Private Equity in Q3 2026: Holds Stretch as the Deal Market Waits

0:09Welcome to the Karma School of Business, a podcast about the private equity industry, business best practices, and real-time trends. I'm Sean Mooney, BlueWaves founder and CEO. In this episode, we have a special edition where we're going to walk you through BlueWaves Q3 2026 Private Equity Insights Report and give you a behind-the-curtain lens into what the best business builders in the world are doing to play the game that exists in business right now. Enjoy.

0:45All right, we have a lot to talk about today. Today, we're going to go through our recently published Q3 2026 Private Equity Insights Report. This report comes from the thousands of projects that we equip across hundreds of firms in the private equity industry. And what's really interesting about it is it gives us a great lens into how the best business builders in the world, the business builders of private equity, are taking action during not only this time, but over time. And when we take all of the data that we generate as we're equipping these business builders with the top resources that we need, it tells us the story of private equity.

1:26There is a lot going on to say the least. Some of these are generational trends. Some of these are tactical trends. Some of these are momentary trends. Let's go through all of this bit by bit. The big things is if we give you kind of the TLDR is we're seeing private equity at large, once again, extending its holds periods in the private equity portfolio companies that it's invested in over the last decade. As part of that, if we look at like, what are the foundations of this observation? We're seeing that deals are starting, but fewer are making it to full diligence. So there's not necessarily, at least in the third quarter of 2026, as much conviction as there was a year ago.

2:08The other thing that's giving us a lot of insight into why their hold periods are perhaps being extended is we're seeing a lot of demand for interim executives across private equity. What that typically means is you're making changes in your portfolio company, either at the very beginning of a deal or in the midstream. We're seeing a lot of midstream changes, which typically means we've got more work to do. The other thing that's really interesting though, is not only are they maybe extending portfolio companies because the deal market really hasn't picked up in the way it's tried to in each of the last two years, but we're still seeing private equity take pretty strong action into the future of their business.

2:48So we are seeing staggering amounts of AI implementations going on right now in a way that is equipping their companies for the future of business. And so it's a really interesting time right now where we're seeing PE kind of reacting to a lot of the consternation that's happening, but they're also taking action about the long-term. I think they know that the PE industry is something that has to respond to short-term influences, but also is building companies really for the next 10 years. Before we get into some of the more tactical trends, let's talk a little bit about the macroeconomic backdrop.

3:26The PE industry in some ways is reacting to these black swans that have flown during each of the last couple years. And if you look at where the economy is overall, it's not so bad. But what's happened is there's been enough noise that causes PE to kind of pause. And so let's talk about what happened last year. The economy was pretty good. The deal market was getting ready to take off. And then we had Liberation Day, which is the introduction of tariffs, and then we had geopolitical conflict in the Middle East. And then what we saw through the balance of last year was a pause, and then it picked up steam, and then it got going again.

4:09Now, this year, same thing kind of happened. We had the economy in pretty good shape. The deal market was starting to take off. And then what we had was, once again, geopolitical conflict that reoccurred in the Middle East, which caused oil to go up, which caused inflation to stay sticky, amongst other things, which caused PE to start pausing. Now, on top of that, you also had AI, people trying to figure out how it's going to play out. Well, the private equity industry is running towards that now, and I think they're seeing it as much as opportunity is something they have to look from a risk mitigation standpoint.

4:46And then so when you put in the geopolitical constructs, you put in the oil inflation that comes along with that, you put in the uncertainty that comes along with that, you put in some of the trying to figure out how to play this AI world, and then you put on top of that midterm elections, we've seen generally kind of more of a pause during the third quarter. Now, we're seeing fits and starts in the fourth quarter of the deal market coming. So what could be happening is it's a later start. People want to get going. The proof will be in the pudding in relatively short order. But let's look at like what's going on underneath the hood of the economy to say, is there something that should be concerned about?

