/ economics / the ebitda case
The savings land on EBITDA, and they survive the exit
Software you rent, work done by hand, and processes that crawl are three standing taxes on operating margin, and a buyer can read all three in diligence. We remove them, portfolio company by portfolio company, with systems the company owns, so the improvement is structural: it shows up in the P&L and it transfers at exit.
Software rent is a permanent opex line, and it can leave permanently
Per-seat software is rent: the bill grows with headcount, the price moves one way at renewal, and nothing is owned at the end. Across a portfolio those seats stack into a standing opex line that never shrinks.
We build the capability once, into the company's own cloud, and the company owns it. After that the cost is maintenance and continuous improvement, not rent. The difference lands on EBITDA every year, and it does not come back at the next renewal.
Labor cost decouples from volume
Manual work prices growth in headcount: double the invoices, double the routing. When an agent takes the repetitive share, the same team carries more volume, and the margin per unit of output improves. That is operating leverage an owner can underwrite, because it does not depend on heroics.
The people stay and move to judgment: every agent output is a proposal, cited to its records, that a person signs off. Nothing approves itself.
Slow processes tax the decisions they delay
The third tax is the wait: reports that describe last month, approvals that stall and restart, answers that live in one person's head. The cost is decisions made on stale data and exceptions found after the money is gone.
Once the data layer is real, the step that took days takes a question, and the audit runs continuously. The wait leaves, and decision quality is what improves.
It repeats across the portfolio, and it transfers at exit
The method is company-agnostic: the data layer first, the same capability engines on top, deployed into each company's own cloud. Spend analysis, accounts payable, capital planning, document control, and the knowledge agent recur across portfolio companies because the workflows recur.
At exit the systems transfer with the business, because the company owns them. The savings are structural, not a vendor relationship that reprices under new ownership, and that is a claim that holds up in diligence.
/ start
Bring one portfolio company and scope the first workflow
Start where the manual work is most visible. We build it, and the same method runs in the next company. Email hello@mcintoshsystems.com.