What Every Company Can Learn from Private Equity

Private equity (PE) firms have often been portrayed as corporate raiders—investors who snap up companies, pump up their numbers through cost cutting and financial engineering, sell them at huge profits, and move on. But that view is outdated. In recent decades some of the industry’s traditional tactics, such as asset carve-outs (selling off divisions or subsidiaries) and sale leasebacks (selling a company’s property and then leasing it from the new owner), have become so widespread that they no longer guarantee exceptional returns. So today’s most successful PE firms have found a more straightforward way to create surplus value: They’ve learned how to build better businesses faster.