5:23As I look at the measures that we often look at, one is GDP. GDP is kind of good, not great. If you look at the GDP now estimate, which the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta puts out, and as you look at those estimates closer to kind of the quarter end, they generally are reasonably predictive of what GDP will be. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, as of their October 8th estimate, so after the quarter, was indicating that GDP growth was coming at 3.6%, which is pretty good. Now, the Fed funds rate, we obviously had to raise interest rates. So that's at the kind of 3.75 to 4 % mark from the Fed.

5:59That's not something that investors are looking for, right? But the Fed is saying, we've got to tame inflation. The unemployment rate is still pretty good. When you look at the measures month to month, they'll say, oh, unemployment went up. Well, unemployment's at 4.2%. If you look at where the Fed typically kind of says, this is full employment, it's in that kind of 4.2 to 4.5. So we're on the full end of full employment right now. Now, you don't want that to slip, and sometimes it does, but when you look at the big picture, overall, it's pretty good. One of the really good pictures going on right now is US manufacturing PMI.

6:37And that is an index basically saying, are the manufacturing companies buying more or shipping more or selling more or retracting? Above 50, PMI shows that we are growing more often than not. And so the PMI within the manufacturing world, which I very much believe was in a recession over the last several years, shows that the manufacturing industry is coming back and it's getting stronger and stronger. If you look at the statistics across BMI, you're going to show that it's getting better and better and better. And so that's really good news for a large cohort of what the United States private equity industry invests in, industrial companies, manufacturing, industrial services.

7:18The other thing that we're looking at is real business fixed investment. And the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta puts another estimate out on this. And basically, they're saying that businesses buying capital equipment in the third quarter annualized, that's growing about 11 % a year. So a lot of the policies that have been put in place by the federal government over the last year are showing that there is this re-industrialization of sorts going on. And what did they do? They obviously, the tariffs were meant to protect local industries or at least make them more neutral in terms of other countries competing tariff policies.

7:58No politics intended on any of this, by the way. We're Michael Jordan here. We work with both sides. But what we are seeing is they wanted to strategically re-industrialize, I think, for geopolitical reasons. There's obviously a lot going on in the data center space and the chip space, so that's part of it. But what we're trying to do is bring back manufacturing, not only for middle-class jobs purposes, but for strategic purposes. If you have global adversaries and you don't have the means of production, that's not a good thing. And so a lot of the policymakers, and I think on both sides are supporting this saying, we need to bring manufacturing back.

8:33And so if we look at the PMI, we look at real business fixed investment, we look at policies that they've put in place around the ability to get bonus depreciation on capital equipment, all that seems to be taking place. And so net net, while it's not like boom, boom, go, go time. The economy overall is pretty good. And so why is the deal market not coming back? I think my best read on this is that you need six months to bring a company to a market and you're not going to cross that stream if you can't see six months ahead and risk getting swept off your feet. And so if we look at what's going on this year, the deal market was starting to come back.

9:14And then we introduced more risk, which brought the oil up, which brought uncertainty up. And then you have the normal kind of AI concern. People are just wondering, what does this mean? And then you have midterms coming up. And so what we're thinking and what I'm thinking is there's a general pause. Now, when I talk with my contacts across private equity, people are seeing deal flow is right now, real time right now up. Quality is mixed. But what's kind of interesting as I'm talking with people is it used to be just in the last couple of years, it was like you'd only bring the A's to market. Now what we're seeing is a lot of the B's, the B minuses.

9:54The B's and B minus companies are traditionally where private equity loves to invest because it gives them the opportunity to create value. What will be very interesting as these deals are coming to market right now is, is private equity going to have the conviction to act upon it? If you look at cycles over time, and this is not terribly different than what happened in 2008, 2009, when you look at those cycles, these years tend to be the best cohorts for investment opportunity. And so I think a lot of private equity firms, the ones with the conviction to see through kind of the haze are going to find some tremendous buying opportunities, not only across your traditional business services, industrial, consumer businesses, but also in the software realm, where you're going to see that the unit economics are fundamentally better.

