My favorite PE story is about a certain company created by the government that first went public, the PE.
After the PE acquisition, an exec stands up in front of the entire company and says, and I am not kidding:
"This was a telecom company. Telecom companies grow at 10 to 15% a year. This is now a data services company. Data services companies grow at 20 to 25% a year. Get to work."
PE changed nothing else at that time. They simply decided the company was in another category, and thus, this would yield more money. I have always marveled how some business people can simply move things around on a spreadsheet and think that reality will follow.
That's not all that different from all the tech companies and startups that are now suddenly AI companies because they use OpenAI, Anthropic, or AWS Bedrock. People rarely ever do detailed and deep analysis of a company's value. Instead most people invest based on gut feelings and hunches.
I can make my house hotter in the winter by burning all my furniture in my fireplace. In the short term I'll feel warmer, but by spring my house is empty.
From what I’ve seen they create value for the owners via consolidation so prices can be driven up for everyone else. They aren’t geniuses. They simply have enough capital to manipulate the supply side of the market.
Maybe that's what's most visible, but at least in theory consolidation can create value by centralizing back office/G&A operations, bringing in a development team to automate stuff (which is harder to do when the market is fragmented and everyone is trying to do their own thing), and better management (vaguely defined).
Exactly. Ideally they create the difference between a McDonalds and a random private non-themed eatery/restaurant. They create consistency, and actually have a company behind it. Now you can say "there's no value there", but I'm guessing your kids strongly disagree in the McDonalds case ...
It’s a (preview for) a slide deck / webinar analyzing a selection of successful PE acquisitions that already completed with an exit, marketed towards the PE-involved/aspirational.
Probably not what people expect based on the submission title (“Do PE firms create value? How?”) which seems removed from the “article” title “The Private Equity Value Creation Report: 2025
From Entry to Exit: How Do PE Firms Create Value?”.
They extract value in a nonsustainable way, probabalistically, while creating a moral hazard.
Lets look at Vetinarians. They are buying up huge numbers of vet clinics. The owners retire and they bring in H1B or other lower cost vets, and increase prices 3x. My dog got sick and it cost $7k for then to figure out she had Addison's disease. The POC was some business person trained to extract money from you using guilt. They would give cost estimates and thrn ask for triple that every 24 hours. "she is such a sweet dog, I know its a lot of money but it costs so much to run a pet urgent care, we could just put her to sleep" was a paraphrase of every conversation. In the end it cost 2 cents to give her a pill that is the first thing they should have tried and she recovered. More than $7k for a dog to be at the vet for 3 days.
This is not sustainable. I will never take another pet to a facility like this, its impossible to afford it. In the meantime they have several years of burning customers and fantastic financials, plenty to get a massive loan for a second PE firm to buy the business, that PE firm gambling they can extract enough management fees to make back the small % of equity they actually had to pay themselves before it goes bankrupt.
If you made PE firms responsible for even a fraction of the debt of the businesses they operate they would disappear inside of 3 months. They are purely a hack on our laws around corporate debt and too much dumb money flooding the market due to privatization of retirement accounts.
There's the rub: Private Equity represents the decomposers of business world. Healthy, thriving industries don't sell out to PE, in the same way most healthy, thriving animals don't get colonized by fungi. In the case of vets and dentists, historically the practice owner would sell to some young practitioner, and the cycle would continue. But what happens when the businesses are worth too much for the next generation to afford (or the next generation's too broke)?
Enter PE. They buy out the old practitioner, hire the young one that would have ideally bought the place themselves, then proceed to gradually dismantle the business. Divest all the capital assets, fire all the institutional knowledge, and even convert the business's accumulated customer good will into cold hard cash by exploiting the hell out of them.
Then it's just a matter of running the hollowed-out shell of business until a stiff breeze leads to complete bankruptcy.
In theory, a business should be worth more alive than dead, so a young dentist looking to start their own practice should be willing to pay more than a PE that plans to break the bones and suck out the marrow. On an individual business scale, that's hit or miss. When entire industries start getting swallowed up? It's because something fundamental is wrong with the industry.
For example, Family Dining restaurants (i.e, relatively cheap sit down restaurants where the appeal is more the service than the food like Red Lobster, Chili's, Applebees, etc) are doomed, and have been for a while. Millennials and younger, on average, value table service less than their parents did, preferring fast casual restaurants (restaurants where you order at the counter, but are a step up from fast food) with better food in the same price bracket. This trend is widely known, so there's a shortage of people willing to buy up family dining franchises. But there's a lot of capital tied up in these restaurants. So in swoops PE, to basically bet that they can make more money killing the business than its current owners are able/willing to.
