Buyout groups have raised record-sized funds from investors such as pension funds and sovereign wealth funds and as a result require bigger and bigger deals to put this money to work.

For the biggest pools “a small deal, even if it goes really well, is just not going to move the needle,” said Brenda Rainey, senior director of the private equity practice at Bain & Company. “There’s a limit to how many deals you want to invest in out of a large fund, because it comes down to how much bandwidth you have to manage it.”