By Thelma Adams
Founder, TYK Enterprises and Sr. Consultant, Vantage Advantage Network.
Over the past decade, I’ve not only optimized multiple companies but successfully navigated two private equity transactions, with a third on the horizon. Through this journey, I’ve discovered that the mindset needed to attract PE investment is fundamentally different from what makes you successful as a founder. Let me share the unspoken truths about this critical transition:
PE firms don’t just buy companies, they buy systems, and they invest in people. While entrepreneurial instinct, hard work and perhaps a little charisma got you here, PE investors need to see that your business can run without your daily involvement. They want to see that you have a “helicopter view” not a “street level view” of your company. They want to know that you can step out of the day-to-day tasks happening ‘in’ the business and step into working strategically ‘on’ the business.
The hardest truth? Moving from street level to helicopter height means seeing your business as part of a larger landscape. PE investors aren’t looking for a single thriving street vendor—they want to see a scalable operation that can be replicated across city blocks and beyond. This means being brutally honest about which parts of your business truly drive value when viewed from above, and which ones only looked essential from the ground.
With a helicopter view, your metrics and KPIs become your city’s vital signs. For example, where a street-level founder might focus on daily sales, a PE-ready leader needs to monitor the entire sales ecosystem: customer acquisition costs, lifetime value ratios, operational efficiency metrics, and scalable growth indicators. It’s about seeing patterns and opportunities that are invisible from the ground.
What’s Important? It is essential to build a leadership team capable of managing ground operations while the founder navigates from above. This allows you to elevate your view from single-store metrics to multi-location scalability, transforming the founder from a hands-on operator to a strategic navigator. By building a strong team, you should find the time to develop dashboard systems that provide full picture, real-time insights into our company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
The most valuable lesson? Success in PE, and growth in general, isn’t about abandoning your entrepreneurial instincts—it’s about gaining the altitude to see how those instincts can be systematized and scaled across a broader landscape.
We would love to hear from other founders who’ve made this ascent. How did you manage the transition from street level to helicopter view?