Episode summary
The Changing World of Private Equity: With Permira's Operating Partner, Riccardo Basile
Money Maze Podcast
· · 39 min · Guests: Riccardo Basile
Summary
Permira’s value-creation model is built around growth rather than financial engineering. Riccardo Basile says the firm’s returns have largely come from revenue growth and EBITDA margin improvement, and that today every private equity firm has to do more operational work because cheap money and multiple expansion are harder to rely on. At Permira, that means investing in sales, marketing, capacity, technology and organizational design to help portfolio companies become stronger businesses, not just leaner ones.
Basile describes how Permira has scaled its value-creation team from three people to 21, then reorganized it into four sector-specific mini teams spanning services, healthcare, consumer and tech. The team gets involved early, often during origination and diligence, so the value-creation plan is already embedded before an acquisition closes. He argues that no two portfolio companies need the same playbook, even if pattern recognition helps identify the main levers.
He uses Westbridge, a German energy broker for real estate, as a case study. After closing in March 2025, Permira helped digitize processes, launch an MVP and a customer portal, and build a new sales organization with 75 hires. Looking ahead, Basile thinks private markets will keep growing, with Europe and the US offering different kinds of opportunity and exits continuing to split across secondaries, strategics and IPOs.
Key takeaways
- Basile says about 80% of Permira’s incremental value over 15 years has come from revenue growth or EBITDA margin improvement, not financial engineering.
- Permira now runs 21 value-creation specialists in four sector-based teams, with deal involvement starting during origination and diligence.
- The firm’s Westbridge work included a €15 million technology investment, an MVP within six months and a customer portal within nine months.
- Basile says Europe often needs more commercial professionalization, while the US offers more deep operational optimization opportunities.
- He expects private markets to keep growing, but only if they continue to add tangible value to portfolio companies.
Notable quotes
“today every GP has to focus on value creation because as you said uh you know cheap money is not available anymore”
“80% of the incremental value that we have generated our investments is actually come from revenue growth or ibida margin improvement”
“What we then done is actually changed that model and build four mini value creation teams inside each of the four sectors”
“I hate the name 100 day plan because things don't get done in 100 days”
“the business until our investment was really operating on Excel and emails and in six months after that having spent time with the management team we launched a program to digitize the end to end uh processes”
How the episode opens
But today every GP has to focus on value creation because as you said uh you know cheap money is not available anymore. Multiple arbitrage is definitely much more complicated and companies need to manage or uh operate in a more volatile environment and therefore companies need to be better at the way they they operate uh to generate returns to generate 2x and more returns. You need to be able to take a company from A to Zed with quite a bit of a journey through that.
We, as I mentioned before, we are a growth investor and therefore most of our effort is really in driving growth for our portfolio companies. And that does mean commercial excellence. It means investing in sales teams.
It means investing marketing. It means building capacity if needed. Um so that the companies to grow.
uh one of our converging partners Patel always says that it's better to drive one incremental point of growth than one incremental point of margin. That's the mantra that we use inside the firm. For the last 30 years, private equity has been an increasingly popular destination for both institutional and also high netw worth capital and its reach has extended across multiple industries globally.
Yet at the level where value is actually created inside of the companies themselves, genuine operational transformation has sometimes been harder to discern. Today, the gap between financial engineering and real business improvement is under more scrutiny than ever. One organization which has been determined to show that operational change is real not rhetorical is Pomera and its value creation team is now a defining feature of business whose origins trace back to Schroeda Ventures in the 1990s.
Pomeira's operating partner head of value creation is Ricardo Basilele, an Italian living in London with a reputation as an important architect of value creation.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- private equity value creation
- operational value creation
- pricing and digital acceleration
- organizational redesign
- exits and uplifts
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Permira
- Westbridge
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Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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