'We Price It In and We Move': When Private Equity Meets a Union…

The Man Who Got Fired for Being Right

Alan Pruitt had been with Hargrove for eleven years. He knew where the bodies were buried — not because he'd buried any, but because he'd spent a decade trying to keep the company from digging its own grave. When the board finally ran out of patience with reality, they didn't fire the people who'd made the bad decisions. They fired the man who'd accurately described them.

That's the part Marcus couldn't shake, even weeks later. Pruitt hadn't failed. He'd been honest — specific, documented, honest — and the board had looked at that honesty and decided it was the problem. They wanted someone who would tell them the situation wasn't that bad. Pruitt told them it was. So Pruitt left.

This is not unusual in distressed-company restructuring. The CFO who survives a private equity acquisition is rarely the one who raised the alarm. It's more often the one who learned to soften the alarm into something palatable. Marcus knew this intellectually. But sitting on a call with Pruitt — who was cooperative, who wanted the company to survive, who was clearly still trying to be useful even on his way out the door — he felt the weight of it differently.

What Pruitt Said, and How Cole Heard It

The call was informational. Cole had arranged it in week three of diligence, which meant they were past the early-pass optimism and into the part where the numbers get specific and the assumptions start to bend. Pruitt gave them a real picture of internal operations. Some of it was useful. Some of it was alarming. All of it was honest, which by this point felt slightly unusual.

Then Pruitt mentioned, in passing, the Memphis hub.

The workforce there was largely unionized. Any restructuring that touched headcount at that facility — any reduction, any reorganization that met a certain threshold — would trigger a specific clause in the collective agreement. Sixty days' notice. A mandatory negotiation process. Not a veto, but a timeline and a table, and the obligation to sit at it.

Cole's voice went slightly flatter when Pruitt said this.

Not hostile. Not impatient. Just — recalibrated. Like a man updating a mental model in real time. The terrain was different from the map, and Cole was already redrawing the map before Pruitt had finished the sentence.

Eleven Words

After the call ended, Cole said something Marcus made a point of remembering precisely.

The union clause is a friction cost. We price it in and we move.

Seven words. Then four words. Eleven total.

Marcus turned them over later, the way you turn over something that doesn't quite sit right even though you can't immediately explain why. The sentence wasn't wrong, technically. The clause was a friction cost in the modeling sense — it created a delay, a process, a set of obligations that would extend a timeline and possibly increase severance exposure. You could price it in. You could move.

But what Marcus heard underneath those eleven words was something else: a fluency. Cole spoke the language of friction costs as a native speaker. He'd grown up in it. Every human complication — four hundred people who had organized, negotiated, signed a contract that said you have to talk to us before you eliminate our jobs — translated, without hesitation and without visible friction, into a line item.

The Gap Between the Abstraction and the Thing

Marcus spoke that language too. Two years in, he'd learned the vocabulary. He could build the model, could label the line, could present it to a room without his voice catching. But he'd always known he was speaking it as a second language. There was still a gap — a small, persistent gap — between the abstraction and the thing it represented. Between friction cost and four hundred people in Memphis who negotiated that clause because they'd learned, at some point, that they needed it.

Cole did not appear to feel that gap.

And this is where Marcus arrived at a question he didn't ask out loud, not on that call and not in the days after, though it kept returning: Is that fluency a strength I should be learning, or is it a warning I should be heeding?

There are two honest answers to that question, and they aren't mutually exclusive, which is part of what makes it hard.

The first answer is that Cole's fluency was functional. Private equity restructuring is not a place for people who freeze every time a human cost becomes visible. The ability to hold the abstraction — to see the model clearly, to make decisions at scale — is genuinely necessary. People who can't do it don't last, and sometimes the decisions they can't make would have saved the company and saved more jobs than the ones they couldn't bring themselves to cut.

The second answer is that fluency without friction can become something else. When every human complication translates instantly and costlessly into a line on a model, something has been lost in the translation. Not because the model is wrong, but because the thing being modeled matters. The sixty-day clause existed because four hundred people understood that without it, they'd have no seat at the table when decisions got made about their livelihoods. That's not an abstraction. That's a lesson those four hundred people had learned the hard way.

Why the Moment Stays

Marcus would think about that call later — not because anything dramatic happened, but because of what it revealed about the two different ways a person could be competent at this work.

You could be competent through fluency: the abstraction comes naturally, the model is clean, the friction costs get priced in without hesitation. You move fast. You make decisions.

Or you could be competent while still feeling the gap: the abstraction is available to you, you can use it, but it costs something each time. You're slower. You ask more questions. You sometimes sit with the discomfort longer than is strictly efficient.

Neither version is automatically better. But they produce different people over time. And Marcus, sitting with Cole's eleven words, was starting to understand which version he was — and to wonder, with some unease, whether he was willing to become the other one.

That's the question that restructuring work eventually asks everyone who does it long enough. Not can you do this, but what does it cost you, and are you willing to pay it indefinitely?

Pruitt, the man who'd done the right thing and been shown the door, probably had his own answer. The board had given him a different kind of fluency lesson: honesty is also a line item, and sometimes it gets priced out.

If stories about the hidden costs inside institutional decisions are the kind of thing that keeps you up at night, you're in the right place — and you can carry a piece of that into the world with Drift's official merch at the shop.

Marcus never did ask Cole the question. Some questions, once asked, change the working relationship. And he wasn't sure, yet, that he wanted to know the answer badly enough to pay that price.