$465M Exit and how to get to the top 5% in US Buyouts

In this episode of The Private Equity Podcast, Alex Rawlings speaks with Daniel Pianko, Co-Founder of Achieve Partners, about Achieve’s talent-led investment strategy, its $465 million exit of Optimum, and how the firm reached top 5% performance for DPI in Cambridge Associates’ US buyout benchmark.

Daniel shares how Achieve Partners invests in businesses where the biggest growth constraint is access to trained talent. Rather than simply competing for experienced hires, Achieve builds apprenticeship-style programmes inside portfolio companies, creating new talent pipelines that drive revenue, margin expansion, retention, and differentiated value creation.

The conversation explores the relationship between private equity firms and operators, why data-driven decision-making matters, how Achieve partners with universities and underrepresented talent pools, and why doing good and generating alpha do not need to be in conflict.

Key Takeaways:

• Private equity firms should empower operators to challenge assumptions with data.
• Achieve invests where talent shortages can be solved through focused training.
• Apprenticeships can increase capacity, margins, retention and scalability.
• Optimum shows how training pathways can unlock healthcare IT growth.
• Strong impact and strong returns can reinforce each other.

Timestamps:

00:03 – Introduction to Daniel Pianko and Achieve Partners
00:29 – Daniel’s career path and linking social impact with financial return
01:52 – The mistake PE firms and portfolio companies make in the boardroom
03:44 – How to avoid PE investors driving strategy without enough data
05:10 – Achieve’s unique strategy: investing where talent shortages constrain growth
06:38 – Building apprenticeship programmes to solve supply-demand talent gaps
07:08 – Daniel’s Goldman Sachs training experience and how it shaped Achieve’s model
08:25 – Rebuilding the talent pyramid in lower middle market companies
09:49 – Why Achieve focuses on business services, tech services, and healthcare services
11:12 – Building talent programmes at the portfolio company level
12:10 – Solving the gap between university education and first jobs
13:04 – Why companies should stop searching for “purple squirrels”
14:58 – Partnering with universities and building access to talent
16:44 – The Optimum exit: $465 million sale to Infosys
17:12 – Optimum’s healthcare IT thesis and value creation plan
19:00 – Building healthcare IT training pathways with universities and industry bodies
20:56 – Challenges in expanding Optimum beyond its historic core
22:24 – How Achieve reached top 5% DPI performance
22:50 – Why Achieve sells when the underwriting target is achieved
23:42 – How training programmes create a natural exit point
25:07 – Aligning impact with alpha creation
27:31 – Talent arbitrage, underrepresented communities, and overlooked graduates
29:40 – Why solving major social problems can create superior returns
30:08 – Daniel’s recommended podcasts, books, and shows
31:57 – How to contact Daniel Pianko
32:23 – Closing remarks

Raw Selection partners with Private Equity firms and their portfolio companies to secure exceptional executive talent. We focus on de-risking executive recruitment through meticulous search and selection processes, ensuring top-tier performance and long-term success.

🔗 Connect with Alex Rawlings on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexrawlings/
🌐 Visit Raw Selection www.raw-selection.com

Transcript

00:03
Welcome back to the Raw Selection Private Equity Podcast. Today we have Daniel Pianko, Co-Founder of Achieve Partners, recently talking about his $465 million portfolio exit and also how Achieve Partners got to the top 5% for performance in US buyouts. Something for everybody here, portfolio and private equity. Let's dive in. Daniel, if you can share with us a brief insight into you,

00:29
Yeah, thanks, Alex, for having me on. When I think about my career, what has driven me is I grew up in an environment where I really wanted to do something positive for humanity and for society. And at the same time, I wanted to, you know, make enough money to send my kids to private school in New York, which I no longer do. But that was sort of my goal when I came out of college. And what I discovered, really through trial and error, just kind of randomness was that

00:57
I could invest people's capital in such a way that was both having a positive social impact while also changing people's lives for the better. And so I've really devoted the last 20-plus years of my life and career to identifying areas within education and training where we can do both: make money and have a positive social impact. And so what I'm kind of most proud of through founding of Achieve Partners and our predecessor firms

01:23
is creating that sort of link between economic outcome and social return. So I'm really proud about that. And that's probably the brief insight I'd like to share. Marvelous. Worthy cause. Did the kids make it through private school in New York? No, no, no. We decided to move out to the burbs and send our kids to public school. You know, realized we wanted a simpler life and really have found a wonderful community here in Westchester and proud to be part of it.

