Congrats private equity is coming for your local plumbers, electricians etc

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:SavATree was bought by private equity before 2020 and stayed ok but then got bought again around 2021. They now are all hat and no cattle, their "arborists" are just salespeople, and they are imo con artists for anything other than trimming, cutting, etc.

I called them for a quote, $2k to trim a tree, that’s when I started googling who owns what, it’s shocking just how many of these companies are PE owned.

I kept googling until I found a family owned business, $400, unbelievable

How did you find out who owns the businesses? Whenever I tried it was very hard to tell.

[Anonymous]

Parents, don’t push PE as a career goal!

[Anonymous]

Got 2 tree quotes recently. Both from big regional/national well-known firms. One quote was over 4x more expensive than the other quote.

[Anonymous]

That's why plumbers HVAC and similar trades no longer try to fix anything. They don't even know how. They just sell you new stuff. I hired a company called Crawl Space Brothers which was trying to get into the DC market. Total disaster. They had just been bought by PE company.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sometimes these places go out of business because PE can’t give us what we want.

In my town, PE bought a small chain of previously family owned liquor stores. The stores were successful and the owners were committed to the community and believed in their products. They hosted events, welcomed wine clubs, brought in speakers, etc.

PE did none of that and had no interest in the product. The whole chain is now going out of business just three years later.

Story as old as time. This is a fake bankruptcy after they forced them to take on debt they could afford.

Yeah,
This is like buying used car by using bank loans and dismantling the car and selling the parts for more total profit.
Leverage buyout.