10:39Maybe the prices are going to come down. I think they will, versus when you had these moats based upon how many people you could have with hands on a keyboard. That moat is gone. But if you have large installed bases, you're an industry standard product, your cost of production has gone way down, and that creates tremendous opportunity for the next gen. And so we're starting to see a large number of kind of software and tech companies coming through and start trading now, certainly more so than the last two years. Hey, as a quick interlude, this is Sean here. I wanted to address one quick question that we regularly get.

11:11We often get people who show up at our website, call our account executives and say, hey, I'm not private equity. Can I still use Blue Wave to get connected with resources? And the short answer is yes. Even though we're mostly and largely used by hundreds of private equity firms, thousands of their portfolio company leaders. Every day we get calls from everyday top proactive business leaders at public companies, independent companies, family companies. So absolutely, you can use this as well. If you want to use the exact same resources that are trusted and being deployed and perfectly calibrated for your business needs, give us a call.

11:46Visit our website at bluewave.net. Thanks. Back to the episode.

11:54now the last kind of big trend before we talk about tactically what's happening in terms of how private equity is pulling the levers is that we keep an index together called private equity priority index and what we do is we look at the sentiment across every single scoping call that comes across the hundreds of p firms to try to understand are the p firms taking action at this point in time with a growth mindset, meaning we want to do projects that are going to lift revenue, increase growth across our company, or are they going to be taking action based upon how do we increase our profitability?

12:34So optimizing costs. If we go all the way back to Q1 2020, when we started tracking this, almost every single quarter was decidedly around growth. Because private equity knows in large part that the way you get paid is by growth. That's the biggest correlate to outcomes is how much you're growing and how fast you're growing. And so that's been a very much standard procedure if you look at the preponderance of action across PE. Now, what happened since we've had this topsy-turviness introduced last year in Q1 is three of the five past quarters have really been about profitability. And I think a large part of that has to do with inflation and some of the influences of oil and gas, rising rates.

13:19And so people are saying, we've got to focus on what's happening in terms of our bottom line. Let's survive and thrive today versus focus on tomorrow. The other thing is, I think a lot of companies are getting very close to exit. We're at or near all-time inventory and PE. And so there's a lot of firms saying, we've got to do what we can to kind of clean up the income statement and get whatever profitability we can. Not at the expense of growth, though. So if you think about how private equity firms think about how to play these two vectors in valuation, the profitability tactics will impact essentially what the multiple will be applied to.

13:59It sets the baseline on what you're going to get paid on. Now, the actual exit multiple, though, is very much driven by growth. So they go hand in hand. So if you want to clean up, you're going to say, okay, how can we get an extra million dollars of EBITDA by cleaning some things up? That'll raise your EBITDA level that a multiple is applied to. But ultimately, the multiple that you will get paid on that earnings is very much a factor of growth. And what's really interesting right now is when is that growth mindset and the overall mix of things coming back? I think it's going to come back pretty soon, but we're in this kind of like wobbly period of time.

14:33They're saying, you know what, let's shore up our income statements, our balance sheets, and then we're going to still continue to think about the next 10 years. And how do they do that? They certainly think about how do we sell more things, but they also think about that through AI. And so we're still very much seeing a growth mindset, a future mindset in the businesses. But right now, they're pretty heavily thinking about cost. So let's talk about overall where private equity firms are taking action. Just like last quarter, Q2, 2026, 84 % of all of the activity was on value creation and 16 % was on due diligence.

15:10Now, if you go back a year ago, it was 70 % value creation, 30 % due diligence. And so what that tells me is the deal markets either come in late or in terms of what's actually getting to diligence, it's a little choppier. And they're still very heavily focused on the portfolio companies they have. And I think there's a lot of them. And so private equity is really thinking, all right, we got to continue to push really hard on value creation because we have to start exiting. It's not lost on anyone. The LPs are saying it. The PE firms want to send money back as well. And it's just a matter of like, when can they get to that finish line?

15:47And so we're seeing tons and tons of value creation for those reasons. Let's talk about due diligence. Where are people spending their time? No surprise, strategy is by far the number one category. If you're an investor, if you're an operator, you know the market always wins. And so we're still seeing within the diligence that's getting done, private equity firms heavily wanting to understand the market. And so they're doing extensive amount of work on the market size, the market trends, AI streams within that, voice of the customer, growth vectors. That's what they want to know. A number of very famous investors have said, the market always wins.