OK but there's a demand for vets and dentists. That hasn't gone away. If the PE model is to acquire all the clinics in an area and then jack up prices, at some point a dentist or vet should say "I can do this at a lower price, still make more money than the PE owners are paying me, and work on my own terms" and hang out a shingle.
Exactly. All I'm arguing is that when you see PE swooping in, it means something is urgently wrong with the industry. My guess (as I alluded to in my earlier post) is that for private practice medical adjacent stuff like dentists and vets the issue is that the newer generation of people going into the field don't have access to the capital necessary to actually start their own business. These are relatively capital-heavy businesses (medical equipment is $$$$).
PE carves out industries and runs them into the ground. That IS their business model. Of course the vet will sell to the highest bidder, but the PE bid is higher based on an economic pattern that is destructive and created by legal loopholes, not free market forces.
> Healthy, thriving industries don't sell out to PE
This may have been true in the past, but in today's world, normal people have an increasingly hard time affording the things that our parents took for granted (y'know, things like a modest house, a vacation every 2-3 years, decent food). If the owners of a small local business are offered the opportunity to cash out and retire with enough money that they can guarantee their reasonable comfort for the rest of their lives (barring total societal collapse), they're not going to worry about what's "healthy" or "thriving". And PE companies can afford to do that.
Nor does the fact that they're struggling reflect on the industry that the local business happens to be in. It reflects on our entire system today.
The problem with "enshittification" of this sort is that the shitty solution doesn't just go away. It lingers and aggressively defends its territory, possibly in unfair ways. There are network effects. These zombie businesses should get outcompeted, but it's easier said than done.
Imagine that new developer that gets hired and immediately determines they know how to rebuild the stack better. It's salesmanship 101, I can offer you a better deal. Maybe? Maybe not.
> Gain.pro [...] Trusted by >$1 trillion of private capital,
So I'm not expecting PE to be called out in this piece. Maybe instead it's just weenie suckling of PE. Or maybe just posturing filler, for their own sociopathic benefit, to which PE can relate.
My favorite PE story is about a certain company created by the government that first went public, the PE.
After the PE acquisition, an exec stands up in front of the entire company and says, and I am not kidding:
"This was a telecom company. Telecom companies grow at 10 to 15% a year. This is now a data services company. Data services companies grow at 20 to 25% a year. Get to work."
PE changed nothing else at that time. They simply decided the company was in another category, and thus, this would yield more money. I have always marveled how some business people can simply move things around on a spreadsheet and think that reality will follow.
That's not all that different from all the tech companies and startups that are now suddenly AI companies because they use OpenAI, Anthropic, or AWS Bedrock. People rarely ever do detailed and deep analysis of a company's value. Instead most people invest based on gut feelings and hunches.
Well, the I in MBA stands for Intelligence!
Kind of like WeWork saying "we're not a realestate company, we're a tech company"
I can make my house hotter in the winter by burning all my furniture in my fireplace. In the short term I'll feel warmer, but by spring my house is empty.
and by spring my home is empty and available for additional investment. It's got great bones!
[dead]
From what I’ve seen they create value for the owners via consolidation so prices can be driven up for everyone else. They aren’t geniuses. They simply have enough capital to manipulate the supply side of the market.
Maybe that's what's most visible, but at least in theory consolidation can create value by centralizing back office/G&A operations, bringing in a development team to automate stuff (which is harder to do when the market is fragmented and everyone is trying to do their own thing), and better management (vaguely defined).
Exactly. Ideally they create the difference between a McDonalds and a random private non-themed eatery/restaurant. They create consistency, and actually have a company behind it. Now you can say "there's no value there", but I'm guessing your kids strongly disagree in the McDonalds case ...
It’s a (preview for) a slide deck / webinar analyzing a selection of successful PE acquisitions that already completed with an exit, marketed towards the PE-involved/aspirational.
Probably not what people expect based on the submission title (“Do PE firms create value? How?”) which seems removed from the “article” title “The Private Equity Value Creation Report: 2025 From Entry to Exit: How Do PE Firms Create Value?”.
They extract value in a nonsustainable way, probabalistically, while creating a moral hazard.
Lets look at Vetinarians. They are buying up huge numbers of vet clinics. The owners retire and they bring in H1B or other lower cost vets, and increase prices 3x. My dog got sick and it cost $7k for then to figure out she had Addison's disease. The POC was some business person trained to extract money from you using guilt. They would give cost estimates and thrn ask for triple that every 24 hours. "she is such a sweet dog, I know its a lot of money but it costs so much to run a pet urgent care, we could just put her to sleep" was a paraphrase of every conversation. In the end it cost 2 cents to give her a pill that is the first thing they should have tried and she recovered. More than $7k for a dog to be at the vet for 3 days.
