is timing, and not the timing the survey measures. Firms tend to time their interventions well. What they more rarely track is the order in which value actually disappears.
Value rarely leaks all at once. It tends to leak in stages.
• First comes structural drift. Market clarity weakens, accountability loosens, and capital allocation begins to wander from stated strategy. Nothing on the dashboard moves yet.
• Then operating symptoms spread. Teams work harder for less, coordination costs rise, and priorities become harder to defend.
• Only then does the financial lag appear. By the time the number moves, the pattern has often been forming for months, and the cost of correction has compounded along the way.
Harley-Davidson’s 2026 turnaround plan offers a public illustration. Much of the early commentary fixated on soft retail numbers, but a number of analysts have framed those figures less as the core problem than as the visible lag of an unprofitable dealer channel — one that had quietly starved inventory, service, and the rider relationship for years. The brand still looked iconic throughout. The system beneath it had already drifted.
This is the part a survey struggles to capture. KPI dashboards, quarterly reviews, and post-close scorecards are genuinely useful for monitoring progress against targets already set. They are not built to diagnose the structural conditions that produce those numbers in the first place. They indicate that something happened; they rarely explain why, and seldom early enough to act effectively. That gap is why “proactive” and “early value creation” can turn out to be two different claims wearing the same suit.
Why KPIs Topped the List
That number-one answer rewards a second look. KPI development outranked every operational lever on the board, ahead of supply chain, asset optimization, and the entire AI conversation.
Carpedia is direct about what it reveals: a striking number of portfolio companies lack robust systems for tracking and analyzing their own performance. Firms that cannot measure well struggle to improve well. Data integrity surfaces repeatedly across the findings as the quiet foundation beneath everything else. It is even named the single biggest roadblock in bolt-ons and carve-outs, ahead of process alignment, communication, and talent.
The observation many operators draw from this is straightforward: a business system cannot be managed if it cannot be seen. Before optimization comes an honest, structured picture of where a business creates enterprise value and where it quietly erodes it across the whole system rather than piece by piece. That structured picture is what informs any roadmap. The KPIs come after.
The AI Hesitation Is About the Data
Perhaps the most telling chart in the report concerns artificial intelligence. Asked whether AI and automation will play a leading role in value creation, respondents split almost exactly in half. For a technology this heavily promoted, the hesitation is striking.
The skepticism appears well-founded, though the common explanation, that the tools are not yet good enough, may miss the point. The more persuasive reading, several observers note, is that the constraint sits in the data underneath the model rather than the model itself. AI pointed at fragmented systems and unreliable inputs tends not to create value; it can accelerate confusion and present it as insight. Seen that way, the cautious half of the room is early to a conclusion the broader market may reach more slowly: clean structure first, automation second.
Operating Partners, Advisors, and the Alignment Question
Another finding deserves attention. Ninety percent of respondents call operating partners or advisors important to value creation, yet only a third plan to add operating partners while 77 percent intend to expand their advisor networks. The pressures behind that are visible: longer hold periods, higher multiples, capital that has to be deployed efficiently, and internal operating talent that is expensive to carry. The result is a reach outward for expertise rather than a build-out in-house.
That approach can work, and it can also fracture. External expertise tends to compound only when it plugs into a shared framework, a common language for what “good” looks like across very different portfolio companies. Without one, each advisor arrives with a different map, and no two are reading the same terrain.
It amounts to an alignment test applied to a firm’s own operating model. A system that works only when one particular person is in the room is, in practice, a dependency rather than a system. The more durable arrangement is one where operating partners, advisors, and portfolio leadership examine the same business, scored the same way, debating the same gaps. In that framing, alignment is less a soft virtue than the mechanism that makes outside help additive instead of fragmenting.
Reading the System, Not the Symptoms
Strip the survey down and a single theme runs beneath every chart. The firms that fare best diagnose early, build the metrics that let them see clearly, avoid leaning on the financials to warn them in time, and resist letting outside expertise pull the operating model in several directions at once.
What connects those behaviors 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, in this view, is what happens when the whole system is aligned and functioning, and it erodes when any part drifts, quietly, long before the lag shows up in the numbers.
A small number of capital and advisory platforms have begun building tools around exactly this gap. Firms such as Redtail Capital, for example, have developed decision-support frameworks that surface where enterprise value is created or eroded across a business system, shifting the conversation away from lagging financials and toward the structural conditions that produce them.
The survey, read closely, looks less like a victory lap than a map of where the real work remains. The proactive firms have the timing instinct right. The next edge appears to be less about acting earlier and more about seeing structurally, surfacing the conditions that produce the numbers before the numbers force the issue. Value creation, on the evidence, looks less like an event and more like a discipline.
