Global Talent #50

Brought to you by Lundi: we design, hire, and run international teams.

🔥 Opening Shot

Ask anyone in private equity where returns come from and, for twenty years, the honest answer was the buy. Pick the right company, pay the right multiple, ride the market, exit well. Operations were the thing you tidied up in the last year before the sale.

That era is over, and now there is data to prove it. Alvarez & Marsal analyzed 240 European PE exits and split each company's EBITDA growth into its drivers. In companies exited before 2023, operational margin improvement contributed about a fifth of EBITDA growth. In companies exited in 2025, it contributed more than half. The deal no longer creates the value. The operating does.

I have spent my career on the unglamorous side of that line. Building and running teams across dozens of countries teaches you where margin actually lives: in shift plans, employment structures, payroll mechanics, and the person who knows why the Tuesday report was late. None of it makes a good slide. All of it compounds.

And look at what else happened this week. Colombia rewrote its outsourcing rules and finishes cutting its workweek on Wednesday. Manila signed the largest minimum wage increase in its history. Every one of these lands on the operating line, not the deal line.

The easy money moved. It now goes to whoever operates best.

If your international team is something you bought once and stopped managing, this is the week to look again.

This Week's Number: 21.5% → 51% — the share of EBITDA growth coming from operational margin improvement in European PE exits, before 2023 vs. 2025 (Alvarez & Marsal).

📌 On the Radar

1. Private equity just put a number on the operating advantage.
Alvarez & Marsal's fifth annual European Value Creation study surveyed 200 PE investors and portfolio-company executives and decomposed EBITDA growth across 240 exits. The headline: EBITDA margin improvement drove 51% of EBITDA growth in companies exited in 2025, up from 21.5% in companies exited before 2023, while the contribution of top-line growth fell from 78.5% to 49% (Alvarez & Marsal, May 19, 2026). Sponsors are responding: 58% now deploy value-creation resources within the first 100 days, double last year. And yet 65% admit they delivered less than half the value targeted in plans from the past two years.

Read those last two numbers together. Everyone now agrees the returns are in operations, and most still cannot execute the plan. The most under-used lever I see is the team itself: its shape, its cost structure, and where it sits. A concentrated team in the right market, run properly, is a permanent margin program. But a slide does not run it. Renting seats from a vendor gets you a cost line; owning the operation is what gets you the margin. The gap between those two positions is exactly where that 65% under-delivery lives.

2. Colombia closed the gap between "outsourced" and "yours."
On June 5, Colombia issued Decree 0581, a new enforcement framework against illegal outsourcing and labor intermediation (Decree 0581 of 2026). Contracting third parties remains legal. What the decree targets is the fiction: when outside workers permanently serve your business and the contractor has no real autonomy or productive structure of its own, a direct employment relationship with your company is now presumed, the burden of disproving it is yours, and fines run up to 5,000 monthly minimum wages. Two more dates matter: Sunday and holiday surcharges rose to 90% on July 1, and this Wednesday, July 15, the final step of Law 2101 cuts the maximum legal workweek to 42 hours at full pay.

Colombia is running the same play Poland ran this month, and the direction is global: if a team works for you permanently, the law increasingly says it is yours, whatever the contract says. That is not a reason to avoid Colombia. It remains one of the best talent markets in our hemisphere. It is the end of the halfway structures. Either your people are properly employed inside a structure someone actually operates and defends, or you are one inspection away from owning the exposure without the ownership. Choosing how you own it beats having it decided for you.

3. Manila just signed the biggest minimum wage hike in its history.
On June 30, the Philippine labor department announced a two-tranche wage order for Metro Manila: the daily minimum for non-agricultural workers rises from ₱695 to ₱755 on July 19, then to ₱780 in January 2027, about 12% in total and the largest single increase the capital region has ever enacted, covering roughly 1.1 million workers (DOLE, June 30, 2026). The main business chamber is already warning that thin-margin employers will respond by renegotiating contracts and accelerating automation.

Your analysts and accountants in Manila earn well above minimum wage, so the direct payroll effect on a white-collar team rounds to zero. That is not the point. Wage floors move the whole curve: pay compression pushes up the bands above them, vendors reprice their seats, and every BPO contract in the metro has an escalation clause someone is reaching for right now. The Philippines is still exceptional value, and this is exactly how a maturing market behaves: it gets more expensive at the bottom first. If your Manila operation is a rate card, your costs just moved and you had no say. If it is a team you own and operate, this is a manageable comp-curve exercise. That difference compounds every year.

📊 Chart of the Week

Caption: Share of EBITDA growth by driver in European private equity exits, companies exited before 2023 vs. exited in 2025. Source: Alvarez & Marsal, European PE Value Creation Report 2026 (240 Western European exits, 2013–2025), released May 2026.

Same asset class, same decade, inverted math. When top-line growth carried nearly four-fifths of value creation, you could afford an average operation. At 49%, you cannot. For CFOs and operating partners, the message is blunt: the levers that move margin (team cost structure, location strategy, operating discipline) just got promoted from back office to alpha.

🚀 One More Thing

Edition fifty. When this newsletter started, the argument was that global talent was a cost decision. Fifty editions later, the market has come around to what operators already knew: it is an operating decision, and the returns go to the people who treat it that way. If there is an international team in your plans this year (or one already in your P&L that nobody has examined hard since it was set up), book a strategy session and bring the numbers you are least sure about. No pitch. Just insight from someone who has been there.

📖 New here? My book, Winning the Global Talent War, is the full playbook behind this newsletter.