16:25PE gets that more than anyone else. And the next big category is human capital. Who do we have on our team? Who's going to make this plan work? Operations is the next category after that. About 12 % of all the activity. At the end of the day, they want to know, particularly in industrial businesses and manufacturing businesses, but increasingly in also business services. A, we want to see if there's any red flags on the equipment base, the manufacturing capacity. Do we have the means of production. But really now it's also about, can we find dollars that are underexposed? Can we find procurement opportunities?

16:59Can we also find capacity? Particularly manufacturing, you're seeing demand come back, you're entering the next cycle of growth. And so how do we free up capacity when we can buy less capex and get more out of these plants with less waste? And so there's a lot of lean Six Sigma type activities going on in that world as well. And then of course, technology. One of the really interesting diligence streams is AI. It used to be when you do tech diligence, it was more about looking at the IT infrastructure. Is it appropriate? Do you have the compliance posture of a sheet paying for the stuff you should pay?

17:35Do you have the resources from a technology capacity that you need to grow? Now it's very much, do we have an AI strategy? And probably as much as anything, almost every deck that comes out into the markets and they're saying this company is an AI company. And the P firms want to know, is it really an AI company or do they just have Claude installed across their employees? And so that is a work stream that is emerging. And it's one that I would add if I were a private equity investor to every diligence I do from now on. Hey, Karma School listeners, this is Sean with a quick aside. Virtually every day, I'm having conversation with private equity firm professionals and business operators.

18:16And we're talking about the same exact thing. Where and how do we actually start with AI? The answer is you start with people who have already done it successfully for others. This is exactly what Blue Wave does. We have built a one-of-one invitation-only network of trusted AI enablement providers that top private equity firms are using right now to create real value. Private equity, great quality, pre-vetted by Blue Wave, ready to go at a moment's notice. And they're not just for PE. Whether you're a PE professional or an operating company CEO, go to bluewave.net. That's B-L-U-W-A-V-E. We'll get you to the right resources so you can start on your AI journey right now.

19:05If we talk about next, what's happening in value creation itself? The biggest area, no matter how much we talk about AI, is human capital. And so this is the story of the quarter and not necessarily human capital per se, because it's always popular, but it's really how they're playing the game, if you will. And so we're seeing very strong demand for interim executives within this kind of very unique ecosystem that we have, where we have thousands of previously PE-backed executives. So it's a go-to toolbox for PE when they have to make a change. And they know at the C-suite, you can't leave a seat open.

19:45And so they come to us because we already know who they need. Now that world has been growing dramatically this quarter, but what's not coming with it as much is the recruiters. And so typically you would get a call for a recruiter to hire the next executive and the interim executive to hold the seat open. And what we're seeing is less actual recruiting. So what this tells me is once again, is PE is very late in their hold. They are getting ready to sell and it may not make sense or may not be possible to bring in a full-time new C-suite or parts of the C-suite based on how deep they're in the hold.

20:23So what they're going to do is bring in someone who they can kind of have during the transition. And then the next buyer can say, hey, do we want this CEO in place? They're kind of doing a mutually beneficial kind of rent to own, if you will. And so that is a big trend. It's something that has really taken off. Part of it may be that people use this just because of the uniqueness of the offering, but I think it's big enough of a trend that it's also something indicative of what's going on at PE. Now, the next big thing that you're seeing here, of course, is technology. Technology was about, last Q3 2025 was about 18 % of our projects.

21:02This year is 25%. AI is happening in big numbers. Demand for AI advisors grew 175 % year over year when you break down that specific section. And so we are seeing AI start with AI assessments. Where are the opportunities? They're looking for ways to automate manual processes, which has a customer satisfaction effort. You get things done faster. It also has a cost improvement effort. There's just less need to kind of have hands on keyboards typing things in. We're seeing this particularly in field services, multi-location, routing, call centers, pricing, procurement, in terms of like, how do we figure out what the appropriate levels of inventory to hold are?

