Cost reductions captured by changing how a portfolio company buys goods and services — through better pricing, consolidated suppliers, and tighter demand.
The rate at which customers or recurring revenue is lost over a period — the leak that <em>net</em> growth has to outrun before any new sales count.
Centralizing back-office functions — finance, HR, IT, procurement — into one shared unit so multiple business units stop running them <em>separately</em>.
The total gross profit a company expects to earn from a customer over the whole relationship — the number that makes <em>acquisition</em> spend rational.
Moving a company off legacy or fragmented systems onto a single enterprise resource planning platform — high-risk plumbing under most other ops levers.
The time it takes to recover what was spent acquiring a customer from the gross profit they generate — the metric that tells you how <em>cash-hungry</em> growth is.