Next week's issue of Bloomberg Businessweek will feature a story on private equity firm Monomoy Capital called 'My Week at Private Equity Boot Camp' and it's a monster — 5 pages of in depth access to the everyday workings of the firm. Brendan Greely, the reporter, participate in the action.
This is rare for an industry as small, powerful and clandestine as private equity. Monomoy specializes in buying mid-sized manufacturers and improving their efficiency.
Anyway since the article itself is so long, we've broken it down into the most important firms for you. Obviously, private equity firms vary a ton from company to company, but this should give you a cool look at what the strive for in general.
Oh, and by the way, Greely ultimately did come to a conclusion about whether or not the industry is harmful, helpful, or downright useless to the economy. And contrary to what Bloomberg Businessweek's menacing (and controversial) cover, Greely likes what Monomy does:
Practiced this way, private equity is not slash-and-burn liquidation, extracting money from capital. It’s not overleveraging, making profits off dividends paid out of unsustainable loans. Private equity, the way Monomoy does it, is a castle in the sand, a brief victory for order in the constant slide toward entropy.
To make company's more efficient, Monomoy holds 'boot camps' four times a year.
There are tons of tools the in the private equity tool box. Firms can send someone in as an advisor to a CEO, they can send in their own team to manage, etc.
Monomoy's 'boot camps' are intense two week efficiency training courses held four times a year. About 20 of the manager's of Monomoy's portfolio companies go to one manufacturing floor and suggest ways to make it more efficient.
Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
This bootcamp is being held at the Heat Transfer Products group
Based in Scottsboro Alabama, Heat Transfer Products Group designs and manufactures heat transfer components and equipment for refrigeration applications in the food service, food retail and other non-consumable markets.
That's where they apply a concept Monomoy borrowed from Toyota, 'kaizen' as their philosophy.
Kaizen means continuous improvement. Employees use it as a verb and a noun to describe what they do.
Stewart, Bray, and the rest of the operations team apologize for the system even as they ruthlessly carry it out. Their accents, their dress, their turns of phrase all say: We are going to upend your workday, but it happened to us once, too. We’ve swung a hammer. We like Wildcat basketball. It’s going to be OK.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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