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. Where the money for those deals is coming from, why smaller companies feel a lending pullback first, and what an owner should ask a buyer about the money behind an offer.

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.

A company says it offers health benefits. Sixty-one percent of the people who work there are actually enrolled. Offered, eligible and enrolled are three different words, and running them together is how a hundred-person company budgets for a hundred people and pays for sixty-one. One source throughout: KFF's 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey.

Turnover in a services business is not one number. It is two different problems added together, and they carry completely different price tags — one you can fix in a quarter, one nobody fixes at all. The number on the page does not tell you which is which.

Sri Vanamali works through the arithmetic with Ada, who brings the federal and industry data and disagrees with him twice. At the center is a roughly ten thousand dollar gap between what a home care aide earns an hour and what the job pays in a year — and why that gap is an hours story rather than a wage story.

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