Growing portfolio revenue from $10M to $180M
Fifteen years as an operations and investment executive running a private-equity-style portfolio, focused on turnarounds and acquisitions in the lower middle market.
- Revenue grown across the portfolio
- $10M → $180M
- As an operations and investment executive
- 15+ yrs
- Board seats held as owner representative
- US & int’l
The mandate
A privately held investment firm running a private-equity-style strategy, buying in the lower middle market and fixing what it bought. The brief was not advisory. It was to take the seat, own the number, and make the calls.
Over fifteen years the portfolio went from $10M to $180M in revenue, through a combination of acquisition and turnaround, not one or the other.
What that involved
Stepping in as CEO at underperforming businesses, one at a time, and running them. Rebuilding operating cadence, cutting what was not earning its place, resetting pricing and go-to-market, and, most durably, finding and developing the leaders already inside the business.
The pattern repeated almost everywhere: it was rarely a strategy problem. Companies knew roughly what to do. Nothing in the operating rhythm forced it to happen, and nobody owned the outcome by name.
On the boards
Board seats in the United States and internationally, sitting as owner representative, not as an observer. Every one of those positions supported significant growth in the business underneath it.
Sitting on the board and running the company are different jobs, and knowing both is what makes the sponsor conversation and the management conversation possible in the same week without confusing the two.
What persisted
Businesses repositioned for growth and handed back to leadership teams that could run them. Several of the leaders developed in those turnarounds have since gone on to become CEOs of their own companies. That is the outcome that matters most, because it is the one that survives the engagement.
This is the operating half of what scomil does. The AI work only compounds when it lands on a business that is being run properly.
- Interim and fractional executive leadership
- Performance turnarounds and margin recovery
- Operating cadence and accountability design
- Board representation as owner
- Leadership bench development and succession
- M&A · Healthcare · Media · B2C · Revenue cycle management
Buying and selling companies, and getting the deal closed
- Turnaround · Out-of-home media
A million a month in losses, taken to break-even
- Turnaround · Multi-state specialty clinical practice
A clinical group that acquired faster than it could absorb
Want the detail behind this one?
We are happy to walk through the architecture, the decisions, and what we would do differently now.