Aug 10, 2026 · 1 hr · 11 segments
I love a chance to get into a nearly existential conversation about recruitment and about business. As anticipated, Ken's new book reflects a lot of the views he shared with me in our past…
Kenneth GreenbergGuest
Rick ColuccioHost
yeah that's super interesting and so i have a basically a million questions and we'll see if we can get in the hour but one of the things that for me who's an outsider who didn't come up through any kind of investment banking or kind of like operator level companies, even small companies.
But my observation from someone who's on the outside is that even just discussing private equity firms and what they do and their mergers and acquisitions and the desire to start a company that eventually gets private equity investment or is sold to private equity is has gone from nobody knows those words and uses them in the popular culture to this is a little bit of a thing to now it's all anybody talks about when they're talking about entrepreneurship practically, unless they're talking about making a tech company that booms in some kind of app fashion.
A lot of people on the service may understand private equity or use the word.
And oftentimes, at least with executives, certainly our clients understand how the market is stratified, right? But with executives, you have to really get them up to speed.
The lower middle market is a very different field than the large cap buyout firms in terms of what they're trying to achieve to get their returns.
And all that is a bit of an education process with some executives, right? Some executives have worked in the lower middle market.
Some have worked in private equity portfolio companies before for lower middle market firms.
We have different ways we coach up executives to get them in the mindset to be able to speak to lower middle market private equity firms, if that's the mandate, right? It's not all we work on, but in that environment.
So someone comes in and thinks they understand private equity and they're going to hold fast in that understanding, even though it's inaccurate, at least for our niche.
If they don't take to it, then it's probably not a good candidate for us to advance.
yeah that's super interesting and so i have a basically a million questions and we'll see if we can get in the hour but one of the things that for me who's an outsider who didn't come up through any kind of investment banking or kind of like operator level companies, even small companies.
But my observation from someone who's on the outside is that even just discussing private equity firms and what they do and their mergers and acquisitions and the desire to start a company that eventually gets private equity investment or is sold to private equity is has gone from nobody knows those words and uses them in the popular culture to this is a little bit of a thing to now it's all anybody talks about when they're talking about entrepreneurship practically, unless they're talking about making a tech company that booms in some kind of app fashion.
A lot of people on the service may understand private equity or use the word.
And oftentimes, at least with executives, certainly our clients understand how the market is stratified, right? But with executives, you have to really get them up to speed.
The lower middle market is a very different field than the large cap buyout firms in terms of what they're trying to achieve to get their returns.
And all that is a bit of an education process with some executives, right? Some executives have worked in the lower middle market.
Some have worked in private equity portfolio companies before for lower middle market firms.
We have different ways we coach up executives to get them in the mindset to be able to speak to lower middle market private equity firms, if that's the mandate, right? It's not all we work on, but in that environment.
So someone comes in and thinks they understand private equity and they're going to hold fast in that understanding, even though it's inaccurate, at least for our niche.
If they don't take to it, then it's probably not a good candidate for us to advance.
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