Execution momentum is what every value-creation plan promises. Most plans never produce it. And here’s why.
Alvarez & Marsal’s 2026 study found 65% of private equity respondents achieved less than half the value they targeted. Those plans were written in the last two years.
The same survey found 58% of firms now deploy resources inside the first 100 days. Last year it was 29%. Speed nearly doubled in a single year.
So the industry moved faster and still missed plan. Which tells you the constraint is not pace. Execution momentum comes from somewhere else.
The plain answer
A value-creation plan gets written by people who do not work at the company. It describes a company where, from the inside, nothing currently feels broken.
That is the whole problem. Everything else is a version of it.
The investor sees a gap between what the business earns and what it could earn. The people inside see a business that is working. Both are right. But only one of them is holding a clock.
So the plan arrives carrying somebody else’s urgency. And urgency does not transfer by document.
Four ways that shows up
Nobody inside feels a problem yet. This is the founder-led pattern almost every time. Revenue is fine. The founder is confident. So nothing is on fire. The plan therefore reads as an outside opinion rather than a response to something real. People comply. They do not move.
The plan lists outcomes, not first steps. Grow margin 400 basis points. Professionalize the sales function. Those are destinations. But nobody can start a destination on Monday morning. Ask what the first concrete action is and the room usually goes quiet.
There are eleven priorities, not three. Rose Hollister and Michael Watkins call it the multiplier effect. First, each function adds a few reasonable initiatives. Those stack as they travel down. A couple from each department become a dozen for the manager at the bottom. Nobody decided on that total. Instead it accumulated.
It lives in a document, not in people. You cannot store execution momentum in a tracker. Ask a leadership team where the plan lives and they point at one anyway. But a plan lives in how many heads hold it. Helfat and Martin put it plainly: the capacity to adapt sits in identifiable people, not in an organizational property. If four executives can state the top three priorities without opening anything, it lives. If eleven each hold a different version, it does not.
What actually predicts execution momentum
There is one measure with real research behind it, and it is simpler than it sounds.
Bryan Weiner calls it readiness, and it has two parts. First, people have to want the change. Second, they have to believe they can pull it off. Commitment and capability.
Both, or neither. Wanting it without believing you can produces anxiety. Believing you can without wanting to produces compliance.
Weiner is also explicit that readiness is specific to the change in front of you. In other words, a company that executed well last year can stall this year on a plan that looks easier.
Which is why “they did it before” is weak evidence. And why execution momentum has to be built for this plan, not assumed from the last one.
If ten things are critical, nothing is
The second way plans die is quieter. Nothing goes to zero. Everything just gets thin.
Rose Hollister and Michael Watkins call it the multiplier effect. Each department launches a few initiatives, reasonable on their own. But those stack as they travel down. A couple from each function become a dozen for the manager at the bottom.
Nobody chose that. It accumulated.
Porter said it more directly thirty years ago: the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Yet most value-creation plans are lists of improvements, not choices. Because a list has no trade-offs in it. So nothing can be sequenced and nothing gets sacrificed.
I’d challenge you to name your top three. Even when that means letting go of things that matter to you, because that is the more important decision.
Then ask where the biggest levers actually are, and stay there. Otherwise you’re shooting a squirrel with a shotgun.
What this means in plain English, depending on where you sit
If you’re the one in the seat: you already know which of your priorities is real. In fact you could name it right now. The problem isn’t that you can’t choose. It’s that choosing means telling three capable people their work just moved down the list. That conversation is the actual work of focus. So most leaders postpone it by keeping everything on the board. Meanwhile your team is reading the board, not your intentions. They’ll spread effort evenly across eleven things, because nobody told them not to. Say the top three out loud, to everyone, and say what comes off.
If you’re the investor or the board: the plan you approved is not the plan running inside the company. Those are two different documents. That gap never shows up in a monthly report. So ask four executives separately to name the top three priorities. Then compare the answers. That spread tells you more about execution momentum than any milestone tracker will. Because it measures where the plan actually lives. LHH’s 2026 research found 28% of leaders naming lack of strategic clarity as a top limiter on their effectiveness. Ultimately that is a diligence question, not a culture question.
Decoding the Lingo
Alchemy works at the intersection of four rooms that rarely share a vocabulary. Investors. Entrepreneurs. Leaders. Operators. The same word carries different weight in each one. And most writing on this subject assumes you already sit in the room where the term was coined.
We do not make that assumption. So every piece decodes its own language. What a term means, where it came from, and why it matters from where you sit.