01:52
So what's one mistake that you see private equity firms or portfolio companies making and what would you suggest to correct it? Yeah, it's kind of a two-way street here. I think the biggest thing I have seen go awry, especially early in a relationship with a portfolio company, is everybody assumes a private equity firm is 100 % right all the time. A private equity firm does and the operators are sitting here thinking, okay, I just sold my business. This is my owner.

02:20
And so I've seen way too many times a private equity firm member, maybe even a VP or associate on a team or the partner say something in an offhand way in a board meeting and then that drive strategy for a while. I'm a firm believer that private equity professionals should remain private equity professionals and people people running businesses should stay running businesses. And that it's really important that if you are...

02:45
If you hear something in a meeting and you're running a business or you're in management, that does not mean that a private equity professional has fully thought through, everything about the ramifications of that decision. And it's really important that there is sort of a give and take between the two. And conversely, private equity professionals sometimes come in and say, I own this business, do whatever the hell I want. And that is not productive either. And so I think the biggest mistake that companies make

03:14
and their private equity partners make is this one's the boss and one's just doing what the boss tells them to do. And that's not really the right attitude for having a successful outcome. So how do you protect yourself from that? literally were speaking this morning with the management team here and we were looking at a certain constraint we're trying to get over. And we forgot it yesterday, we went away, we came back.

03:44
And I went, guys, I don't think we've got enough data to make a decision. And then so we pulled loads of data pulls together. I obviously dived into ChatGPT and said, Hey, here's a load of data. Can you tell me what data I need in order to make a decision to overcome X? How are you guys doing the work to prevent you from falling into the trap of being what you regard as the typical private equity investor driving the narrative without all the information or the experience? And how are you allowing the portfolio companies to...

04:13
to make their own decisions to protect you from doing that as well, or needing to do that, should I say? Yeah, I think part of it's just the attitude you bring to the board meeting, right? And the attitude you bring to a call, which is, I try to talk less in a meeting than the person who's actually doing the presentation, which is sort of a good rule of thumb, put a timer next to your desk and figure out who's talking the most, and usually don't listen to that person. 04:42
It's really important that you actually say, this is what I, from the private equity professional perspective, the managing partner to say, hey, this is what I think, what does the data say? And then it's important that if the operator hears, go do this, the operator has the common sense to say, hey, I heard you say this, but I have this data, do you want me to run this? And nine times out of 10, a good private equity professional will say, yes, please run that data.

05:10
And we'll have more of a dialogue. So I think it's making sure that you're doing data-driven decision-making. And if you are the private equity professional, giving the room to the operator to do the work and for the operator to say, you know, I've got to do the work before implementing what the PE firm says. talk to us about your strategy, because everyone likes a unique strategy and yours is not one I've come across. We can definitely call it a USP. Your strategy is around targeting companies in regions

05:39
that are talent short, run an executive search fund, so I'd highly recommend that's not a good idea, but clearly seems to be working for you as we'll dive in with a recent exit of decent magnitude. So talk to us about the plan or the method behind what looks like madness. Yeah, it is kind of madness. When we go out into the market, what we like to say is we're looking for founders or CEO for whom their biggest problem is finding enough trained talent.

06:09
This is very easy. You probably open the FT if you're in Europe or the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal here in the U.S., and you'll say, oh, we need more cybersecurity professionals or, oh, we need more nurses or, we need... And in many businesses, it's not just those big categories. It's like HVAC technicians, still a big category. But then if you go into areas like cybersecurity, it's not just cybersecurity. It's like, okay, we're looking for specifically like SOC 2 analysts or a lot of these like three-letter acronyms or four-letter acronyms after people's names.

06:38
that if you put them up in your LinkedIn profile, you will get a hundred calls from recruiters in three minutes because there's just so much demand for that talent. And so what we do is we try to identify these sectors of the economy where there is this just fundamental supply demand mismatch for talent. We buy those businesses or invest in those businesses, and then we build what are effectively apprenticeship programs to create more talent in that space.

07:08
We do a bunch of other things as well, but that's kind of our totally unique selling proposition. As you said, you're USP. And this is really based off of my personal experience in a lot of ways, which is I was a history major. I majored in the history of the city of New York. And I have no idea why, but Goldman Sachs decided to hire me. And after they hired me, they put me in a room with about 200 other

07:36
23-year-olds, recent college graduates, postgrads as you would say in the U.K.. And they trained me in accounting, finance, M&A, all this other stuff. And at the end of six weeks, they handed me a business card and said, you are now a certified investment banker.

07:56
And that was great for me. I was now a certified investment banker. And then I went to work for Goldman Sachs for two years. We bring that to the lower middle market. We bring back college recruiting at scale to these companies in the lower middle market that have these specific demand drivers for talent. And when we do that, we create two value creation mechanisms. One, more revenue. A lot of the companies we buy, cannot take on more work.

