Structure Before Sophistication

What actually happens inside businesses, written by someone who ran one.

Most business writing is produced by people who have never made a payroll. This isn’t that.

I spent thirty years building and operating a field services company — crews, trucks, routes, and weather that doesn’t negotiate. I sold it to private equity in 2021. I went into that process not knowing what working capital was, and came out at a number that worked through some combination of ignorance and luck. Plenty of people aren’t so lucky, and the gap between what an owner knows and what they’re about to sign is what I write about most here.

The name

Every number in a spreadsheet is downstream of something physical. A crew that shows up. A machine that starts. A route that gets run before the snow stops falling. Get those right, and the model has something to stand on. Get them wrong, and no amount of normalizing puts the earnings back, because they were never there to begin with.

Structure before sophistication. Every time.

What you’ll find

Essays on operations, ownership, and what private equity does to businesses that run on labour rather than licences. Some weeks that means arithmetic. Some weeks it’s closer to an argument.

The Reckoning, a podcast launching January 2027. Founders who sold their companies, talking about what actually happened next — what the LOI promised versus what arrived, how the earnout was really calculated, the first board meeting where the room turns out to have a different definition of “we.”

And occasionally the books, which are a longer story.

Who’s writing

Gerry Visco. Ontario. Thirty years in field services, an MFA, and an MBA finished after the sale — a strange order to do things in, and the thing that finally gave me language for what I’d already lived through.

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