Should You Sell Your Company to Private Equity?

21 Aug 2025 · 1 min

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In this monologue, the speaker explains why they would not sell their company to a private‑equity (PE) firm. They argue that they are not seeking liquidity and therefore have no financial pressure to exit. They describe the typical PE playbook—building a platform company, loading it with debt, making add‑on acquisitions, and then extracting value through cost cuts and operational control. The speaker dislikes the loss of autonomy that comes with that model, emphasizing that they enjoy running the business for its own sake, for the fun of creating value, and for the impact it has. Because they do not need cash now and value their freedom and enjoyment, they see no reason to change their operating style to fit a PE agenda.

Chapters

Should you sell your company to private equity? I don't think it's worth it, at least for me, to sell my company to private equity. Obviously there's a price for everything, right? But I don't necessarily, I'm not chasing the liquidity or anything like that. That's one piece, right? But the second piece is they have a formula that works for them. It's like, okay, we're gonna have a platform company, we're gonna take on debt, we're gonna take on a few turns, we're gonna lever up, right? And we're gonna buy some other companies and then hopefully there's a larger multiple. And then their game is like, okay, well we know what works for this. Okay, you're gonna have to cut over here. You're gonna have to run things our way. I don't do well with somebody telling me what to do, right? And so I'm not gonna have fun anymore and then We do this partly, obviously, to add value to the world and also to make money too. But we do it because it's really fun, right? And so I wouldn't like— if I don't necessarily need or want the liquidity right now and I like what I do, then why do I need to change how I'm doing things in that respect?