Member-only story
I am surprised, that I was surprised
The only time I lost my job in my 40+ year business career was in my last full-time Corporate job working for a Private Equity-backed company. I had resigned several times to move on to different opportunities, but never “termed”.
I was 2 years into my career, leading a division of a public company, and my team and I had turned the business around delivering double-digit growth in 16 months.
We changed the business culture by focusing on purpose, strong values, and accountability. This delivered results. We were becoming a high-performing entity which made us very attractive to a market filled with companies roiling the water like sharks.
We could command a premium price so the Corporation’s Board decided to sell our business unit to Private Equity. It was a home run for the corporation and a pending disaster for the business.
This meant we would need to “carve out” this business from all the Corporation’s support functions that had been in place for 10+ years…an intimidating situation.
New IT platform, new distribution centers, and all the critical functions we had relied on the corporation to handle for us and they had done a GREAT job!