This is not sustainable. I will never take another pet to a facility like this, its impossible to afford it. In the meantime they have several years of burning customers and fantastic financials, plenty to get a massive loan for a second PE firm to buy the business, that PE firm gambling they can extract enough management fees to make back the small % of equity they actually had to pay themselves before it goes bankrupt.
If you made PE firms responsible for even a fraction of the debt of the businesses they operate they would disappear inside of 3 months. They are purely a hack on our laws around corporate debt and too much dumb money flooding the market due to privatization of retirement accounts.
So there should be a great opportunity for young vets to open their own practices and undercut the PE-owned clinics. Why don't they?
There's the rub: Private Equity represents the decomposers of business world. Healthy, thriving industries don't sell out to PE, in the same way most healthy, thriving animals don't get colonized by fungi. In the case of vets and dentists, historically the practice owner would sell to some young practitioner, and the cycle would continue. But what happens when the businesses are worth too much for the next generation to afford (or the next generation's too broke)?
Enter PE. They buy out the old practitioner, hire the young one that would have ideally bought the place themselves, then proceed to gradually dismantle the business. Divest all the capital assets, fire all the institutional knowledge, and even convert the business's accumulated customer good will into cold hard cash by exploiting the hell out of them.
Then it's just a matter of running the hollowed-out shell of business until a stiff breeze leads to complete bankruptcy.
> Healthy, thriving industries don't sell out to PE
Sometimes the owners want to cash in and retire after decades of operating their business. Selling to PE is one way to do that.
In theory, a business should be worth more alive than dead, so a young dentist looking to start their own practice should be willing to pay more than a PE that plans to break the bones and suck out the marrow. On an individual business scale, that's hit or miss. When entire industries start getting swallowed up? It's because something fundamental is wrong with the industry.
For example, Family Dining restaurants (i.e, relatively cheap sit down restaurants where the appeal is more the service than the food like Red Lobster, Chili's, Applebees, etc) are doomed, and have been for a while. Millennials and younger, on average, value table service less than their parents did, preferring fast casual restaurants (restaurants where you order at the counter, but are a step up from fast food) with better food in the same price bracket. This trend is widely known, so there's a shortage of people willing to buy up family dining franchises. But there's a lot of capital tied up in these restaurants. So in swoops PE, to basically bet that they can make more money killing the business than its current owners are able/willing to.
OK but there's a demand for vets and dentists. That hasn't gone away. If the PE model is to acquire all the clinics in an area and then jack up prices, at some point a dentist or vet should say "I can do this at a lower price, still make more money than the PE owners are paying me, and work on my own terms" and hang out a shingle.
Exactly. All I'm arguing is that when you see PE swooping in, it means something is urgently wrong with the industry. My guess (as I alluded to in my earlier post) is that for private practice medical adjacent stuff like dentists and vets the issue is that the newer generation of people going into the field don't have access to the capital necessary to actually start their own business. These are relatively capital-heavy businesses (medical equipment is $$$$).
PE carves out industries and runs them into the ground. That IS their business model. Of course the vet will sell to the highest bidder, but the PE bid is higher based on an economic pattern that is destructive and created by legal loopholes, not free market forces.
> Healthy, thriving industries don't sell out to PE
This may have been true in the past, but in today's world, normal people have an increasingly hard time affording the things that our parents took for granted (y'know, things like a modest house, a vacation every 2-3 years, decent food). If the owners of a small local business are offered the opportunity to cash out and retire with enough money that they can guarantee their reasonable comfort for the rest of their lives (barring total societal collapse), they're not going to worry about what's "healthy" or "thriving". And PE companies can afford to do that.
Nor does the fact that they're struggling reflect on the industry that the local business happens to be in. It reflects on our entire system today.
The problem with "enshittification" of this sort is that the shitty solution doesn't just go away. It lingers and aggressively defends its territory, possibly in unfair ways. There are network effects. These zombie businesses should get outcompeted, but it's easier said than done.
Imagine that new developer that gets hired and immediately determines they know how to rebuild the stack better. It's salesmanship 101, I can offer you a better deal. Maybe? Maybe not.
> Gain.pro [...] Trusted by >$1 trillion of private capital,
So I'm not expecting PE to be called out in this piece. Maybe instead it's just weenie suckling of PE. Or maybe just posturing filler, for their own sociopathic benefit, to which PE can relate.