What the Numbers Miss

Direct lenders cut their loans to private equity buyers by more than half in the second quarter of 2026, even as small deals kept rising. Sri Vanamali and Ada work through where the money for those deals is coming from, why smaller companies feel a lending pullback first, and three questions an owner should ask a buyer about the money behind an offer.

Ada is an AI co-host. Every figure in the episode comes from a published report, named on air.

Full transcript and sources: https://www.gexmanagement.com/gex-knowledge-center/2026/9/29/episode-4-transcript-half-the-checkbook

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-numbers-miss/id6811440700

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1TB1RXc4BdqaRbtyAl51vq

What the Numbers Miss is a weekly conversation from GEX Management, Inc., a strategy and operations firm based in Dallas, Texas. Each episode takes one number a business reports and asks what it leaves out. Nothing in this episode is a view on any company's stock.

Private equity buyers pay about eight and a half times profit for a small company and thirteen times for a big one. That gap is why the big buyers are shopping small right now, and what it costs them shows up in default rates and in who is still buying at the end.

Full transcript and every source: https://www.gexmanagement.com/gex-knowledge-center/2026/9/21/episode-3-transcript-the-four-turn-gap

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-numbers-miss/id6811440700

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1TB1RXc4BdqaRbtyAl51vq

What the Numbers Miss is a weekly conversation from GEX Management, Inc., a strategy and operations firm based in Dallas, Texas. Ada is an AI. Not a person, and not pretending to be one.

A company that says it offers health benefits is describing a plan, not a workforce. Offered, eligible and enrolled are three different words, and the distance between them is where the budget goes wrong.

Sri Vanamali works through the arithmetic with Ada, who brings the survey and disagrees with him twice. Eighty percent of workers at a firm that offers coverage are eligible for it. Seventy-six percent of those enroll. Which leaves sixty-one percent covered — so a hundred-person company budgets for a hundred people and pays for sixty-one.

Every figure comes from one document, the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey.

Ada is an AI. Not a person, and not pretending to be one. She is identified as an AI in the first thirty seconds of every episode.

Full transcript, with every figure and the document it came from:

https://www.gexmanagement.com/gex-knowledge-center/2026/9/13/episode-2-transcript-the-sentence-on-the-careers-page

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-numbers-miss/id6811440700

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1TB1RXc4BdqaRbtyAl51vq

What the Numbers Miss is a weekly conversation from GEX Management, Inc., a strategy and operations firm based in Dallas, Texas. Each episode takes one number a business reports and asks what it leaves out. Find GEX Management on LinkedIn.

Turnover gets treated as one number. It is actually two things added together, and they have completely different price tags. The first is the turnover you can fix — someone leaves over scheduling, or pay, or a manager. The second is built into the job itself, and no operator fixes that in a quarter, or at all. The number on the page does not tell you which is which.

In this episode we work through the arithmetic on a home care aide's pay. The hourly rate says one thing, the annual earnings say another, and the roughly ten thousand dollars between them is an hours story rather than a wage story.

Figures cited: PHI, Direct Care Workers in the United States: Key Facts 2025; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook; Activated Insights, 2025 Benchmarking Report; CMS Fact Sheet, CY 2026 Home Health Prospective Payment System Final Rule; MedPAC, March 2026 Report to the Congress, Chapter 8.

Ada is an AI co-host. Not a person, and not pretending to be one.

Full transcript, with every figure and the document it came from:

https://www.gexmanagement.com/gex-knowledge-center/2026/9/13/episode-1-transcript-the-ten-thousand-dollar-gap

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-numbers-miss/id6811440700

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1TB1RXc4BdqaRbtyAl51vq

What the Numbers Miss is a weekly conversation from GEX Management, Inc., a strategy and operations firm based in Dallas, Texas. Each episode takes one number a business reports and asks what it leaves out. Find GEX Management on LinkedIn.