Lessons from 2025: How Top-Performing Portfolio CEOs Built Repeatable Growth Engines

2025 made one thing particularly clear in the PE-backed companies we advise at Singulier: most CEOs don’t miss their value creation targets because of strategy, but rather because they are not focused on creating a unified and repeatable growth engine.

On paper, the plans often appear credible. Where they fail is in the day-to-day – creating sales models that depends on heroics, one-off deals or a single product cycle, rather than something the organisation can repeat, enhance and build on from quarter to quarter.

Sitting between sponsors, management teams and lenders across dozens of situations each year gives us a privileged vantage point. The assets that outperformed in 2025 were not the ones with the neatest equity story or the most charismatic CEO. They were the ones where the CEO had purposefully hard-wired growth into the operating model, meaning that revenue, margin and cash moved in a predictable way even as the macro picture shifted.  This was not because their plan was rigid, rather the ‘engine’, by design, was robust and flexible enough to adjust quickly.

1. Commercial governance that creates momentum

You can usually tell in the first 10-15 minutes of a monthly review whether a business will hit its plan. In weaker assets, the meeting is a commentary on the past. In stronger ones, it’s a collaborative working session on the future.

Gartner’s B2B Commercial Strategy Survey of commercial leaders found that when marketing and sales share buyer-journey insights, organisations are more likely to see higher sales conversion rates but only a few businesses actually collaborate on buyer-journey mapping. That’s what good governance really is: a shared view of reality, translated into a disciplined operating rhythm.

In our highest-performing portfolio clients, monthly reviews are short, forward-looking decision meetings: a single view of the numbers, a handful of leading KPIs, clear owners, and actions agreed in the room, rather than being parked for “next time”. That same cadence also protects agility: when indicators move with the macro environment, the team sees it early and can course-correct in weeks, not quarters.

2. Sales engines built on playbooks, not personalities

The post-pandemic demand spike masked many sins. As volumes normalised in 2024–25, it became clear who had built a robust sales platform and who was still reliant on a limited number of rainmakers.

What is clear is that firms which organise around the customer and align their revenue engine (marketing, sales, product) deliver structurally higher revenue growth, profitability and retention than their peers.

Forrester’s ongoing work on ‘customer-obsessed growth engines’ finds that organisations aligning sales, marketing and product around the customer deliver materially higher revenue and profit growth than their peers.  Many high-performing commercial leaders we work with treat the sales process as an exercise in choreography, where the trick is to build repeatable processes.  These sales teams exhibit 3 key characteristics:

• Defined stages and qualifications embedded in the CRM.
• Playbooks by segment and use case – with talk tracks, proof points and objection handling that sales reps can actually use.
• Continuous enablement via deal reviews and call listening, not a single “kick-off” training.

Crucially, sales playbooks are refreshed as buying behaviour and macro conditions evolve – the pattern is consistent, but the content moves with the market.

When you can shadow three reps and recognise a consistent pattern, you are witnessing a repeatable platform. When every top performer “has their own way” without suitable reasoning, that is a red flag.

3. Pricing sophistication that quietly compounds EBITDA

Nowhere is the gap in company performance more visible than in pricing.

The Financial Times’ coverage of Unilever over the last two years has showed both sides of the story: record price rises that initially supported margins, followed by eroding market share and management openly acknowledging the group “needs to improve” as price-led growth runs out of road. In luxury, FT reporting on Hermès has highlighted the opposite pattern:  controlled supply, selective distribution, measured price increases and strong brand equity have combined to sustain sector-leading growth and margins while peers struggle.

4. AI-powered digital marketing that is measurable – not experimental

Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey shows marketing budgets stuck at an average of 7.7% of company revenue for the second year running, with almost six in ten CMOs saying they still lack enough budget to execute their strategy – forcing leaders to turn to data and AI to do more with static funds. This pressure on efficiency and accountability puts increased necessity of clear measurement and robust execution frameworks. In short, CMO’s can’t risk going ad hoc.

Google’s AI Path to Excellence series brings this to life. Based on a global survey of 2,000 marketers, Google shows that “AI leaders” – those using AI-powered attribution, marketing-mix modelling and experimentation – are opening up a clear performance gap on both growth and efficiency versus the rest of the field.

5. A single source of truth that speeds decision-making

Every CEO now claims to be “data-driven”.  Given this, a common question we ask in boardrooms is “how fast can your team make a decision they trust enough to bet the quarter on?”

Graphite, Singulier’s data capability arm, has made this its north star for data transformation projects.  Modern data and analytics programmes are about better, faster decisions, not dashboards for their own sake. The consensus across their clients is that fast and reliable data-driven decision-making is now critical to creating business value and competitive advantage. Organisations enjoy greater agility and competitive differentiation as they embed predictive and prescriptive analytics into decisions.

In our highest-maturity clients, this shows up very practically:

• Master dataset and schema are linked to all relevant numbers that underline a concrete business challenge.
• Common KPI definitions are deployed across teams and ranks.
• Lightweight self-service analytics are established, so operators get to “why is this moving?” in hours, not weeks.

In lower-maturity situations, management teams often spend half of their decisioning time arguing about whose spreadsheet is right – and no amount of tooling compensates for that.

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