The Operator
Execution, delivery and performance, gets the hard thing done.
Michael Fisch, co-founder and CEO of American Securities, is The Operator because he treats operational continuity as the primary lever of value creation. His 80% CEO retention metric is structural rather than rhetorical, a deliberate choice to optimise existing human capital instead of imposing transformation.
“Oh, there's so many forces going on, Barry. I mean, now, and just think about the big impact of the five or six largest tech companies as a percent of The growth in stock markets and the average company, particularly smaller public companies, are down, not up, even though the stock market's up.”
“So private equity, as you were talking about before, has been growing now for 35 years. So as the ecosystem keeps growing there are more companies owned by private equity, there are more good things, and there are sometimes more bad things. So it's just growing.”
“You want to work with. We had then and we have still today a relationship focus. And changing, and it's practical. Changing executives is risky.”
“And that's one inherent issue. And the second is since if we know what's trading in the public market, so you know that that was the trade yesterday. Whether someone paid too much or too little, you know that was the trade. And as we say for every buyer who thinks they're getting a deal, there's a seller who is happy with the price.”
Masters in Business: “Michael Fisch on Private Equity Funds”
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