Agentic-AI value creation for private equity portfolios.

The hundred-day plan assumes force is expensive. It's now almost free.

Most value-creation plans die in the same place: the portfolio company's team is too thin to run the analysis and the operating change at the same time. So the plan gets triaged, the second-order levers slip to year two, and the deal model quietly absorbs it.

Agentic AI changes the cost of the first half. The weekly reporting a finance team assembles by hand is an agent workload now. So is the pricing review that happens once a year because the model takes a month, and the customer follow-up that depends on whoever has spare hours. The hard part is choosing which workflows to hand over, then building them so the existing team actually runs them and the freed capacity goes to the levers in the deal thesis. Force got cheap. Direction is the work, and direction is what I sell. I've written the longer argument in Force × direction.

I've serviced these engines, driven one, and now I'm building my own.

Seven years at McKinsey as a Senior Engagement Manager (2017 – 2024), much of it serving private equity: diligence and value creation across TMT and B2B SaaS. Then Director of Strategy at HelloFresh ANZ, a $1B+ ARR business, where I learned what a plan costs when you're the one who has to run it.

Now I'm co-founder of Frollie, an FMCG company in Jakarta that reached profitability on a 90-day clock: three brands, six channels, one repo, operated end to end on agentic infrastructure — down to the point-of-sale that runs the counter. When I recommend an agentic operating model to a portfolio company, it's the one I was running last week, and the build notes are public: twelve essays on exactly how.

Three common ways to partner with me

• Diagnostic sprint — two to three weeks inside one portfolio company. Starting with the exCo team building their first agents to understand the concepts and potential. We work with the exCos who can then internally mandate the workflows worth handing to agents, rank them against the deal thesis, and we design the sequenced build plan they can execute with or without Ikigai.
• Venture build engagement — We partner to build something amazing together, faster than legacy competitors can drive internally, proving the hypotheses for value creation while learning together; 16-24 weeks.
• Advisory retainer — a standing cadence with the deal team or board. I read the plans before they go to IC, pressure-test the vendor claims, and say which of the portfolio's AI bets are pointed at the wrong destination.

Engagements are priced as a competitive expert-builder retainer, scoped to the company and the thesis — not a fixed menu.