California Surveyors Forums

It's a tired and bloodied bull viewed through the dust across the ring. Time for the roses.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYI09PM ... DG&index=1

Some of us were not meant for that sort of thing....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoLhKJu ... rt_radio=1

The angst of the decision....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eReqTYk ... rt_radio=1

James, it would have been much easier for me to simply say, “private equity is not the problem.”

The license does not disappear under private equity. What changes is the honesty about what governs. The business model is the issue. Private equity is simply more transparent about it.

When financial return becomes the organizing principle — regardless of ownership — professional discretion becomes subordinate. Not abolished — subordinated. The difference matters.

You cannot blame a private equity firm for pursuing return any more than you can blame a lion for eating a gazelle. It is a capital structure. It behaves as designed. The sun comes up in the east. Capital seeks yield.

If the system consistently rewards revenue velocity over professional judgment, the license does not vanish. It becomes an ornamental credential inside a machine — required for regulatory compliance, but not decisive in direction.

Private equity is different in only one respect: private equity does not pretend otherwise.

Private equity does not drape the structure in sports metaphors (Lombardi, Wooden), war stories (Patton), or framed quotations about toughness and winning — the kind of symbolism that fills leadership vacuums. That theater is left to carnival barkers who rely on mythology to manufacture loyalty. Private equity calls the structure what it is: capital seeking yield.

There is something almost refreshing about that transparency. No pretense of noble stewardship. No suggestion that sacrifice is character-building for its own sake. Just return targets and timelines.

Capital behaves as designed.

The question is whether the professional understands the design he is standing inside.

That is about all I have to say on it.

DWoolley

Dave,

Thanks much for expanding on this topic from the private sector perspective. Although I started in that realm, I have spent the bulk of my career in the public sector. That may be worthy of its own digression sometime.

On the topic of barking carnies and mythology.....
Step right up...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTdScE3 ... rt_radio=1

One of the words the carnies liked to use was "benefits".....