The Private Equity Paradox: Why 65% of Deals Involve PE, and Why Most Founders Still Lose

Private equity isn’t slowing down.
In Q1 2025 alone, 65% of all marketing and media M&A deals were PE-backed. Capital is everywhere. Funds are sitting on record dry powder.

On paper, that sounds like good news for agency founders.
More buyers. More options. More liquidity.

But here’s the paradox: even as PE activity rises, most founders still lose, not financially, but strategically.

They sell their majority, lose control of their culture, and spend the next three years trying to make someone else’s spreadsheet work.

Every founder thinks they’ll be the exception.
They’ll take on capital, keep autonomy, and scale faster.

The reality is less romantic.

Traditional PE deals are built around control.
The fund installs its own leadership, restructures teams, and optimises for exit timelines, not founder legacies.

You might keep your title. But the decisions, who you hire, how you grow, even what clients you take, often shift overnight.

The promise: resources, systems, scale.
The trade-off: your independence.

And in most cases, the math doesn’t work in your favour.

“It’s not that founders sell too early. It’s that they sell too much.”

Let’s look at what’s actually happening in the market:

• 65% of Q1 2025 UK marketing M&A deals involved private equity.
  
• 75% of those were bolt-ons, not platform investments, meaning smaller agencies folded into existing portfolio groups.
  
• 70% of roll-ups fail to meet projected returns because integration destroys culture and talent churns before synergies ever materialise.

The playbook hasn’t changed in decades:
Buy majority control → install new leadership → merge operations → sell at a higher multiple.

It works for investors.
It rarely works for founders.

The Founder’s Dilemma: Freedom or Firepower?

When founders reach scale, they typically face three choices:

1. Sell majority control to PE or a holding group
   → Gain capital, lose control.
   
   
2. Bootstrap the next phase alone
   → Keep control, lose capacity.
   
   
3. Join a roll-up
   → Gain systems, lose soul.

That’s the paradox. The very founders who built the market’s most dynamic businesses are forced into models that dilute everything that made them valuable in the first place.

The logic of private equity makes sense on a spreadsheet: leverage capital, consolidate, and scale margins through efficiency.

But agencies aren’t factories.
They’re people, relationships, and creativity.

Culture doesn’t merge.
It either survives, or it burns.

And when it burns, so does value.

In diligence, buyers price the mechanics of a business.
But in reality, it’s the momentum of a team that drives returns. Traditional PE is still trying to apply industrial logic to human businesses.

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Here’s the question that built The Unusual Group:

“What if founders could access private-equity-level firepower, without losing ownership or control?”

Because control is not a vanity metric. It’s a performance driver.
Founders who stay emotionally and operationally invested build better outcomes.

That’s the model we flipped.

Instead of taking 60–80% and rewriting your business, we back founders to keep 65–95% ownership while giving them access to the same infrastructure, capital, and operational muscle PE uses to build value.

We call it founder-first capital.

The Unusual Group Lens: Capital as a Multiplier, Not a Takeover

In the traditional model, money comes first, systems come later.
At Unusual, it’s reversed. We embed infrastructure before capital compounds.

Here’s how it works in practice:

1. Capital Meets Infrastructure
   Growth capital is paired with enterprise-grade systems, finance, legal, HR, tech, that make scale sustainable.
   
   
2. AI-Enabled Efficiency
   We hardwire automation into delivery within ten weeks, creating 30% efficiency gains that lift margins before expansion.
   
   
3. Leadership Depth and Resilience
   Founders hire ahead of revenue, building leadership benches that reduce risk and multiply capacity.
   
   
4. Exit Readiness Built Early
   We design for valuation from day one, clean contracts, predictable revenue, documented systems.

This isn’t financial engineering. It’s founder engineering.

Two agencies, both at £5m turnover, both approached by private equity.

Agency A sells 80% to a traditional PE firm.
Year one: capital injection, aggressive targets, new leadership layer.
Year two: culture clash, leadership churn, margin squeeze.
Year three: roll-up fatigue. The agency that once had a soul is now a spreadsheet line.

Agency B joins The Unusual Group.
Keeps majority ownership.
Uses minority capital to build systems, automate delivery, and strengthen leadership.
Within 24 months, EBITDA margin rises from 18% to 24%.
By the time buyers call, they’re negotiating from strength, not survival.

Same size. Same market.
Different ownership. Different outcome.

Most founders don’t lose because they sold.
They lose because they sold too much, too early, or to the wrong model.

They confuse “liquidity” with “freedom.”
But liquidity without control is just a well-paid job in your own company.

True freedom comes when capital accelerates what you’ve built, not when it replaces it.

That’s the distinction between transactional exits and strategic exits.
One extracts value. The other compounds it.

By 2026, this shift will accelerate.
Investors will increasingly compete for proven, founder-led platforms that already have embedded systems, recurring revenue, and AI-enabled operations.

Traditional PE will keep chasing roll-ups.
Founder-first investors will build collectives.

And the valuation gap will widen, not between big and small, but between controlled and controlled by others.

Because the market is learning what founders have always known:

Control isn’t a luxury. It’s the multiplier.

Private equity has more capital than ever, but the model is broken for the very people who built the market.

It strips control, replaces culture, and chases spreadsheets instead of sustainability.

The Unusual Group was built to flip that script, giving founders the same level of infrastructure, capital, and network access, while letting them keep the ownership that makes them unstoppable.

“Traditional PE buys control. Founder-first capital builds it.” Luke Tobin

Take The Unusual Group’s Exit Readiness Assessment or book a confidential conversation about how to access PE-level resources without losing what makes your agency yours.

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