Scale Your Business With Data with Crawford McMillan

About Scale Your Business With Data with Crawford McMillan

Private equity meets data. Conversations with deal teams, operating partners, and portfolio company leaders about the data problems that kill deals, slow exits, and destroy value. Hosted by Graeme Crawford, founder of Crawford McMillan. 20 years leading data programs at Fortune 100 companies. Now helping PE-backed companies fix data before exits so the numbers hold up under scrutiny. New episodes cover diligence red flags, value creation playbooks, and the real stories behind successful (and failed) transactions.

Publisher

Graeme Crawford

Category

business · leisure · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

2 May 2025

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

48 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   8 Oct 2026

   Why Private Equity Value Creation Plans Quietly Fail

   Here's the scariest sentence in private equity: every KPI on the value creation plan is green and enterprise value is exactly where it started. I paint that horror show because it's exactly what I've seen: dashboards full of check marks, a room of smart people, and nobody who can explain why the company isn't worth more. You get the quick wins in year one—pricing tweaks, a bit of cost takeout—and everyone celebrates. Then year two arrives, the heavy-lift initiatives—cross-sell, add-ons, new segments—take longer, definitions diverge, and the board deck looks prettier than reality. What breaks the thesis isn't bad strategy; it's broken data. I walk you through how every lever—pricing, procurement, cross-sell, M&A—relies on numbers you can trace. Most portfolio companies run on a patchwork of systems, one heroic finance person, and no agreed definitions. So the dashboard turns green because we're measuring activity, not value. The net result: enterprise value flatlines and buyers discount everything because they can't trust the baseline. If you want to find the gap, try my one-meeting test: pick the single number the plan depends on and ask the room who can trace it to source, define it, and reproduce it. If the room goes quiet, you found the problem. I also flag a free scorecard at the end to see where you stand and offer a chat to show you where the plan and the data disagree while you still have time to fix it. Takeaways: You should stop trusting green KPI dashboards — they often measure activity, not the actual value increments buyers will pay for. I explain why value creation is the whole game now: cheap leverage and multiple expansion no longer carry deals. If you buy a new BI tool or hire a fancy consultant without fixing definitions, you're just decorating broken data — don't order the pizza yet. We learned the hard way: merging companies means merging messy datasets first, otherwise any post-acquisition claims won't survive diligence. You can test your portfolio quickly — pick the one number the plan depends on and ask who can trace it back to source. Foundations matter: build data definitions and ownership early, because they compound value each quarter and speed up provable initiatives. I even put a free scorecard at the bottom — use it now so we can find where your numbers and the plan disagree before it's too late.

2. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Why Private Equity Operators Still Cannot Find Their Real EBITDA

   In this episode I talk with Afrozy Ara, founder and CEO of LuminaData, an AI transformation platform for finance operations backed by Techstars and Berkeley SkyDeck. Afrozy started her career as an electrical engineer, then spent over a decade in enterprise consulting at firms including Mu Sigma, where she worked directly with Fortune 500 finance teams and built out diagnostic practices that benchmark how finance work actually happens inside large organizations. She started LuminaData a year and a half ago, beginning with a single problem inside reconciliations, and her founding thesis is that AI adoption is not the same as AI transformation. We talk about where the money actually hides inside a finance team, from duplicate invoices and unpaid remittances to the nonstandard contracts that large customers like Amazon force onto their vendors. Afrozy explains why giving a team of ten people the same AI tool can produce ten different answers without a shared process behind them, and why she still keeps a human in the loop for every exception rather than letting an agent make deterministic decisions on its own. She also walks through the three step method her team uses inside a client: look across the whole business, pick one area and go deep, then show a small result fast to build trust before scaling the work across the order to cash process. Chapters: 00:19 - The Agent: Reimagining Your Process 04:11 - Thesis: AI adoption is not AI transformation 08:15 - AI in the Enterprise — From Copilots to Capturing Value 20:56 - Humans in the Loop: Designing AI Agents with Human Oversight 25:05 - Connecting platforms to reveal business performance and KPIs 33:21 - Personal Writing, Unfinished Books, and AI Companies Mentioned LuminaData Techstars Berkeley SkyDeck Mu Sigma Capital One Amazon Ramp Brex QuickBooks Anthropic Websites Mentioned linkedin.com/in/afrozy-ara-57527612 (http://linkedin.com/in/afrozy-ara-57527612) luminadata.ai (http://luminadata.ai) Guest Information Afrozy Ara is the founder and CEO of LuminaData, an AI platform for finance operations backed by Techstars and Berkeley SkyDeck. She began her career as an electrical engineer before moving into enterprise consulting, spending over a decade at firms including Mu Sigma, where she partnered with Fortune 500 finance teams on data and process problems. She started LuminaData a year and a half ago, beginning with a single problem inside reconciliations, and her work today centers on her belief that AI adoption is not the same as AI transformation. You can find Afrozy on LinkedIn. Guest's Full Name: Afrozy Ara Company / Organization: LuminaData Website or Main Page: Not provided Guest Social Media Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/afrozy-ara-57527612/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/afrozy-ara-57527612/)

3. 

   24 Sept 2026

   What Actually Breaks Private Equity Portfolio Companies

   In this episode I sit down with Rich Kershaw, a technology due diligence specialist who has looked at over 250 companies for private equity and venture capital investors. We talk about why the technology itself is rarely the real problem inside a portfolio company. Rich explains that the org chart exposes decision making gaps that technical documents alone will not show you. This conversation gets into where large language models help and where they fall short. Rich explains why he treats AI like a smart but inexperienced intern who still needs clear direction. He shares what he is building with Billy, a platform designed to spot gaps in a company's operations before they turn into bigger problems for investors. Chapters: 00:42 - The Hidden Data Problem Behind Value Creation 02:28 - A Circuitous Route into Private Equity 11:20 - When Technology Is — or Isn't — the Problem 17:21 - Org Charts: What They Reveal About Governance and Decision‑Making 27:19 - AI, LLMs and Due Diligence: What They Can — and Can’t — Automate 37:24 - Origin of Billy: Scaling the Service with LLMs 49:57 - Where to find Billy and Diligency — contact, beta sign-up & next steps Companies Mentioned Octopus Investments, Octopus Energy, Lecky Kershaw, Diligency Consortium, Billy, Microsoft, GitHub, Monday.com (http://Monday.com), Atlassian, Salesforce, Intercom Websites Mentioned richkershaw.com (http://richkershaw.com), diligency.org (http://diligency.org), leckykershaw.com (http://leckykershaw.com), billy.works (http://billy.works) Guest Information Rich Kershaw spent his career on both sides of the technology table, first as a CTO and product leader, then running technology and product due diligence for venture capital and private equity investors through Lecky Kershaw. He co-founded the Diligency Consortium, a group of due diligence specialists working across multiple disciplines, and he is now building Billy, a platform that tracks portfolio companies against established operational standards between funding rounds. Rich can be found at richkershaw.com (http://richkershaw.com) and Billy at billy.works.

Who has been a guest on Scale Your Business With Data with Crawford McMillan

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Elliot Blacklist
• Ellery
• Assad Ali
• Michael Young
• Lauren Gibson

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

30,966

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 48 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

54

Social presence

0

YouTube

72

Engagement

32