What this is
No new concepts. This is the whole course, applied to one final, complete scenario, the state Meridian CRM has actually reached, three years into the holding period this tier opened with.
The company, today
- £100m revenue, £20m EBITDA (Lesson 10)
- Growth has slowed to 5% (was 18% at entry, Lesson 12)
- NRR has fallen from 118% to 95% (Lesson 8's number, now on the wrong side of 100%)
- Top 10 customers: now 30% of revenue (concentration has crept up as smaller accounts churned, Lesson 12's stress test made real)
- Entry: 8× multiple, £60m of debt remaining (Lessons 13, 15, 16)
Revenue
£100m
EBITDA
£20m
Growth
5%
was 18% at entry
NRR
95%
was 118% at entry
Top-10 concentration
30%
was 14% at entry
Management proposes: a pricing increase, hiring 20 additional sales reps, an AI-driven product feature, and support automation.
Your task
- Evaluate the investment thesis, is it still intact, or has it fundamentally broken (Lesson 5)?
- Challenge management's four proposals the way Lesson 14 challenges an asking price, which of these actually addresses the real problem (NRR below 100%, Lesson 8), and which is just activity?
- Identify the risks each proposal carries, a pricing increase risks accelerating the churn that's already the core problem, not fixing it.
- Prioritize the real opportunities using Lesson 27's six factors.
- Sketch a 100-day plan (Lesson 25) for this specific moment, not a fresh acquisition.
- Choose which Data & AI initiatives from Lessons 32-33 you'd actually fund, and which you'd cut.
- Define the KPIs (Lesson 30) and specifically the leading indicators (Lesson 31) you'd track to know within one quarter, not one year, whether the plan is working.
- Model an upside/base/downside case (Lesson 22's chain, Lesson 23's stress tests) for where this deal could still land at exit.
- Recommend: proceed with a revised plan, or is this deal now a write-down candidate?
There's no single right answer, and that's deliberate, a strong response might argue that 20 new sales reps is solving the wrong problem entirely (new-logo sales productivity, when the actual crisis is existing-customer retention, Lesson 8's NRR), while account-health scoring and a more targeted, retention-linked pricing approach address the real issue directly. A different, equally defensible response might argue the concentration risk (30% in the top 10) is now the more urgent problem to solve first, before either pricing or AI initiatives get funded at all.
| Scenario | EBITDA growth | Exit multiple | Exit equity | MOIC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Downside | Flat from here | 6x | ~£40m | ~0.6x |
| Base (revised plan) | Modest recovery | 7x | ~£95m | ~1.5x |
| Upside | NRR recovers above 100% | 8x | ~£150m | ~2.3x |
Where to go from here
You've now walked one deal through its entire arc: a thesis formed on a healthy, fast-growing business; a price, a structure, and a return case built and defended in front of an Investment Committee; and, three years later, a real value-creation problem that doesn't look like the deal that was originally approved, which is the honest shape of most real PE holdings, not a clean, on-plan line from entry to exit.
If you want to go further from here: the same three levers from Lesson 18 apply to any company, in any sector, and the same six-factor prioritization from Lesson 27 applies to any list of competing initiatives, well beyond private equity specifically. The habit worth keeping is the one this course kept returning to from Lesson 5 onward, state the thesis as a specific, falsifiable sentence, then go looking for the evidence that would prove it wrong before you commit.
Congratulations on completing the course.