Private Equity Portfolio Consulting

When the value creation plan stalls, we go onsite and get it moving again.

Higher margins. Stronger cash flow. Portfolio companies that are actually ready when you go to market.

Book a Free Discovery Call

Talk to a portfolio operations expert about your toughest hold.

$1B+ Delivered ROI for Clients

40 Years Working Inside Mid-Market Businesses

100+ Seasoned Executives Ready to Deploy

$3M to $500M Portfolio Company Revenue Range

The Easy Money Is Gone.
What’s Left Is the Real Work.

Holding periods are stretching past five years. Distributions are sitting at decade lows. The classic playbook of cheap debt, multiple expansion, and a fast exit doesn’t carry the weight it used to.

LPs know it. Your IC knows it. You know it.

What moves the needle now is the unglamorous part. Tightening margins. Pulling cash out of operations. Putting accountability systems in place that actually hold. Building a portfolio company a buyer wants, on a timeline that works for your fund.

That’s the work most consulting firms would rather skip. It’s the only work we’ve ever done. We started doing it in 1986, and we’ve been doing nothing else since.

“We’re not here to write a report about your portfolio company. We’re here to roll up our sleeves and make it better. 

That’s what management needs, that’s what your LPs need, and frankly, that’s what this market is going to reward.”

Lou Mosca, President & CEO

American Management Services

— Lou Mosca, President & CEO, American Management Services

How We Help PE Portfolios

Portfolio Health Assessment

Every quarter you wait is a quarter your assumed exit multiple gets harder to defend. We deploy onsite for two to four weeks to find what’s actually leaking EBITDA, where cash is getting stuck, and which gaps in management or systems are blocking the original value creation thesis.

You walk away with a 90-day plan you can put in front of your IC.

This is the heart of what we do. We deploy onsite and implement our Pre-Determined Profits™ system, which treats profit as a line item to plan for, not a residual to hope for. 

Cost discipline, margin recovery, working capital release, and the financial controls that make all of it stick. We do this work alongside your management team, not from a slide deck.

Most portfolio companies don’t fail because of bad strategy. They fail because nobody is running the daily plays. We install fingertip controls, a weekly reporting cadence, and the accountability systems that let your portfolio CEO actually deliver against the numbers your IC is expecting. The systems stay in place after we leave.
Buyer diligence has a way of unwinding a value creation story that looked clean from the boardroom. We do the operational cleanup months or quarters before you go to market, not days before. Clean KPI history, a margin story that survives scrutiny, documented systems, and a management team running on rails. The asset shows up to diligence the way you described it in the IC memo.
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We’ve Been Inside Thousands of Companies That Look Like Yours

For nearly forty years, American Management Services has worked inside the $3M to $500M revenue businesses that make up most lower-middle and middle-market PE portfolios. More than 400 industries. Over a billion dollars in ROI delivered to the owners who hired us.

Portfolio CEOs tend to accept us quickly because we’ve already worked where they work. No theory, no junior team behind a partner. Just senior executives who have run companies, fixed companies, and exited companies.

And because our promise has been “Results, Not Reports” since 1986, we’re comfortable putting part of our fee at risk against the EBITDA or cash improvement we agree to deliver.

Healthy, Stalled, or Distressed. We Take the Work on Either End.

Most consulting firms pick a lane. Either they do glossy value creation work for healthy assets, or they specialize in pulling distressed companies out of crisis.

We do both, because most PE portfolios have both.

For sound but underperforming assets, the work is value creation. Margin recovery, working capital release, accountability systems, and the operational cleanup that gets a portfolio company exit-ready. This is the bulk of what we do, and it’s where most of the cards above apply.

For assets in real trouble, the work is turnaround. Stop the bleeding first, get cash flow back to neutral, prioritize the vendors who keep the business running, and reduce operating expenses across the board. Once the business is stable, we transition that asset into the same value creation track everything else runs on.

You don’t need two firms for two situations. That’s the point.

How We Work Together

Book a Discovery Call

Tell us about the asset that's giving you trouble. Where it is in the hold, what the value creation thesis was, where things have stalled. You'll get a real conversation with someone who's worked inside companies like the one you own, and you'll leave with a clear sense of whether the next step is worth taking.

Portfolio Health Assessment

We deploy onsite for two to four weeks. Our team works alongside management to find the operational and financial gaps, put a number on what each one is costing the business, and present a 90-day plan back to you and the company. You decide what happens next.

Deploy and Transform

If the fit is right, we deploy to execute. We install our Pre-Determined Profits™ system. We build the controls and accountability systems the company has been missing. And we stay onsite alongside management until the numbers move and the systems hold.