This is baseline education on purpose. You cannot hold a plan in common if you do not hold the language in common. Execution momentum starts there.
Value-creation plan. The document a private equity firm writes after buying a company. It explains how that company will be worth more when it sells. That is not a strategic plan. It is an underwriting argument — the specific moves the buyer promised its own investors would produce the return.
Where it came from: for most of private equity’s history, returns came from financial engineering. Cheap debt, low entry prices, and selling at a higher multiple than you paid. Those levers are largely spent now. So the plan stopped being paperwork and became the actual job. Alvarez & Marsal found margin improvement drove 51% of earnings growth in 2025 exits, against 21.5% before 2023.
Why it matters to you: if you ever raise outside capital or sell, someone writes one of these. Better to know what goes in it.
EBITDA. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. In plain terms: what the business earns before financing choices, tax position, and the accounting for things bought years ago.
Where it came from: the term is widely credited to John Malone in the 1970s cable business. Heavy infrastructure spending there made ordinary profit look terrible. William Thorndike’s The Outsiders is the usual source for that attribution. So treat it as consensus rather than documented fact.
Why it matters to you: your company is almost always priced as a multiple of EBITDA. Which means it is not a reporting number. It is the number your valuation is built on.
MOIC, or “2.5x.” Multiple on invested capital. Total money returned divided by money put in. A 2.5x turns a dollar into two dollars and fifty cents.
The decode is what it leaves out. MOIC ignores time completely. Internal rate of return, or IRR, is the one that counts the clock. So 2.5x over five years and 2.5x over nine years look identical in MOIC and very different in IRR.
Why it matters to you: that gap explains your investor’s urgency. They are not impatient by temperament. Instead they are measured on a clock, and execution momentum is how they beat it.
Hold period. How long an investor owns a company before selling it.
Here the word means three different things depending on who is counting. Bain measures at exit — purchase to sale, now around seven years. PitchBook measures the median age of companies still owned, which was 3.4 years at the end of 2024. Same market, different questions, different numbers.
Why it matters to you: the longer the hold, the more leadership transitions your plan has to survive. That is execution momentum over years, not quarters.
What the looseness costs
Vague words produce vague decisions. So when “buy-in” is your diagnosis, every intervention becomes communication.
You’ll run another town hall. Then you’ll rewrite the deck. But nothing moves, because nobody inside ever wanted it to.
Bain puts buyout holding periods at roughly seven years now. Through the 2010s the average ran five to six.
And the math got harder inside that longer window. In the 2010s a typical deal needed 5% annual growth in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Today the same 2.5x return needs 10% to 12%.
Which means the plan has to work inside the company. Because you can’t exit your way out of a stalled one.
Ultimately, execution momentum is not a speed problem. It is a clarity problem that speed makes visible.
Name the top three. Then check who else can say them without opening the file.
Where Alchemy fits
Most of what I do sits in this gap. Not the plan itself. The capacity to run it.
We build the internal operating system for human capital at organizations hitting an inflection point. Succession. A capital event. Post-close. AI integration. A scale-up or a roll-up.
That work starts with the diagnostic in this post. Whether anyone inside actually feels the problem, and how many people can name the top three unaided. Execution momentum follows from those two answers.
Then we build depth against them. Executive assessment, so you see what the team actually holds. Bench architecture, so the plan lives in more than one head. Decision rights, so first steps exist and people can act on them.
This is human capital management, not training. And the output gets measured in enterprise value protected, not workshops delivered.
If you’re ready for a conversation: https://calendly.com/brynn-alchemyleadershiplab
References
- Alvarez & Marsal, Private Equity Firms Turn to Operational Value Creation as Geopolitical Shocks Derail Deal Recovery, May 20, 2026 — link
- Bain & Company, Global Private Equity Report 2026 (press release, 17th annual), February 23, 2026 — link
- LHH, 2026 C-Suite Research, March 26, 2026 — link
- Bryan J. Weiner, “A theory of organizational readiness for change,” Implementation Science 4:67, October 19, 2009 — link
- Constance E. Helfat & Jeffrey A. Martin, “Dynamic Managerial Capabilities: Review and Assessment of Managerial Impact on Strategic Change,” Journal of Management 41(5), 2015, 1281–1312 — link
- Rose Hollister & Michael D. Watkins, “Too Many Projects,” Harvard Business Review, September–October 2018 — link
- HBR IdeaCast, “Is Your Company Suffering from Initiative Overload?”, April 8, 2026 — link
- Michael E. Porter, “What Is Strategy?”, Harvard Business Review, November–December 1996 — link