Comment by renewiltord
2 days ago
What a moron. This explains why private equity is so successful. Small town businesses are good businesses but they’re often run by morons who inherited their stuff. Once you buy them out you can drive costs down and be efficient and just not send your money to Nigerian princes.
Seems to me private equity is often, though not always, a terrific way to run a previously-stable business into the ground in short order. See for example https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3423290 .
Private equity is successful because there's a lot of money to be made in strategies most people would find unconscionable (even if not illegal), not because it makes better decisions than the worst 5% of business owners.
A well run company that's owned by PE. That's an oxymoron.
PE typically raises prices. Replaces all good employees with the cheapest. Then runs up debt that they have no intention of paying back all under the guise of expansion.