1. You need to find a lender willing to lend you most of the acquisition capital.
2. You also need someone to put up the initial equity capital.
3. You need to find a viable company to be acquired that won't crash immediately upon acquisition, and it can't be too expensive. Your first goal is to recover your equity investment. Everything after that is basically profit.
4. Frankly, 99.9% of people have ethical issues (you risk the jobs of 100s of people by overleveraging) with PE deals or don't have the skills and/or intelligence (managing the financial side + running/growing a business is hard) to be able to execute a deal like that.
If all you care about is making money, then private equity is probably one of the "easiest" ways to build wealth (for yourself, that is). At the end of the day, it's nothing more than buying a companies with a huge loan. There are some billionaire entrepreneurs who have used LBOs as their "empire building" tactic, i.e. Rupert Murdoch, John Malone, etc.
Also, check out Amaya Gaming. Classic LBO play done by an entrepreneur.
It's one of those things that's easy if you're of the right class and have the right contacts. Another example would be Holmes raising billions for Theranos through people who were all friends of her family. You need to know the right people to stake you the initial sum (and who will collect their fee for doing so). A few years at a big bank, then Harvard Business School should do it. Oh and also you need to be completely amoral.
2. You also need someone to put up the initial equity capital.
3. You need to find a viable company to be acquired that won't crash immediately upon acquisition, and it can't be too expensive. Your first goal is to recover your equity investment. Everything after that is basically profit.
4. Frankly, 99.9% of people have ethical issues (you risk the jobs of 100s of people by overleveraging) with PE deals or don't have the skills and/or intelligence (managing the financial side + running/growing a business is hard) to be able to execute a deal like that.
If all you care about is making money, then private equity is probably one of the "easiest" ways to build wealth (for yourself, that is). At the end of the day, it's nothing more than buying a companies with a huge loan. There are some billionaire entrepreneurs who have used LBOs as their "empire building" tactic, i.e. Rupert Murdoch, John Malone, etc.
Also, check out Amaya Gaming. Classic LBO play done by an entrepreneur.