Worked for a PE firm… $3B fund, middle market. We had grown EBITDA 3x in about 3 years, half organic and half via acquisition (and half of the acquisition EBITDA was synergies we executed). We go to sell the company and the MD asks us to project gross margins by projecting every single SKU’s gross margin for the next 12 months We had ~200k SKUs. I told him (politely) that there was no way that effort would be worth the energy. It would take us weeks to accomplish that and at best we would have a forecast that assumed two major variables - price and mix (we had about 6 mos visibility on future costs). He wouldn’t listen. Had to have this done. We spent about 30 days trying to get something together. In the end he realized it was a futile effort. Anyway, his delay lost us a lot of momentum and his continued micromanagement through the sale process eventually botched the entire thing. Didn’t sell. Devastating. Don’t assume PE knows what they’re doing.