08:25
because they are limited by the people they have who can do the work. And two, at a higher margin, Trainees are much more profitable than experienced talent. And so what we're effectively doing is creating, recreating the pyramid in many of these lower middle market companies. And what I mean by the pyramid is if you think about a healthy organization, they have a lot of people at the bottom, very few people at top.

08:53
When we see most services organizations right now, they look more like a diamond, which means they have a couple people top, couple people bottom, and then the vast majority of people are the very expensive middle. And by creating this junior level of talent, we increase our retention rates, right? People stay, we tell them, we ask them to stay for two years when they take the role. It helps retention rates with experienced talent.

09:20
they suddenly have people doing their scut work for them. So someone's actually doing the work that they don't want to do, once you're experienced. And we find it drives substantial amount of return. And the way we think about it is, we do exactly the same things that every other private equity firm does. We will find you a CFO, we will help them win KPIs, we will provide capital and debt and all the rest. But we also do this other thing. And so for a lot of founders,

09:49
They listen to this and it is a unique pitch. It is something different than every other private equity firm. And so that's why a lot of our deals are proprietary in nature, long-term developed relationships with founders who care deeply about their sector and building their own legacy in it. Does that therefore lead you to investing predominantly in service companies, predominantly in human capital intensive organisations because of that place, I guess?

10:13
You're ready to give the pitch. Yeah, of course. invest effectively exclusively in business services and really tech services and healthcare services at this point in time. What we're looking for is areas where you get, and this is kind of a rough rubric, at least 10,000 unfilled jobs where, with about two to three months of training, we can get someone to a 70 to a hundred plus dollar bill rate where there's enough value to the training where

10:43
They can drive, you know substantial revenue and profitability from the firm Okay, so and do you build that so like if you think of a Forget the name. The private equity firm will come back to me. Alpine Investors. There we go. There we go. They build their kind of talent funnel for the senior end They built that in the private equity firm. Are you doing that of your particular apprenticeship level type work in your education? So I'm sure has been built

11:12
internally. Are you doing that at the private equity fund level funded by you guys? Or are you doing that at the portfolio, on the balance sheet of the firm? No, and we're big fans of Alpine investors, went to business school with a lot of those guys, really, really huge, huge fans of what they've done. It's the latter. are literally transforming how these companies engage with the talent marketplace. So we're actually building the first six months of our

11:41
Investment are usually pretty intense. We're usually creating partnerships with universities or others. So first you got to identify, well, what's the problem? What's missing? Epic certified analysts, SOC 2 analysts, Salesforce analysts, like all these kind of just usually large software providers is the easiest way to understand it. Well, how do you then find those people? Well, we partner with generally universities, right? And we can get into that a little bit, or like people leaving the military or

12:10
other sources of sort of underappreciated talent, where, and then we run them through a training program, and then we engage them. And I think the core problem we're solving is, you we have amazing universities here in the U.S. and in the U.K., but we have a chasm, right? We graduate our students, 50 % of our graduates do not use their college degree in their first job.

12:37
This is shocking to people, right? 50 % of college graduates are briefed at the Starbucks working retail. They are not using their college degree at all. Why is that? Well, companies are looking for what we call purple squirrels. Alex, how many purple squirrels have you seen in your life? Not too many. Images of things in marketing and probably a marketing company call that? None. Yeah. A chat GPT image maybe.

13:04
What companies are looking for, and you can see this in job descriptions, right? You're in recruiting, the job description, the JD always says minimum three years of experience, must have done this before, must be certified. Well, if they've already done the job before, if they're already certified in what you need them to do, they're probably already working. And if they're not, it's probably a negative thing. Or they're very expensive, right? So because the market for talent is pretty efficient. And so what do is we kind of bridge that gap. We say to the employers, basically, don't look for purple squirrels.

13:34
Look for brown squirrels, we'll teach them to be purple. And we're saying to the universities, hey, we will partner with you to find your top quality talent that has been misunderstood by the market pathways into these good first jobs. A quick break from the podcast to introduce Chief Outsiders. Chief Outsiders help private equity firms and their portfolio companies accelerate revenue and increase enterprise value fast. Their bench of seasoned growth executives aren't career consultants.

14:03
They're strategic operators who've led sales and marketing inside real businesses. They embed directly into portfolio companies to drive growth from insight to strategy to execution. And when deeper capability is needed, their on-demand execution teams jump in to get companies to go to market without the delay or long-term cost of full-time hires.

