Profit Patterns

You know the take rate. Most sellers find the second fee the hard way. Here's the full accounting of what platform commerce costs in 2025, and why AI-powered discovery agents are changing the math.

Germany's Mittelstand firms have operated profitably for over a century without chasing unicorn metrics. The strategic logic behind their longevity is more transferable than most operators realise, and more relevant right now than it has been in years.

Accounting firm advisory services are growing as a market category and shrinking as an internal priority. The gap is in the operating model, well before skills or software enter the conversation. Compliance and advisory run on incompatible operating logics, and most firms are trying to run both on the same machine.

The buy-build growth strategy has a strong track record across sectors and rate cycles. What fails is sequencing. This piece breaks down the 70-20-10 integration framework, the five deal-gate questions, and the KPIs that tell you whether your build phase is compounding.

The Federal Reserve hit the lights, and the era of free money ended. Interest rates, once an afterthought, are now a primary obstacle, and the cost of debt service is eating into the returns that were once considered guaranteed.

The post-ZIRP era not only changed interest rates, it exposed which GPs built real value creation infrastructure and which relied on multiple expansions. Here's what sophisticated LP due diligence now evaluates, and what it reveals about operational discipline.