I live my life by a simple code:

Update, about 1.5 years later, we’ve since been sold to ANOTHER PE firm and changed senior leadership. It’s been a big improvement (finally addressing some of the long-standing issues), but we’re in the investment and growth phase. The cuts will come in time, as we are fattened up then trimmed down for the next sale.…

this is all very interesting and whatnot but i think the most important question here is when will society collapse please soon hurry collapse

yes. No required vacation time either. 

Wait a minute... you don’t have severance pay in America?!?!

Hamilton, you were one of the main reasons I read Gawker and Splinter, and probably one of the architects/biggest advocates for Unionizing your workplace and industry. This industry is better off after having you in it, and wherever you go consider that at least this reader will follow.

Almost a decade ago (just as my region-ahead of the rest of the world-was pulling itself out of the ‘07 Depression my employer (small family business with less than 60 employees and about $26Million a year in revenue) was acquired by a PE Firm that was in the midst go a Buy-Build strategy in my (at the time) very…

I’ve worked at a couple businesses that were bought up by PE firms, and both times they chewed them up, ruined their reputation, and then just sort of crapped them out a year later after about 90% of the staff had either been “trimmed” or just left in despair. Two years later they were basically completely new, but…

I remember reading up on this when Toys R Us was going under. I think its a shame that every news source opted for the simple answer of “Amazon did it” instead of going a little bit deeper and mentioning the source of Toys R Us’ debt and why they weren’t turning a profit despite actually selling toys.

When did you work for TRU? Bain happened around 2005.

Appelbaum points out that PE firms operate just fine in Scandinavian countries, which have much stronger worker protections. The question is one of political will. Private equity managers will take every last dime that they are allowed.

Hell, at least the Toys R Us PE vultures were covert about it. Take a gander at the Autotrader dot com debacle a few years back...PE owners of Autotrader decided roughly 3 months before a scheduled IPO that they were going to give $400m in dividends to shareholders (ie: themselves); only problem was that the dividend…

I work for a PE-owned media company (much smaller than GMG and not in the same line of publishing). Since we were acquired, senior management spends most of its time scrambling to manage numbers and margins for our overlords, rather than addressing obvious operations and other fixable issues that exist.

I left my law firm to work in-house. Like three months later, the company I was working at got acquired by a private equity firm, and three months after that I was back in private practice. Working for a PE-owned company was worse than law firm life.

I’ve been at my current job 12 years, the first 8 of which we were getting traded around by various PE funds. The last of which was actually brilliant - they targeted profitable companies who were drowning in PE debt, bought up all the junk bonds they could find from those companies, and offered not to call the debt…

The PE world is not a world of home run after home run, Chrysler Motors was taken over by a PE firm and they lost billions before Fiat showed up to buy it for nothing.
The most popular scam that I know of works this way, a firm buys a company, often with the help of the current CEO, and over a period of years they…

Winners and losers. That’s it.

The only valid responses are to laugh. Or cry. Or both.

I’ve worked for a lot of company’s that are owned by PEs and for big companies that are not owned by PEs.

The fuck are you on about? Your job is the easiest to outsource.