Advisory · For PE operating partners

Stop your portcos wasting $400K on the wrong AI initiatives.

A private line for operating partners running point on AI across 2–10 portcos. You get up to two hours of my time each week, a Friday brief written for your portfolio by name, and an ad-hoc flag whenever something concrete surfaces at one of your holdings. I pick up the phone. No queue, no associates, no chatbot at the front of it.

Advised teams at Bain Capital BASF Bose Daxko GAF Mass General Brigham Medtronic Owens Corning Trane
Book a 30-minute discovery call or grab the 20-prompt playbook first →
30-day money-back guarantee No annual commitment Mutual NDA on signup
Adam Grey, Chief AI Advisor at Frontier Consulting.
Adam Grey · Chief AI Advisor
5of 8
Spots filled
May 2026

Five of eight positions are already filled. At eight, the page switches to a waitlist and the next cohort opens at $4,000 a month.

Frontier has advised teams at

"First AI advisor who told me to spend less, not more. That alone was worth the retainer."

Marcus T. Operating Partner · Mid-market PE

"Three hours of vendor pitches versus eight minutes of the Friday brief. The brief wins every time."

Sarah Whitfield VP Strategy · Industrial Portfolio

"Cut a portco's AI vendor list from twelve to two in twenty minutes. That's billing $9K of value at $3K."

Dr. Daniel Marsh Operating Partner · Healthcare PE

"Paid for itself in the first month. Renewing for year two next week."

Priya Iyer Investment Partner · SaaS Buyout

"Adam called BS on a roadmap nobody in the firm wanted to challenge. Saved us six months."

James Lockwood Senior OP · Manufacturing

"Replaced an ongoing consulting engagement at a third of the cost. No transition pain."

Lena Han Principal · Tech-enabled Services

"Twenty minutes of honest opinion when I need it. That's the whole product and it works."

Thomas Kirkland MD · Industrials

"The only AI write-up I actually read each week. Built for our portfolio specifically."

Rachel Mendez Operating Partner · B2B SaaS
What lands in your inbox

Six things on every $3,000 invoice.

The brief and the quarterly deep-dive ship on schedule. The rest are on call when you need them. Most months you'll use a fraction of what's on the menu.

01

Dedicated advisory time.

Up to two hours a week of senior-partner attention. Use it for vendor diligence, build-vs-buy memos for portco CEOs, or board-deck slides you can ship as-is. Loom drops and email between sessions are unlimited.

  • I pick up. No support queue.
  • Most weeks you'll use one hour.
  • Same-day turnaround on vendor questions.
02

A weekly brief written for your portfolio.

Lands Friday morning, built for one reader. The week's AI movements run through a single question: does any of this move margin at your named portcos in the next four quarters? Your industrial distributor gets its own callout. So does your healthcare rollup. So does each PE firm we work with.

  • Written for your firm, not a sector list.
  • Eight-minute read, two charts.
  • Each named portco gets its own row.
03

Portfolio Opportunity Flags.

When something concrete surfaces for one of your holdings, whether in market, in research, or in a vendor's release notes, you get a short flag before your next board meeting. Named portco, sized opportunity, suggested first move.

  • Tied to specific holdings of yours.
  • Quantified where the data permits.
  • Lands before the agenda closes.
04

Vendor evaluation framework.

A standing scoring template and criteria sheet for AI vendor pitches. When a portco's about to sign, you get the framework plus my written read on that specific vendor in the same email. Usually back inside a day.

  • Scored on cost, lock-in, integration burden, security.
  • Templated PDF you can forward to your portco CEO.
  • Refreshed quarterly as the vendor landscape moves.
05

Quarterly portfolio deep-dive.

Once a quarter, a long-form written report covering every named portco in your portfolio. Sector-specific AI trajectories, an opportunity heat-map for the next two quarters, and a focused recommendation list. The kind of asset LPs ask to see on update calls.

  • Portco-by-portco breakdown, named.
  • Two-quarter opportunity heat-map.
  • Cleared for LP circulation.
06

Curated AI vendor roster.

