A private equity investor explains why firms that push out founders fail. They acquired 51% of Savory while letting the founder keep control of brand, menu, and logo decisions.
Chapters
I think that's the biggest mistake for private equity or funds is that they buy the brand, kick the founder to the side, or isolate them. Yeah. And then they make a lot of changes to the business that made them great. Why would you do that? Because I started my whole career as an operator. I look at things from a founder's purview of when private equity a lot of times will come in and then they'll buy in and then they make bad decisions, right? They haven't been there the whole time. They should probably listen more to the founder. I take that approach with Savory. I always go to the founder and say, listen, we're gonna buy into your business, Bridger, but we do have to have financial control. So we do buy a 51% position. Every time. We never buy a minority. However, we do structure it to where the founders have brand control. So they can control the decisions on the menu and the feel and the logo and all the stuff that matters to a founder that a private equity group's going to change. Yeah. So we give that control, but we keep the 51% financial control.