21:49And so one of the biggest surprises I've seen is the number one category that we're seeing AI applications and the AI demand across PE firms and their PORCOs is in the industrial and industrial services sector, which many people thought was going to be the most insulated from AI. But what I think is happening here is there's just such low-hanging fruit because so many of those companies just never really put in the technology tools in place. Now they're just so much more actionable and cost-effective versus putting in very expensive, time-intensive implementations of traditional SaaS platforms that required consultants to come in and stay there for years to do it.

22:32Now you can get something done in a much more cost-effective way in terms of bringing the capabilities to bear and the ROI so much faster. Of course, we're seeing this across every industry right now, but I think the unique one was in the industrial area. But I think every company with manual processes is seeing tremendous amounts of opportunity to improve the underlying offering they have, speed it up, speed of business is so important, but then also improve costs. And so there's a lot of opportunity there. And I think there's a lot of action for sure. The next biggest area where we're seeing activity is operations.

23:05Inflation's persisting. People have to make sure that they're maintaining their gross profit dollars. So we're seeing tons on the procurement side, tons on the Lean Six Sigma side. So how do we improve our processes so we have less waste when something comes out the other side? But also, how do we increase capacity? Because demand is increasing within the manufacturing world. And so a lot of interesting kind of macro trends going on right now that are impacting how the business builders and PE are taking action. Across all of these, I think there's huge opportunities. I think the other area that you absolutely are still seeing tons of activities in sales and marketing strategy, finance, every one of these areas, we're seeing PE take action.

23:44There's not an or in this. It's an and. And so from that perspective, I think it's a really exciting time. One of the things that we talk about each time during these quarterly inputs is we dare to look at the predictions we made at the end of 2025 and see how we've done. Now, we make these predictions every fourth quarter based upon what we're seeing from the PE industry, which equips our vision into the future because we just roll the tape forward. And so we'll do this again in the fourth quarter of 2026. So the predictions to quickly go through these. The first one we made was AI is going to stop being treated as a strategy unto itself and become a tactical force embedded directly into everyday workflows.

24:27Well, we just talked about it. That's what the 175 % increase is. And that is happening rapidly. If you're not doing these things, run towards this, give us a call. what I would say is this area is also filled at the risk of being provocative with charlatans and TikTok influencers who are doing very different things even a year ago. And so the way to play this to win is start with an AI assessment. And then the other thing I think about this is not only in terms of enabling capabilities, but also think about what your cost improvement opportunities are. You got to be doing both of those. We have whole segments and seminars that we do on AI.

25:05If you want ideas, give your Blue Wave rep a call. We're seeing what the best business builders in the world are doing every day, and we're putting the tools in their hand for it. That's an area that certainly we understand who to be trusted. The next prediction we had was software choice was exploding and it's going to create decision paralysis. Software is so much easier to produce. You can get tons of options. You're going to get a BDR knocking on your door every day saying, choose me, choose me. And then the next day, there's another one, another one, another one. This is something that is absolutely also taking place.

25:37So our software selection implementation project demand grew 114 % year over year. People want to get it right. Don't just respond to the next fatty thing. You want to make sure you're getting the one that fits with your business. And you're going to want to make sure that you have people in place to help you pick the right option, particularly if you're not doing this all the time. And so how do you play to win? Give us a call. We've got people who are amazing at software selection, who are private equity grade, who do this all the time, measure twice, cut once on this stuff because the world is moving really quickly.

26:10The other thing we're seeing a lot of is if a recent implementation stalled, go and fix it. Don't just replace it. See it through. A lot of times the technology put in place has now caught up, but you just didn't implement it well. And so that's why we're seeing such high demand in those categories in particular. The one that we also predicted was that the US economy would heat up. I think we got this kind of partially correct and maybe half correct. And so after uneven growth, the US economy is improving in many places, but it's certainly not running hot. I think manufacturers are expanding. The thing that's really hurt is inflation has stayed up, which has caused the Fed to have to raise rates, which is, I think, stalling what otherwise probably would have been a really attractive economy.

