Do we even understand private equity?

Every so often, someone with a finance bio quote-tweets a project like this one to say: people who worry about private equity don't understand what it is, and they're embarrassing themselves.

It's worth taking seriously, because part of it is true.

What's fair about the criticism

"Private equity" is a broad, mostly-boring, mostly-legitimate category. At its plainest it just means investing in companies that aren't traded on a public stock exchange. Some of that money belongs to teachers' and firefighters' pension funds. Some of it funds companies that genuinely needed capital to grow and would tell you it was the best thing that ever happened to them. Plenty of private-equity deals close and unwind without anyone's dentist ever changing hands. If your mental model is simply "private equity = villain," you will, in fact, be wrong a fair amount of the time.

We're also not against selling. If you built a business and you want to sell it — to anyone, private equity included — that's your call, and we mean it. We wrote a whole piece saying exactly that.

So, guilty: we care about a broad term. Now let us be specific, because the specificity is the entire point.

What we actually mean

We are not tracking "private equity" the asset class. We're tracking a particular pattern, and it has a recognizable shape:

A firm buys a profitable local business — a vet clinic, a dental practice, an HVAC company, a nursing home, a mobile-home park — often using debt secured against the business itself. Then it buys the one next door, and the one after that, until it owns a whole regional cluster. Then it does what the model requires: standardize, cut costs, raise prices, add fees, strip out whatever slack made the place feel human, and sell the bundle to a bigger fund in five to seven years. The name on the door usually doesn't change. Almost everything behind it does.

This isn't a conspiracy theory; it's a documented playbook, run industry by industry. It's why the biggest owner of veterinary care in America is a candy company, why your dentist may quietly answer to a fund in another state, and why a federal regulator has actually stepped in to slow specific roll-ups. When people say private equity is hollowing out Main Street, this is the thing they're pointing at — even when they reach for a broad word to describe a narrow problem.

"You're being imprecise" — so we got precise

The strongest version of the criticism is that anti-PE sentiment is vibes: no definitions, no rigor, just a boo-word that makes people feel righteous.

Fair. So we don't run on vibes. Free Range excludes businesses we can identify as controlled by private-equity funds, corporate holding companies, or PE-backed franchise systems — and we do it with a stated method, real sources, and a human review queue, not a gut feeling. We also get some wrong. A directory of hundreds of thousands of businesses, assembled from public records, will always contain errors in both directions — a genuine independent flagged by mistake, or a quiet subsidiary we haven't caught yet. When that happens, we'd rather hear about it and fix it than pretend we're infallible.

A reviewed, correctable directory is a stronger answer to "you're being sloppy" than any argument could be. If you find a business we've mislabeled, tell us. That's not the system failing; that's the system working.

You don't have to agree with us to use it

Here's the part that makes the whole debate a little beside the point.

Free Range isn't an argument. It's a map. It shows you independently-owned businesses near you. You can believe private equity is a menace, or believe it's a misunderstood and mostly-benign corner of finance, and either way the tool does the same thing: it helps you find the coffee roaster, the bookshop, and the repair guy who still answer to themselves.

Which is maybe the most telling thing of all. The same people who say a project like this misunderstands private equity also, quietly, would like a copy of the list. A directory of who's still independent turns out to be useful whether you're trying to support those businesses or trying to acquire them. We built it for the first reason. We just noticed the second.

We're not hiding anyone from anyone

So let's say the quiet part out loud. We know investors and buyers can browse this directory too, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. We are not here to build a wall around independent businesses to keep acquirers away from them — that isn't our job, it wouldn't work, and honestly, it isn't our place. An owner who gets approached with a good offer should get to weigh it (and we've written about how to weigh it well).

What Free Range is for is simpler and more useful than gatekeeping. It's a tool for patrons, job seekers, and the businesses themselves to find one another — so that more of a community's money and talent stays in that community, by the ordinary act of people choosing where their dollars and their working hours go. Maximum local economic and community benefit, one deliberate choice at a time. If a buyer uses the same map to make an offer, that's the owner's call. We're just making sure the people who want to support these businesses can find them first.

If you own one of these businesses and it's still independent, claim your free listing. If you think we've gotten one wrong, tell us — both make the map better.