That's because he really was a hostage reading a script that was carefully written by his new owners and partners. The new owners are Gridiron Capital, a private equity firm that buys and sells companies like the rest of us buy and sell consumer knives.
There is zero chance they would let a loose canon like Lynn Thompson say what's on his mind.
Private equity firms are a big business in the United States, thanks in large part to highly favorable legislation written by the politicians they own. In 2019, private equity firms were worth $3.9 Trillion -- that's "T" as in trillion. That value was up 12 percent from 2018.
PE firms pool the money of wealthy, sophisticated investors and pension funds to purchase non-public companies, often as leveraged buyouts or venture capital inputs. They invest to gain control of their companies, usually with a 4-7 year investment period. Their goal is to create a high return on investment in the short term. Then they sell.
Gridiron is based in New Canaan, CN. It specializes in partnering with founders, entrepreneurs and management teams. It's possible that Thompson retains some equity, but it's difficult to say because Gridiron didn't buy Cold Steel, it bought GSM Outdoors, which had earlier purchased Cold Steel when it was part of Sentinel. The terms of Thompson's Sentinel deal would likely have carried forward.
Gridiron purchased GSM from Sentinel Capital Partners, which is based in New York, in November.
Sentinel is another private equity firm. It purchased GSM in June 2018, with the help of mezzanine funding from Yukon Partners, a Minneapolis-based firm. Mezzanine financing is highly lucrative, with returns running from 12-30 percent a year. One of the advantages of mezzanine funding is that in the case of bankruptcy (after pillaging by the PE firm), its debt is rated above that of the existing owners.
Sentinel, like other large PE firms, owns many, many companies in many different lines of business. It specializes in lower, mid market companies, usually through management buyouts, recapitalizations. It profits through balance sheet restructurings (creative accounting) and turnarounds. It looks for companies with earnings below $65 million.
Sentinel also looks for companies with good potential and high-quality management teams who want to gain some equity.
We don't know what Lynn Thompson's terms of sale entail, especially because he's now just a small part of a small part of a much larger organization that is utterly focused on return on investment and a quick sale a few years down the road.
The new owners are not knife people. They don't care about knives. They specialize in taking a lot more money out of an organization than they put into it. All these finance people and these revolving ownership deals pull money out of the companies they invest in.
). As most all have noted Cold Steel is basically an ideas and marketing company, they seem to do this well. What remains to be seen of the quality of their products going forward will be interesting. 
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