We build something from nothing, and then someone arrives with a clipboard and a better idea. That idea becomes the playbook for the renovation.
Private equity is not in the business of rescuing founders. It is in the business of extracting value that was always there, waiting for a different owner to see it.
That distinction matters more than most founders realize until it is too late.
The Bar Rescue narrative is seductive. The troubled bar, the expert, the transformation, the tearful owner grateful for the intervention. It makes for good television. It makes for poor due diligence.
What we rarely see is the episode that airs six months later.
When PE enters a mid-market business, the playbook is consistent. Compress costs. Install reporting. Professionalize the management layer. Reposition for multiple expansion. Exit in three to five years. The founder who understood this going in is positioned. The founder who believed in the partnership story is not.
We are not cynics about capital. Capital accelerates. Capital enables. Capital, in the right structure, is transformative.
But capital also has a mandate. And the mandate is often not aligned with the founder’s next twenty years.
The question we should ask before signing is not “what will they do for us?”
The question is “what happens to us when they are done?”
