Winning Moves
105 Proven Ways to Create Value in Private Equity-Backed Companies
by Dan Cremons
The 60-Second Take
In Winning Moves, private equity veteran Dan Cremons provides a comprehensive, actionable playbook for driving post-acquisition growth. He argues that the era of relying purely on leverage and cost-cutting is over. To generate superior returns today, investors and executives must master deliberate value creation. By aligning leadership, optimizing talent during the critical first hundred days, and pulling specific revenue levers, leaders can predictably scale their portfolio companies.
You Can No Longer Cut Your Way to a Great Return
In Winning Moves, Cremons outlines why the old arbitrage playbook no longer works. Investors and the executives they hire to run their portfolio companies are under intense pressure to justify high multiples, which means they actually have to build structurally superior businesses. The book is an exhaustive manual, crowdsourcing decades of wisdom from dozens of mid-market professionals into a systematic approach to value creation. This summary explores the foundational shifts in the industry, how to manage talent, and the specific strategic levers you must pull to drive growth after the deal closes.
What You'll Learn
Why financial engineering and high leverage are no longer reliable drivers of private equity returns
How to prioritize human capital and build a leadership team capable of executing a thesis
The critical importance of securing quick wins in the first one hundred days post-acquisition
The five distinct levers you can pull to generate sustainable top-line revenue growth
How to transition from a conceptual strategy to executing specific, actionable business moves
The End of the Financial Engineering Era
For a long time, the private equity industry thrived on a reputation of ruthless efficiency. The goal was to find a bloated business, trim the excess fat, and let the leverage amplify the returns. That era is over. Cremons explains that the sheer volume of capital chasing deals today means you are rarely the only smart buyer at the table. When you are forced to pay a premium to win a competitive auction, you cannot simply fire a few middle managers and expect to double your money.
The new era of private equity requires an operational mindset rather than a purely financial one. You have to drive genuine, fundamental value creation. Value creation is not an abstract concept; it is the deliberate, methodical process of making the underlying business more profitable, more resilient, and ultimately more attractive to the next buyer.
Many executives step into a private equity-backed role and freeze. They understand their industry, but they do not understand the specific mechanics of accelerating equity value on a compressed timeline. Cremons argues that value creation must be demystified. It is not magic. It is a set of specific, repeatable actions—the 105 winning moves—that push a company from its current state to a much higher valuation. To do this, investors and operating executives must move past financial modeling and get their hands dirty in the actual mechanics of the business.
Getting the "Who" Right: The Talent Advantage
You can draft the most brilliant strategic roadmap in the world, but if you hand it to the wrong executive team, the investment will fail. Cremons insists that value creation is fundamentally a human endeavor. The most valuable asset in any portfolio company is not its proprietary software or its manufacturing equipment; it is the people executing the daily operations. As noted by industry experts, nailing the "who" is just as important as getting the "what" right.
Often, private equity firms focus entirely on the "what" during the due diligence phase. They analyze the market share, the margins, and the product lines. They spend remarkably little time analyzing the "who." When the deal closes, they suddenly realize the existing management team lacks the urgency or the specific skills required to scale the business at the speed the investment thesis demands.
To fix this, leaders must prioritize organizational alignment immediately. This means rigorously assessing the leadership team to ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction. Cremons emphasizes that human capital strategies cannot be an afterthought. You have to clearly define the roles needed to execute the new strategy, evaluate the current talent against those specific requirements, and make hard decisions quickly if there is a gap. A culture of accountability and high performance is the only environment where massive value creation actually takes place.
The First One Hundred Days and Momentum
In the lifecycle of a private equity investment, time is the enemy. The internal rate of return drops every single day that the business fails to grow. Because of this compressed timeline, the first one hundred days after an acquisition are critical. This is the window where the foundation is set, expectations are established, and momentum is either built or permanently lost.
Cremons warns against the common mistake of spending the first few months trapped in analysis paralysis. Executives often want to study the business perfectly before making a move. While caution is understandable, hesitation kills the energy of the transition. The operating team and the investors must align quickly on the core growth story.
To achieve this alignment, Cremons recommends using a structured inquiry process to force consensus, such as his methodology of getting growth-stage leaders to answer six critical questions. The leadership team must sit down and agree on fundamental aspects about the direction of the business. What is the core economic engine? What are the biggest immediate threats? Where are the lowest-friction opportunities for quick wins? When a team agrees on these answers early, they stop debating strategy and start executing. Securing early, tangible wins in the first one hundred days proves to the broader company that the new ownership is competent, which builds the internal trust required for heavier lifting later on.
The Five Levers of Revenue Growth
While optimizing costs is important, you cannot shrink a company into greatness. Massive value creation requires massive top-line growth. Cremons deconstructs this growth into five specific, sequential levers that businesses must evaluate.