26:58It is what it is. Overall, as we talked about at the beginning of this episode, it's still pretty good. It's just not great. And so how do you play to win this is protect your margins, bring in cost improvement resources. We have the best of the best. And I say that humbly, who are going to come in and get the things done actionably and get it done quickly. The other thing that you should think about in terms of inflation is use pricing strategies. Those are groups that can come in and help you pick pockets where you can increase prices. For those of you who've taken these business school classes on it, this is kind of like the one-on-one.

27:34One of the best ways to drop dollars to your bottom line is pricing strategy. Next prediction, the private equity deal market continues its rebound. This is one where we have not seen it yet. And I would say, we're going to have to wait and see on this one. I'd say the deal resurgence is delayed, not derailed. Why is it delayed? Because it has to happen. There are so many companies on the shelves of private equity firms today. They have to come to market. So many of these companies in the P firms themselves are coming up against 10-year hold periods. And so they will take place. And I think there's increasing kind of consternation about continuation vehicles amongst the LP community.

28:14The LP community continues to beat their table saying, you got to sell. And we're hearing that from everyone. We're hearing it from the LP context. We're hearing it from our GP context. We're hearing it from our investment banker context. So everyone across the lattices of our intelligence networks are saying this has to happen. So this will happen. It's just a matter of when. One of the things that we're saying like right now, because people are wanting to play in these markets. And the quality is more of the Bs. Now, the Bs are where PE almost always loved to play before. So it's kind of interesting.

28:45And so what we're seeing do and what we recommend is get going, play to win, but configure your scopes for your due diligence and phase gates so that as you see more cards, you can go to the next. So you don't necessarily, when you're doing a big project in diligence, have to say, hey, we're going to buy all of it at once. You can phase it. We're going to do step A, step B, step C, particularly with quality of earnings. That's how it's done. Like, hey, do your work, and then we'll go to the next one. And the next one, we can kind of meter our cost investments with the progress and diligence. You can same thing, do that with your commercial diligences.

29:17I say, okay, do your voice of the customer first, do your market sizing work, then we'll do the growth vectors next. You stage it so that you can align your spend during diligence with your findings in diligence. The other thing that I would say that we're seeing a lot of activity, if you are going to market, prepare, prepare, prepared so you can make sure you know all the answers for the buy side that they're going to have in this market. And you know them before you're asked. Bring in a sell side quality of earnings study. Bring in a specialist commercial diligence group. In this market, you don't need to buy the platinum provider.

29:52If you're concerned that you're not going to be able to get it, and we're seeing a lot of companies that don't make it through, but then the Porco has to pay for all the diligence, you don't need to have the blue chip provider for your sell side or for your market study, what I would say is you need to have a good one that's trusted by PE. And so we're getting lots of demand for the sell side because what they want to know is who's someone that's going to know this business, who's going to stand up to it, but maybe isn't the platinum priced of the blue chip who've all really raised their prices dramatically.

30:24And how do I take the specialist off the table for the commercial due diligence phase so that my buyers can't use them themselves. And so that's kind of the clever tool where we'll see as the customers come up like, hey, who's the one who really gets this industry versus someone who's going to have to call the expert networks for this? And it doesn't mean either are good or bad, but that's the smart play that we're seeing people do. Okay, last prediction. We said that performance gaps are going to start widening sharply in 2026 as AI adoption separates the decisive movers and shakers versus those who are waiting and watching.

30:58I think that this is absolutely happening. We're seeing a large part of our PE cohort run towards AI. And what we're really seeing that I think is really interesting is not just like doing AI assessments, but they're thinking holistically. And one of the measures that we track and see is how much people are actually doing work on their data. Now, demand on the data side has risen 133 % year over year. and that in my mind is a fundamental precursor to how far you can go with AI. You can kind of put in the point-specific tools. You can get a lot out of Claude. You can upload stuff. You can kind of connect it to your SharePoint.

