Why PE Firms Don’t Need a Heavy Data Stack

Private equity firms are all about creating efficiencies, boosting productivity, and improving the margins of their portfolio companies. Data visibility is critical to this goal. Operators need to see revenue trends, technician efficiency, and close rates across all brands in the portfolio.

Faced with this challenge, the instinct for some is to build a traditional BI stack: Pull data with Fivetran, store it in Snowflake, transform it, and visualize it in Tableau. But here’s the problem: Building and maintaining a heavy stack is costly, time-consuming, and often misaligned with PE timelines. For portfolios including HVAC, plumbing, or roofing companies running on ServiceTitan, big stacks are overkill.

The smarter move is to integrate data with minimal engineering effort, so you get fast insights without burning through capital or months of setup. Let’s take a look at how PEs can achieve that in this blog post.

Why PE firms need unified data in the first place

When private equity firms acquire and roll up home service companies, they inherit multiple systems of record, most commonly separate ServiceTitan instances, accounting platforms, and spreadsheets. At first glance, each company runs fine on its own. But at the portfolio level, this fragmentation quickly becomes a roadblock.

Without a unified view of performance, PE operators face serious issues:

• Manual data integration relying on spreadsheets leads to slow reporting cycles and outdated insights.

• Inconsistent metrics render portfolio-wide comparisons unreliable, making it difficult for leaders to identify best practices.

• Limited visibility into operations prevents leadership from seeing portfolio-wide revenue trends, technician utilization, or close rates in real time.

• It becomes harder to spot underperforming branches or replicate best practices across brands, causing decision-makers to miss valuable opportunities.

That’s why many PE firms believe they need a data stack—to centralize and standardize reporting across the portfolio. Unified data is the foundation for benchmarking, operational improvements, and ultimately driving growth. The challenge isn’t whether PEs need unified data, it’s how they get there.

The traditional data stack approach

The standard practice for enterprise companies is to build a data stack that comprises

• data pipelines built with tools like Fivetran or Airbyte,

• data warehouses in Snowflake or BigQuery,

• data modeling in dbt,

• data visualization in Looker Studio, Tableau, or Power BI.

Although regarded as the safe choice by most companies, this setup has notable drawbacks. First, it needs a team of data engineers to develop and maintain pipelines. Building this type of data stack takes weeks or even months, in addition to the six-figure costs for initial investment and salaries. Finally, the lengthy setup process and high expense do not align well with a PE firm's timeline, which presents a significant challenge.

Why heavy IT projects don’t work for PE timelines

Private equity firms are different from most other companies because their business model relies on condensed value creation cycles of 3 to 5 years. That means:

• Every quarter counts: Delays in generating insights undermine decision-making and waste valuable time.

• Lean IT teams: PE companies lack the large data teams that can build and handle data pipelines, making them a bad fit for complex data stacks.

• Heavy reporting requirements: Boards of PE firms demand clear, consistent, and trustworthy data, not technical excuses.

• Unclear ROI: By the time a large data stack begins to generate returns for a PE firm, much of the value creation period might already have passed.

The capabilities of a traditional data stack are far beyond what PE firms need, and these unnecessary capabilities come at the price of time and lower margins, which PE firms can hardly afford. These companies should invest in nimble platforms that can provide answers without the need for a large data team. That’s what Peaka does.

The ideal integration model for PE firms

The right approach for PE-led home service portfolios isn’t a full-blown enterprise data stack but a lean, lightweight integration that delivers fast insights without IT drag.

The ideal solution should:

• Provide connectivity across multiple ServiceTitan accounts

• Standardize KPIs for true apples-to-apples comparisons

• Deploy within days with minimal engineering overhead

• Integrate with popular BI tools

• Offer scalability as the portfolio expands

This formula gives PEs all the answers they need without putting their roadmap and margins at risk.

How Peaka fits the need for lean integration

Peaka was designed specifically to address this challenge: Helping PE firms simplify reporting across home service businesses in their portfolios without the engineering burden.

With Peaka, PE firms can

• Unify data from multiple ServiceTitan instances

• Enable portfolio operators and finance teams to query their data in natural language with text-to-SQL capability

• Pull in data from popular accounting platforms like QuickBooks, Xero Accounting, or Sage Intacct

• Create one-click dashboards in BI tools like Power BI, Looker Studio, Metabase, and more that consolidate revenue, job close rates, technician utilization, and marketing ROI

• Deploy and see results in days, not quarters

• Incur minimal cost and overhead, perfectly aligned with PE value creation cycles.

Peaka proves that your data stack does not need to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and maintain just to provide you with real-time reports from your portfolio companies.

Key takeaways

• Heavy data stacks are costly, slow, and misaligned with PE value creation timelines.

• Home service portfolios need lean, plug-and-play data integration to unlock insights quickly.

• Peaka provides the visibility PE firms need without the IT burden or six-figure spend.

Smarter data integration for PE value creation

If you’re managing a growing portfolio of ServiceTitan-based businesses, you don’t need to keep stitching together spreadsheets or waiting on analysts. An official ServiceTitan partner, Peaka can help you unify your ServiceTitan data, accelerate reporting, and create the visibility your value creation plan demands.

Sign up to Peaka for free today.

Book a demo to see how Peaka helps PE firms replace IT-heavy data projects with smarter, faster reporting.