The Asset Won’t Improve on Its Own.

Every quarter you wait is a quarter the assumed exit multiple gets harder to defend. The work we do is fast, measurable, and built to hold up through diligence.

The first conversation is free, and it’s useful even if you decide not to engage us.

Call 800-743-0410 to speak with someone now, or fill out the form and we’ll be in touch.

In Partnership With Dutchess Capital

When sponsors need the strategic and financial advisory work that sits above the operational layer, we partner with Dutchess Capital.

Dutchess has been doing capital markets, transaction advisory, and strategic repositioning work for more than thirty years. They handle the strategy and the financial roadmap. We handle the hands-on operational execution.

Together we give sponsors one coordinated team from value creation thesis through exit.

Visit Dutchess Capital

FAQs

How is American Management Services different from a Big 4 consulting firm or an in-house operating partner?
Two main differences. First, we implement. Big 4 firms typically deliver reports, frameworks, and recommendations. We get our hands on the business and execute alongside management. Second, we have depth. A solo operating partner is one person with limited bandwidth across a whole portfolio. We bring more than 100 seasoned executives who can deploy across multiple assets at the same time.

We deploy seasoned operating executives onsite at PE portfolio companies to improve EBITDA, free up cash, and get the business ready for exit. The work is hands-on implementation, not strategy decks. We’ve been doing this kind of operational consulting since 1986, primarily for businesses in the $3M to $500M revenue range, which covers most lower-middle and middle-market PE portfolio companies.

It’s the operational methodology that anchors most of our engagements. Pre-Determined Profits™ treats profit as the first line item to plan for, not the last one left over. We work backward from the profit number the business needs to deliver, then build the cost discipline, pricing approach, working capital management, and accountability systems required to hit it. It was developed by AMSERV’s founder George Cloutier and has been refined across thousands of client engagements.

We do both value creation and turn-around work. In our almost 40 years of operation we have recommended a formal filing only twice. We have designed and implemented internal restructurings where necessary. If a portfolio company is in true crisis, we’ll be honest about that and if not curable we will be honest about that also. Our work is suited to fundamentally sound businesses that are underperforming as well as crisis management.

Almost certainly, in spirit if not in name. We’ve worked inside thousands of mid-market businesses across more than 400 industries, which means we’ve been inside companies that match most PE portfolio profiles. On a discovery call we can talk through specifics about your fund’s strategy, your portfolio mix, and the kinds of situations we’ve handled that look most like yours.

Our sweet spot is portfolio companies generating between $3 million and $500 million in annual revenue. This range covers most of the lower-middle market and a significant portion of the core middle market where PE sponsors hold the bulk of their assets.

It depends on the scope. A Portfolio Health Assessment runs one to three weeks. A full operational improvement engagement typically runs six to twelve months, with our team onsite alongside management throughout. Exit readiness work usually runs three to twelve months ahead of a planned transaction. Across all of these, we work in defined timelines with measurable milestones.

We tell you. Early and directly. Every engagement is structured around specific timelines with measurable milestones, which means by the end of the first cycle both sides know whether the work is producing results. If it isn’t, we have an honest conversation about why, and we either restructure the engagement or part ways professionally. We’ve never been interested in stretching engagements that aren’t delivering.

Both. The PE sponsor typically engages us and sets the value creation goals. The actual work happens onsite at the portfolio company, alongside management. We report progress back to the sponsor and keep the portfolio CEO accountable to the plan. The model works best when both sides are aligned from day one.

For most engagements, we have a team onsite within two weeks of agreement. The Portfolio Health Assessment is designed to deploy quickly. When a situation is urgent, we move faster.

Pricing depends on the engagement. A Portfolio Health Assessment is a fixed fee. Longer operational engagements have a defined budget and timeline which require a monthly retainer paid in advance.

We have a working partnership with Dutchess Capital that spans almost 20 years. Dutchess is, a corporate advisory and capital markets firm with more than 30 years of experience. Dutchess handles the strategic, financial, and transactional advisory side of value creation. We handle the hands-on operational execution. For sponsors who need both, the partnership gives you one coordinated team from strategy through exit.

We’ve worked across more than 400 industries. The ones we see most often in PE portfolios include manufacturing, construction and contracting, distribution and wholesale, transportation and logistics, professional services, retail, restaurants, and auto dealerships. If your portfolio company is in a mid-market industrial, services, or consumer business, we’ve almost certainly done similar work before.

We are headquartered in Orlando, Florida, and our consulting bench is national. Our consultants are seasoned executives and full time American Management staff. We deploy executives to portfolio companies anywhere in the continental United States.

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