Ben Glick

On a brisk Saturday morning in an Evanston neighborhood, a simple sign taped to the front door of a brick home directed visitors to the back yard and down a set of stairs. It led to a residential basement that housed School Hour Studios.

Private equity fundraising is going strong this year, undeterred by the pandemic. Forty-two U.S. mid-market private equity funds were raised in 2021 through mid-July, according to alternative investment data provider Preqin. Those funds collected $37.2 billion compared to 77 funds and $68 billion in all of 2020. In 2019, the total raised was $50 billion across 58 funds.

Since the pandemic first walloped the world 18 months ago, the resulting economic impacts have been far from universal. In advising businesses in what we call the “Knowledge Economy,” Clearsight’s focus area, we recognize the confluence of macroeconomic factors at work in creating today’s unprecedented M&A market. The Knowledge Economy includes IT services, management consulting, digital transformation, life sciences and strategic consulting, cloud and data analytics, compliance and cybersecurity.