14:29
Everything they do is backed by proven market-tested methodology and an AI native operating system built from more than 2,000 engagements, bringing collective experience to every initiative. Chief Outsiders have partnered with hundreds of private equity firms and even more than 500 portfolio companies to drive billions in revenue growth. If you're looking to accelerate value creation across your portfolio,

14:58
visit chiefoutsiders.com. Chief Outsiders: growth starts here. Personal question for us, because it's something where we have a similar model internally where we bring graduates through into our business. We train them in executive search and we pull them through. One of the problems we've actually got at the moment is the engagement in the colleges, you would call them universities here. How have you, have you just done cold outreach to these guys banging on the door when you build a platform? What do you actually do to...

15:26
engage and get them to respond because that's a problem we're having currently. Yeah, so we've been in education investing for substantially our entire lives, right? So started, Mike, after leaving Goldman, basically got into building schools, running schools, etc. And my partner Ryan, same, our entire team has been in and around education for their entire careers. And so what we've done is my partner Ryan actually writes a newsletter, goes out to tens of thousands of

15:55
People who are interested in workforce and development. We feel like we can get to almost any, you know, college provost, president, et cetera, within a couple of clicks. And so we really use that. And since we've been in education for so long, we are actually really good at understanding what the university offers in that partnership, right, and what we need. And so.

16:18
This is one of those things that's probably really hard. There are a lot of aspects of our model. We write about our model, we talk about our model, we speak about our model all the time. And I think part of the reason why so few other people do it is it is actually a special sauce to be able to partner with universities to identify their underrepresented talent and get them, identify them, run them through the right... 16:44
screening mechanisms to find people who can really do the job, who can really do what you need them to do, who are able to become purple squirrels. Okay, so the model obviously works. There's press releases and information with regards to the recent exit of Optimum, acquired in 2020 and exited in 2026 for $465 million to what looks like strategic in Infosys. Walk us through kind of the playbook there, the value creation.

17:12
Obviously I'm guessing it had the education apprenticeship piece that you you formulate. did. Thank you. Thank you for picking this, this example. First of all, let me tell you what optimum does and then kind of what the value creation play was. then, you know, how, how our training model fit into that. you know, optimum helps implement IT systems in, hospitals. So if you've ever been to a doctor, you will probably see a doctor typing away on their computer.

17:40
and they are m entering their lesson notes, their session notes into usually in the U.S., a software package called Epic. You may have heard it's a large software provider. In the U.K.. You probably may be more familiar with Cerner, but basically our investment thesis was almost no matter what happens in the world, hospitals will have technology and someone's gonna have to implement that technology.

18:07
This is an area with, and what we realized when we bought Optimum was it had really great relationships with hospital CTOs. was considered a best-in-class as sort of the company that evaluates the quality of implementation partners to hospitals, Gartner Magic Quadrant type of company, very well regarded in its segment.

18:35
And so it had this great relationships with hospital CTOs. And what we realized was hospital CTOs wanted them to do more than just Epic. And so through acquisition and organic growth, we added additional work streams to it like cloud and ServiceNow and other kind of key software packages that the hospitals were using. So that was one part of the value creation.

19:00
plan and that really worked really well. And we usually talk about like 60 to 70 % of value creation comes from kind of traditional private equity metrics, like adding service lines, for example. What did we do that was unique though, was we built a training program. So you probably, may not know this, your listeners may not know this. There are over a hundred thousand unfilled jobs in healthcare IT right now.

19:29
Many healthcare IT jobs pay literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here's the fundamental problem. No 23-year-old wakes up on Saturday morning says, oh my God, I really want to be a healthcare IT professional. That just does not happen. And so what we did is we partnered with the University of North Florida initially, which is a local state university in Jacksonville, Florida, where Optimum is based.

19:59
And we created a plan to help people get certified in Epic. We partnered with Epic and did a bunch of other things around that. And eventually we ended up partnering with Chime, which is effectively the association of chief information officers for hospital CTOs, right? So like the people actually have this hundred thousand person problem. And we created 10 distinct pathways into healthcare IT. And so what we were able to do is we were able to go to...

20:27
universities, most prominent that is University of North Florida in Jacksonville. And we recruited people who did not get a, generally people who were, like, biology majors who didn't get into medical school or, you know, statistics majors who didn't get a good first job. And we trained those folks and we've been really successful, it's driven a lot of incremental revenue and a lot of incremental profitability. And we think a big part of the exit.

20:56
What was an unexpected challenge with that platform and how did you overcome it? Our biggest challenge was expanding outside of the historic core. We did two small tuck-in acquisitions to get us into new areas, but the value creation from that took longer than expected. And sort of if you look at where the bulk of the revenue and EBITDA growth that came later in our hold than we initially expected.

