Investment bankers need to find a new best friend.
The man who oversaw $35 billion of privatisations in five years - from ports to electricity networks and water assets - is gone.
And gone at a time when there are another $15 billion or so of infrastructure sales either started or slated to start this year.
The NSW Premier looked like a banker, talked like a banker and, perhaps most importantly, he could sell like a banker.
As senior bankers tell it, he worked out how to sell privatisations to the people - setting up the Restart NSW Fund , an infrastructure development fund, while NSW Treasurer in 2011.
Restart NSW was all about recycling funds from existing and valuable infrastructure assets into new projects.
As Macquarie Group chief executive Nicholas Moore told The Australian Financial Review in late 2015, NSW set the benchmark for privatisations.
"It's a concept that resonates not only here in Australia but around the world," Mr Moore said. "There is a great example here in NSW ... We are seeing the results of that and the plans coming out of Macquarie Street are quite impressive and they are believable given that they will be fundable."
The privatisation spree started with the cleanly run Sydney Desalination Plant privatisation in 2012 and snowballed pretty quickly.
Five years later, Baird's team has overseen the sale of Port Botany and Port Kembla ($5.1 billion), Port of Newcastle ($1.75 billion), electricity transmission company TransGrid ($10.3 billion), power distributor Ausgrid ($16.2 billion) and the state's electricity generators, which were more about removing liabilities from NSW's balance sheet than achieving a big price.
The run coincided with domestic and offshore superannuation and pension funds' hunger for long-life real assets, which could return consistent annual returns in the mid-to-high single digit range.
With bond yields low, these investors needed other sources of returns for their investment portfolio. And, with the help of cheap debt, they bid hungrily for each of NSW's assets as they came to market.
Investment banks and lawyers have spent thousands of hours working on NSW deals over the past five years. So too the big lending banks that bankrolled deals, and infrastructure funds that signed the equity cheques.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, UBS and Deutsche Bank ran the various sales, while these banks and more popped up on the buy-side.
In terms of lawyers, Allens, Baker McKenzie and Minter Ellison were among the firms involved.
While the deals generated big fees for the banks and law firms, it was not their most profitable work. Governments are renowned for keeping a lid on fees and NSW was no different.
However, these deals dominated much-watched league tables in recent years. And for the local boss of a big Wall Street or European bank, working for governments is usually held in high regard by their bigger bosses offshore.
And each year seemed to bring another multi-billion dollar deal.
The question now is who takes over, and whether it will see a shift in power. Bankers have spent plenty of time dealing with NSW Treasury and its transaction teams in recent years, and the people at those levels is not expected to change.
The other question is what it means for privatisations already underway in the state.
NSW is seeking offers for its land registries office, Land and Property Information, expected to be worth about $2 billion, is assessing formal expressions of interest for a $4 billion-odd stake in its Endeavour Energy electricity network and has a scoping study underway assessing a potential sale of its $16.8 billion WestConnex roads project.
While the heavy lifting has been done, each of these sales has its own issues.
And while issues are not new in privatisation, it was in dealing with these issues that Baird was often credited as being most successful.
Upon resignation, Baird said he had helped to unleash an infrastructure boom and it was up for his successor to manage it.
There will be plenty of bankers and lawyers offering assistance, in an effort to keep run alive.
