Unlocking Organic Growth in Middle Market PortCos: Insights from ACG Houston’s DealFlow Breakfast
Earlier this month, Michael Galanis, Vice President of Commercial Excellence at The Sterling Group, joined Jusleen Karve of EIV Capital, Lucas Kuipers of Platform Partners, and Summer Craig, Managing Partner at Craig Group, at ACG Houston’s DealFlow Breakfast for a conversation on “Supercharging Middle Market PortCo Organic Growth Following PE Investment.” The panel explored how private equity investors can best partner with management teams to unlock organic growth, an often underutilized but powerful lever for value creation.
Moderated by Summer Craig, the discussion covered a range of practical strategies across pricing, sales effectiveness, customer insight, and team development, all centered around one essential takeaway: alignment on priorities early in the investment cycle is critical to ensure focus and accelerate results.
Setting the Stage: Growth Equals Change
As Summer Craig emphasized at the outset, “Growth equals change.” Whether through pricing optimization, sales enablement, or strategic talent deployment, every organic growth initiative requires transformation. This means private equity sponsors must not only identify the right levers to pull, but also manage the human side of change – building trust with leadership teams, aligning incentives, and pacing transformation to retain key talent while delivering measurable impact.
Pricing as a Strategic Lever
Mike Galanis shared how Sterling Group approaches pricing as a core component of the commercial value creation plan. Rather than simply “raising prices,” Sterling’s approach is rooted in data-driven analysis and customer insight. “We look closely at customer segments, pricing sensitivity, and value perception,” Galanis explained. “The goal is to capture value where it already exists, not to impose arbitrary increases.”
He highlighted that successful pricing initiatives start during diligence, where commercial teams gather intelligence and align with deal teams on early hypotheses. This alignment ensures the pricing strategy is integrated into the investment thesis and can be acted upon immediately post-close.
Listening to the Customer: Lessons from Platform Partners
For Lucas Kuipers, organic growth begins with understanding customer value perception. Drawing on an example from a past investment in infrastructure services, he described how his team surveyed customers before implementing a pricing shift. The results revealed an opportunity to lower unit pricing while expanding volume, driving a significant increase in revenue and market share.
“The more market intelligence you have, the easier it is to make smart pricing decisions,” Kuipers said. “Sometimes the best pricing move is about aligning your value proposition with what customers truly need.”
Building the Right Team, Inside and Out
Jusleen Karve emphasized the importance of building strong partnerships with management teams and supplementing them with external expertise when needed. “We often bring in outside support early – not because something’s broken, but to accelerate learning and value creation,” she said. Two key external partners EIV Capital looks to are commercial specialists to sharpen go-to-market execution and independent board members who can provide objective market insight and challenge assumptions.
Karve also noted that change management is often the hardest part of post-close execution. “Everyone’s excited during diligence,” she said, “but once the deal closes, reality sets in. You have to help teams navigate that transition.”
Talent, Accountability, and the Human Element
Throughout the panel, a consistent theme emerged: growth initiatives succeed or fail based on people. Galanis stressed the importance of retaining key sales talent by introducing tools and processes that make their jobs easier before layering on new expectations. Kuipers added that success depends on setting clear benchmarks and ensuring leaders understand what “good” looks like. Without that clarity, accountability and alignment can quickly break down.
Simple structures can be transformative. Galanis shared that introducing weekly sales meetings – focused on goals, progress, and lessons learned – doubled pipeline volume and increased deal size by 50% within months. “Accountability doesn’t have to be complex,” he said. “It just has to be consistent.”
The Takeaway: Alignment Drives Acceleration
The discussion closed with a shared insight: there is no shortage of levers to pull in pursuit of organic growth – pricing, customer insight, talent, process, and accountability all matter – but without early alignment, even the best initiatives can falter.
For PE sponsors and management teams alike, the path to sustainable value creation starts with clarity –on strategy, structure, and the shared commitment to embrace change in pursuit of growth.