A short-list of 10 to 15 AI vendors I've vetted directly, with notes on fit, use case, and pricing posture. When you need a warm intro instead of cold-pitching the demo team, the roster is the call. No referral fees taken, no vendor pays for the slot.

  • Direct intros to vetted vendor contacts.
  • Notes on fit by sector and use case.
  • Refreshed quarterly with fresh additions.
Unlimited async email between sessions.
30-day money-back guarantee.
No minimum term. Cancel any month.
Sample issue cover of a PE AI Intelligence Brief, names redacted.
A sample issue. Names redacted, structure intact.

One reader. One firm. One portfolio.

Each Friday brief is built around one client's actual portfolio. Cover, lede, sector callouts, opportunity rows, all of it written for that firm's named holdings. The brief on the left is from a recent issue, with the firm and portcos scrubbed.

This isn't a public newsletter. There's no free tier, no waitlist version, no aggregated digest. The brief only exists inside the retainer because most of its value comes from being written for one reader.

See a real (NDA-cleared) issue on a call or grab the playbook →
Who this is for

If you've got a portco AI problem, this is the line for it.

No experience gate. Wherever you sit on the AI curve, the retainer meets you there. Pick the version closest to your situation.

Newer to AI and ready to step up.

You know AI is the conversation this year and you don't want to keep nodding along. You've used ChatGPT, you've heard portco CEOs talk about Claude and Copilot. What you're missing is the bridge between "I get the headlines" and "I can spot real EBITDA lift across the portfolio."

The retainer is that bridge. Most clients start with one hour a week. Two months in they're running circles around the AI vendors their portcos are buying from.

  • Spotting EBITDA lift opportunities specific to each holding
  • Translating model and tool releases into portco-relevant decisions
  • Building enough fluency to call BS on a vendor deck in real time

Already running point on AI for the firm.

You're the partner the firm calls when a portco CEO sends through an AI question nobody else at the table can answer. You've heard every vendor pitch worth hearing.

What you're missing is one outside line you can ring without scheduling, twenty minutes at a time, when the stakes are real. Someone who reads the same briefing decks you do, who can stress-test a portco's $400K RFP in twenty minutes, and who isn't trying to sell you the project at the end of the call.

  • Second-opinion on vendor stack and roadmap before signing
  • Killing bad RFPs before the portco commits
  • Ad-hoc Loom or written read on whatever just landed in your inbox

Mid-CDD on a target and you want eyes on the AI angle.

You're three weeks into diligence on a deal and the AI value-creation thesis is sitting in the deck without anyone fully pressure-tested. Where's the genuine EBITDA lift? What's in the existing tech stack that gets replaced cheaper at close? Where's a moat real versus a vendor-deck moat?

I'll sit on diligence calls if useful, write a side-memo on AI angles your investment team won't have time to chase, and flag what to renegotiate at signing. Often the first call pays for the retainer twice over.

  • AI value-creation side-memo for the IC
  • Live participation on CDD calls with target management
  • Day-one playbook on AI initiatives to launch post-close

Rationalising your firm's internal tooling.

Your firm has stacked SaaS over the years. CRM. Pipeline. Reporting. Data rooms. The AI-native versions of half of those are ten times better and cost a fraction of what you're paying right now.

The retainer includes an honest audit of what you're paying for, what's replaceable, and what an AI-first internal stack looks like for a PE firm at your scale. Often pays for itself the first time you cancel a renewal.

  • Internal SaaS stack audit, line by line
  • AI-native replacement recommendations with cost deltas
  • Migration sequencing so nothing breaks during transition
Typical firm$500M–$3B AUM
Portfolio shape2–10 holdings
Time to first valueWeek 1
EngagementMonth-to-month
One engagement, anonymized

$180,000 in 30 days. $400K in spend avoided.

A PE-backed industrial distributor was three weeks from a $400K platform RFP. We killed it and scoped a $38K alternative. The portco extended the pilot fleet-wide on day 31.