Keep your current customers. This is the cheapest and most crucial lever. Before you spend a dollar trying to acquire a new logo, you must plug the holes in your existing bucket. Improving customer retention and reducing churn has an outsized impact on lifetime value and overall valuation.
Sell more to current customers. Your existing clients already trust you. Finding ways to increase their average order value, cross-sell complementary services, or raise prices based on improved value delivery is the fastest path to expanding revenue.
Find new customers in your current market. Once your core base is secure and fully monetized, you increase your market penetration. This involves optimizing your sales engine, improving your marketing funnels, and taking market share directly from your current competitors.
Find new customers in new markets. This lever carries more risk and requires more investment. It involves taking your existing product or service and adapting it for adjacent industries or new geographic territories.
Sell new products to new and existing customers. The final and most difficult lever involves genuine innovation. Developing entirely new offerings for either your existing base or a new market is expensive and time-consuming, but it can dramatically change the trajectory of the business if executed correctly.
By viewing growth through these five distinct lenses, operating executives can stop relying on vague instructions like "sell more" and start implementing targeted, specific moves that generate measurable returns.
Value Creation at a Glance
The arbitrage era is dead. You must intentionally build a better business to justify modern private equity multiples.
Talent is the ultimate constraint. A brilliant strategy is useless if the executive team lacks the skills or alignment to execute it.
Momentum matters. The first one hundred days are the most critical period for establishing trust, securing quick wins, and setting the operational cadence.
Growth is sequential. Prioritize keeping your existing customers and selling more to them before you invest heavily in chasing entirely new markets or building new products.
Execution beats modeling. Returns are generated by taking specific, actionable steps in the real world, not by tweaking assumptions on a financial spreadsheet.
A Quick Start Guide to Driving Portfolio Value
Assess the leadership team immediately. Do not wait six months to figure out if you have the right people. Evaluate the executive team against the specific demands of your investment thesis on day one.
Define the first one hundred days. Build a concrete, action-oriented plan for the first three months post-close. Focus entirely on alignment and quick, highly visible wins.
Audit your customer churn. Before launching a massive new marketing campaign, look at the customers leaving your business. Fix the retention issues to protect your baseline revenue.
Map the cross-sell opportunities. Analyze your existing customer base to identify who is only buying a fraction of what you offer. Build a targeted campaign to sell them adjacent services.
Align on the core questions. Gather the investors and the operating team in a room and force a consensus on the top operational priorities for the year to ensure everyone is in sync. If you cannot agree, you do not have a strategy.
Who Should Read Winning Moves (and Who Can Skip It)
Read it if you are an operating executive or CEO stepping into a private equity-backed company for the first time and need a tactical playbook for dealing with compressed timelines.
Read it if you are a private equity investor who wants to move beyond financial modeling and understand the actual operational mechanics of accelerating business growth.
Read it if you are a consultant or advisor who helps mid-market companies transition through acquisitions and management changes.
Skip it if you are looking for a highly technical guide to leveraged buyout (LBO) financial modeling, tax structuring, or debt syndication. This is an operational manual, not a corporate finance textbook.
Skip it if you run a pre-revenue, venture-backed startup. The strategies here rely on optimizing and scaling an already established business model, not finding product-market fit from scratch.
Final Reflections
Winning Moves strips away the intimidating jargon that often surrounds the private equity industry. Dan Cremons does an excellent job of grounding high-level financial goals in gritty, operational reality. By breaking down value creation into actionable moves and sequential levers, the book serves as a highly practical reference guide rather than a theoretical text. Its strongest contribution is the relentless focus on human capital. Finance professionals tend to treat people as line items on a spreadsheet, but Cremons proves that securing returns is ultimately a psychological and organizational challenge. While the sheer volume of "105 moves" could feel overwhelming if taken all at once, the structured framework allows leaders to diagnose their specific business and select only the moves that apply to their current situation. It is an indispensable manual for anyone tasked with generating massive returns on a tight deadline.
The Bottom Line
In modern private equity, you cannot financially engineer your way to a massive return; you must deliberately build a fundamentally stronger business by aligning your leadership, securing early momentum, and systematically pulling the right levers for revenue growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main idea of Winning Moves?
The core idea is that the era of relying on high leverage and cost-cutting to generate private equity returns is over. Today, investors and executives must rely on deliberate, methodical value creation by optimizing talent, securing momentum in the first hundred days, and executing specific operational moves to drive revenue.
What are the five levers of revenue growth mentioned in the book?
The five levers are: keep your current customers, sell more to your current customers, find new customers in your current market, find new customers in new markets, and sell new products to new and existing customers.
Is this book useful for people outside of private equity?
Yes. While the context and urgency are specifically tailored to the timeline of a private equity hold period, the actionable moves and the frameworks for alignment, talent optimization, and revenue growth are highly applicable to any mid-market company looking to scale efficiently.
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