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EP Energy’s $7 Billion Lesson in Borrowed Time
EP Energy could find oil, drill wells and hedge prices. What it could not do was make a leveraged buyout forget the price of oil.
The Bankruptcy Lawyer Who Learned That Silence Has a Balance Sheet
C Street began with a broad promise and found its edge in a very narrow room: the room where lawyers, lenders and nervous executives decide what everyone else will hear. Its rise is a case study in turning lived expertise into a category of one.
TPx Built the IT Sidekick for 25,000 Businesses. Then a $1.1 Billion Debt Load Became the Villain
TPx spent a quarter-century turning phone lines into an all-in-one technology service. Its 2026 restructuring reveals both the value of that model - and the price of financing growth with too much debt.
The Instant Pot Sold Millions Without an Ad. Then the Debt Cooked It.
A computer scientist built a smarter pressure cooker, sold millions on word of mouth, and watched private equity turn a viral kitchen hit into a bankruptcy case study. Here is what the Instant Pot did, what it cost, and what a founder can actually copy.
Car Toys Spent 38 Years Selling You a Better Stereo. Then the Dashboard Got Smart.
For 38 years the Seattle chain sold drivers a better stereo than the one bolted in at the factory. Then the factory dashboard learned to do it all - and the largest independent car-audio retailer in America had to decide what it was really selling.
Linqto Built a $1,000 Door Into Unicorns. Then the Door Jammed.
Linqto turned private-company investing into something that looked almost like online shopping. Its rise - and its Chapter 11 restructuring - shows both the appeal and the hidden plumbing of fintech access.
The Diet That Invented Group Therapy Now Writes Prescriptions
It taught a generation to count points and lean on each other. Then a weekly shot changed the math - so WeightWatchers went to the doctor.
Larry Nusbaum
Larry Nusbaum is a consumer-products and retail turnaround executive who serves as President and Chief Marketing Officer of Work 'N Gear, the Mid-Atlantic and New England workwear, footwear and healthcare-apparel chain, and as an operating partner at Dark Alpha Capital. Over two decades he has run companies as CEO, CMO and COO across housewares, electronics, personal care, apparel and fitness, most visibly at Ronco, the Ron Popeil gadget brand he bought out of bankruptcy with Marlin Equity Partners in 2007 and steered from a reported $7.5 million annual loss to roughly $4 million in profit on about $30 million of 2009 sales. He has also led Midwest Trading Group, where he acquired the phone-accessory brand TYLT in December 2023, and restructured the artisan-goods company GlobeIn into a subscription model. At Work 'N Gear he took a 25-year-old, roughly $40 million retailer through a 2025 Chapter 11 filing, a DIP financing, a shrink from 38 stores to 26, and a April 2026 asset sale to a family-office-backed operator that repaid the lender in full and set up a relaunch of the e-commerce platform and up to ten stores.