LPs Want Better GP Communications, Not More Marketing

By Marc Raybin

This article was originally published in my LinkedIn newsletter Common Sense PR.

Private equity firms say they want stronger LP relationships. LPs are telling GPs exactly how to earn them. They want clarity. They want honesty. They want a simple explanation of how you operate. They do not want more marketing.

Too many firms still confuse corporate jargon with communication. Middle‑market GPs without dedicated communications support fall into this trap the most.

Meanwhile, LPs are asking harder questions and pulling back allocations. If a GP wants commitments in this market, they need to explain—plainly—how returns are generated, how value is created, and how they behave when markets get difficult.

“We're now at three years of the private equity industry overall underperforming the public equity industry,” Ashley Baum, managing director at Teacher Retirement System of Texas, said at the 2026 Milken Conference. “The conversations the last three years have really been about whether private markets deserve as high an allocation as it has had historically.”

That should be a wake‑up call.

“The private equity benchmark has delivered 8.5‑ish percent return over the last three years, public equity is 19 . . . we are underperforming by 50%,” Baum said. “Financial engineering is not going to get you everywhere.”

When LPs see that kind of gap, they want a real explanation. Not a narrative. Not positioning. A real explanation—especially around exits.

“We are spending a lot of time thinking about, is that a real exit or a fake exit,” Baum said. “How many transaction fees am I losing along the way? How many people are getting paid?”

Chris Sparanberg, head of S&P Global Market Intelligence’s iLEVEL platform, said LPs have never had a harder time getting a clean sightline into private equity portfolios.

“If there was a single word to describe the ideal relationship between LPs and their GPs, it would be ‘transparent,’” Sparanberg writes. “This theme will continue to dominate the conversation around LP‑GP relations, but the way transparency is defined and supported will look very different in the years to come.”

The pattern is clear. LPs are not asking for better branding. They are asking for better communication. They want straight talk about performance. Honest discussions about exits. Real value creation, not leverage tricks. Transparency about strategy and structure. Clarity about risk.

They want to understand how you think, not how you market.

This is not a marketing exercise. This is part of the deal process. In this market, transparency is the differentiator.