Michael Girdley on private equity:

The lesson is pretty straightforward. You’re going to go buy a business, and you’re going to look and say, “Where can I cut costs? How can I start to optimize and streamline this?” You can cut fat, but you definitely don’t want to cut muscle, and you don’t want to cut bone. That’s exactly what these guys did. Why did they do that? They’re private equity guys. They get paid on management fees and the deals when they turn around and put them out in the public. They don’t care about the long term. They care about the next three to five years, and that’s exactly what they optimized for.