Editorial chart: a $400K platform proposal shown struck-through alongside a $38K pilot, with $180,000 in 30-day margin recovery.
01 · Diagnosis

The portco was three weeks into scoping an eighteen-month, $400K platform build meant to "improve quote accuracy." Two calls in, the real constraint surfaced. Counter-sales reps were quoting 7,000 long-tail SKUs from memory and pricing them defensively.

02 · Intervention

We killed the RFP and scoped a $38K, six-week pilot with a different vendor. A spec-lookup agent sitting on existing ERP data, routed through the GM at the largest branch first so we'd see the numbers before fleet-wide rollout.

03 · Outcome

Margin recovery on long-tail SKUs ran $180,000 in the first month. The portco extended the pilot fleet-wide on day 31. The board call moved on to the next thing.

"Adam saved us from wasting $400K on the wrong AI initiative. The advisory pays for itself in one call."

Operating Partner, anonymized
Adam Grey, founder of Frontier Consulting.
Who you'd be working with

The same person, every call, for as long as you keep the retainer.

I'm Adam Grey, Frontier's founder. Computer scientist by training, two-time CEO, with a decade of operations consulting inside Bain Capital, BASF, Bose, Daxko, GAF, Mass General Brigham, Medtronic, Owens Corning, and Trane. AI is a recent angle on a job I've been doing for fifteen years: figuring out what makes a business actually run.

When a portco CEO drops an AI question into your inbox, the worst thing you can do is loop in a vendor before you've checked whether the question is real. The retainer exists for that pre-vendor read. Twenty minutes, an honest opinion, sometimes "this is a real opportunity," sometimes "don't waste the cycle."

Capped at eight clients so that promise stays true.

Adam
Real questions

Eight things operating partners ask before they sign.

Pulled from the last forty discovery calls. Anything missing, ask on the call.

Is this a consulting engagement or a subscription?
A subscription. $3,000 a month, month-to-month, cancel anytime. No discovery fee, no SOW, no scope creep. The retainer covers up to two hours of dedicated time per week plus the brief and Opportunity Flags. If you need a project beyond that, we price it separately.
Who actually answers when I call?
I do. Adam Grey, direct. No associates, no junior layer, no AI assistant pretending to be a person. The capacity model caps the retainer at eight operating partners specifically so this stays true. When it hits eight, the page switches to a waitlist.
How do you actually build the brief for my specific portfolio?
Onboarding takes one call. We walk through your named portcos: sector, revenue band, current AI maturity, the vendor stack you already pay for, the partners on each board. From there, every Friday brief runs through that lens. If a holding sells or a new one closes, you tell me and the next brief reflects the new portfolio.
What if I don't use the two hours one week?
Most clients don't, most weeks. Time doesn't roll over. The brief and Opportunity Flags still ship. The retainer is priced on the assumption that the dedicated line and the intelligence stream are independently worth $3K, not on usage.
Can I share the brief inside the firm?
Inside your firm and your portcos, yes. The brief is built for your team, so forward freely to other operating partners, portco CEOs, and your investment committee. Don't post the contents to LinkedIn or publish externally without asking. The boundary is firm-and-portco-internal versus public.
Are conversations confidential? What about portco names?
Mutual NDA on signup, signed before the first call. Portco names, deal data, and internal financials never leave the engagement. The case study above is anonymized with explicit permission and ran for six months before any version was published.
What's the 30-day guarantee, exactly?
If at any point in the first 30 days you decide it's not worth $3,000, email and the charge gets refunded in full. No exit interview, no clawback on briefs or flags already delivered. Past 30 days, cancel any month before the next billing date.
Why eight spots and not more?
Eight outward, twelve total when you count internal commitments. Past eight, response quality slips because the dedicated-time math stops working at the senior-partner level. At twelve, the retainer closes entirely or the price moves to $4K and a second advisor joins. The cap is a real constraint, not a scarcity line.
Two ways in

Talk first, or start today.

The discovery call takes 30 minutes and ends with either a fit or a "not yet." Either way, you walk away with two concrete moves for next week. No pressure to sign on the call.

Only 3 spots remaining 30-day refund No annual lock-in
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