31:39But at the end of the day, if you're not describing to AI what the data is, you're not putting in semantic layers around that, you're not putting it into relational databases, you're only going to be able to go so far. And there's a lot of people who say, no, you can just plug this in and like, Claude will figure it out. Well, what I'd ask you to do this is the same thing we learned because we tried to do that. Put the same question in from three people and see how different answers you get from Claude or ChatGPT each time. And ask that same question multiple times over. You are going to get wildly different questions each time you do that because it's going to try to figure out by looking at all of your data each time you give it a question and try to figure out what it means.

32:20And that same thing happens when you try to overlay custom tools that you're building, workflow automation tools. If you haven't put in a lattice and an infrastructure around it, you're going to get very variable results and you're only going to be able to take it so far. So I think the real winners that we're seeing so far who are now starting to get real operational improvements are those who played the long game, put in the data first, and did the things like equipping their teams with Claude and ChatGPT and started building those tools. And they're all coming together now at once. And if you're starting at a standstill and you haven't done those three things, the world is running by you.

32:57And another risk of being provocative, I'm kind of shocked every day by the conversations I have more in my personal life with friends at other companies on how complacent they are and how slow they're running towards this. I can't stress enough you need to be running fast towards this. It is an existential risk if you don't. It is a generational opportunity if you do. So if you need to get started on this, we do all sorts of these type of guidance sessions. We're like, here's how you do it. And how do we know that? Because we're doing it for hundreds of PE firms. And we know it works, we know it doesn't, and we know who does it best.

33:37And so if you're finding your service providers on your Instagram rail, and be a little bit cautious. That is really all we have for today. We appreciate you taking the time to listen to this. I know this was a missive and then some, but it's my earnest hope by sharing what we're seeing and what we're equipping with the other business builders in the world, you can take some of this and take action yourself and play to win and do better than you would have had you not heard some of these things. If we can be helpful to you for anything, please give us a call. Call your account representative. If you don't have an account representative, you can find us on our website, or you can find us even by calling our number.

34:20We'll put a safe pair of hands at the risk of sounding salesy. And I don't mean to. This is something that we put together that has been pretty difference-making for a lot of people, we think. And the reason it is, is because it's really good. It's highly calibrated. We have more than 7 ,000 service providers in our ecosystem with hundreds of thousands of proprietary fit points where we know what makes them good and why. It's really fast. We're going to give you exactly who you need with multiple options in less than a day, things that would take our customers when they don't use us four to six weeks to do, and we're doing it in 12 hours or in many cases, 12 minutes or 12 seconds.

35:01And then lastly, and most compelling for a lot of people is we're free to use. And so we're not going to charge you a subscription or a membership fee to use us. We can connect you with the very best practitioners in the space who can help you get it right the first time and get it right quickly and get it right with ROI with just a quick outreach. And then I guess maybe the lastly, lastly, is we include a human loop. So it's a human experience for the best business builders in the world, but know that what's going on behind the curtain is hyperintelligence at a scale that is fascinating to me.

35:34and I think comforting for our clients. And so please give us a call if we can be helpful. But otherwise, I wish you the best of luck as we all run to the finish line in 2026. Onward.

35:56That's all we have for today. Thank you for listening. Please continue to look for the Karma School of Business podcast anywhere you find your favorite podcasts. We truly appreciate your support. If you like what you hear, please follow, five-star rate, review, or share. This is a free way to support the show, and it really helps us when you do this, so thank you in advance. In the meantime, if you want to be connected with the world's best-in-class private equity grade professional service providers, independent consultants, interim executives, AI advisors that are trusted and deployed by the best business builders in the world, including many hundreds of the world's top private equity firms and thousands of their portfolio companies, and you can do the same whether or not you're in the PE world, give us a call or visit our website at bluewave.net and we'll support your success.

36:41Onward. The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the individuals presenting and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any other persons or entities, including those referenced herein. No representations, warranties, financial, legal, tax, or other advice are made herein. Consult your advisors regarding any topics discussed during this episode. Bye.