How many private equity firms tell their portfolio companies to "innovate with AI" while their own deal teams are still drowning in manual Excel sheets and copy-pasting CRM data? In Episode 14 of Engineering Alpha in Private Equity, Jarrad Berman, Partner in TZP Group’s Portfolio Growth Group, joins Paul Karner and Dave Mangot to turn the operational excellence playbook on itself.

Jarrad shares the story of how TZP Group — a lower middle market firm with over $2 billion in AUM—completely "burned their ships," ditched an expensive six-figure CRM, and built their own custom CRM in just two weeks using Claude.

The conversation moves beyond the usual hype to dive into the hard operational mechanics of internal AI adoption. Jarrad explains how they built an interactive QSR rollup map that bypassed months of traditional sourcing to win a founder's trust in a live meeting, and shares why saving 30 hours on LBO modeling is a massive P&L win — not because you cut headcount, but because you unlock your team's analytical leverage.

Key Takeaways: - The R and M Framework: How TZP Group maps every single AI initiative to a clear financial driver. It must either drive top-line Revenue (R, such as accelerating speed-to-lead from 3 minutes to 30 seconds to boost conversions) or optimize Cost and Margin (M, such as container-load optimization).

• The "Burn the Ships" CRM Strategy: TZP Group was paying over six figures for a hosted cloud database that acted as a flat CRM. With a hard 30-day contract renewal deadline, they exported everything to Excel and built a custom "TZP CRM" in two weeks. The result? Annual costs plummeted from six figures to just $125 a month ($1,500/year run rate), while delivering a tool 4x to 5x more effective and custom-built for their deal workflows.

• Sourcing Sourcing Sourcing (The QSR Map): Discover how TZP's deal team scraped franchise databases to build an interactive HTML target map. By identifying target coordinates and LLC ownerships, they presented a seller with 5 priority add-on locations, only to discover the operator was already secretly in contract on 3 of them—building instant, undeniable deal-table credibility.

• The "30-Hour Analyst" Dividend: Shifting LBO modeling from Excel to a custom React/HTML template with slider toggles reduced a 3-day process to a few hours. Instead of "mission accomplished," this efficiency allows analysts to spend those 30 saved hours stress-testing unobvious structural variables—like interest rate spikes and tariff events—bringing massive analytical leverage and credibility to the investment committee.