21:26
because it just took longer to actually implement, to build out these other areas. It just took longer to get that increased revenue from those areas. There was also lot of noise in the healthcare market over the last five years. You may have heard of COVID, and that led to some weird funding dynamics as well in the business. So I think those two are actually a little linked, which is, first of all, healthcare things take longer than you would expect for obvious reasons because large organizations.

21:55
And then sort of the kind of weird funding dynamics where initially in the early stages of COVID, people were just throwing money at everything, including healthcare IT systems. And then there's kind of a big fall off in 2023 as those things kind of fell off and then sort of a return to normalcy. those two things, and I think they're kind of interrelated in the sense that, you you needed kind of the stabilization of the funding to coincide with the, you know, additional service aspects of

22:24
of optimum offering. Okay. So focusing on the firm, the two partners, I saw the note regarding the accomplishment of the last fund: top 5% for DPI in the Cambridge Associates US buyout. Other than your obviously your apprentice strategy, what else got you into that place? What's the secret? The secret is you actually sell your businesses.

22:50
I think one of the core problems we see when we talk to our peers in private equity is this holding out for the perfect exit. When we underwrite a business, we are underwriting to a return. Once we hit that, we believe we should sell. I think that a lot of private equity firms hold for too long, especially in this market. The market is generally right in terms of what they're telling you.

23:19
in terms of what your business is worth. So if you run a process, don't get the number you want. You may want to rethink what you have it in your head as. But I think for us, because of our unique value creation mechanism, we sort of have a natural point in time in which we want to exit a business. So if you think about it, if we buy a business with 10 million of EBITDA,

23:42
and we add a training program to it. Let's say we train 100 people a year. That means we have 200 people in the program at any given time. 100 people billing out 2,000 hours in a year at about $100 an hour. That's $$20 million per year of revenue. And if you stack two years of analyst classes on top of each other, that's close to $40 million of revenue. 50 % plus gross margin because trainees are more profitable than your regular people.

24:11
You've added $20 million of gross margin and probably $5 million to $10 million of EBITDA to that platform through your training. So if you think about it as kind of a very steep upward curve in your EBITDA, get your training platform done right. And that leads to sort of a natural point in the cycle to sort of exit a business, right? Once you've sort of achieved that value creation lever,

24:41
as well as while everything else is working in the background or working in the foreground, this kind of gives you a natural point in time, which is a, hey, achieve is done, we'll achieve what our secret sauce is. I hate to use that term, but you did, I think. that's where we kind of say, let someone else take this now from, take the next step and build out these programs.

25:07
So that's kind of how we think about it. There's sort of natural three-to-five-year time cycle for our businesses when we run these training programs. You gave us your opening answer on the brief insight into you and that talked about kind of leading into kind of philanthropy and kind of the giving back and doing the right thing. And that's kind of bleeding through the firm. You're obviously balancing, you know, the general commonality or accompaniment with that is the...

25:36
that and making money don't usually blend together particularly well. How are you communicating beyond obviously the returns of your funds being the top percentiles? How are you communicating that with your LPs and your stakeholders to keep the ball rolling and next fund after next fund? Yeah, I think this is the most common misconception people have is that doing good should... 26:06
should be somehow inherently less profitable. And I think a lot of this is related to how ESG, which has become a dirty word here in the U.S., kind of developed and a bunch of other things. Here's how I think about it. Here's how I see it. If you solve the world's greatest problems, you should make the most money. One of the greatest problems we face as a society, today, is what is the American dream? What is the ability of young people to get jobs?

26:34
that put them on a pathway to a lifetime of fulfillment, not just economically but socially. And that is a massive problem. Youth unemployment is a massive problem. If you can figure out a way to solve that, you should drive more value than someone who is not solving that problem. Same with, we don't do this, but there's going to be an electrification of the countries that we live in, move towards electric vehicles, move towards more use of electricity.

27:03
that is going to change the power grid. That is going to create a once in a lifetime opportunity to reform a multi-billion dollar, a hundred-plus-billion-dollar ecosystem around power in this country. A trillion dollar annual profit pool is being thrown up for grabs by technology and shifts in the market. So what we look at is how do you align your impact with your alpha creation? How do you align what you're doing in the business to drive profitability?

27:31
You notice if I hadn't mentioned the social nature of what we do, you would never have even thought about it. Here's a company that's in the top 5% for DPI from Cambridge Associates. Here's a company with a unique, you called it a unique selling proposition or secret sauce, right? What are we doing that's differentiated from everybody else? At no point did I even tell you that 80 plus percent of our apprentices on most metrics are from underrepresented communities, right?

28:01
whether that's by race, by the fact that they come from poor backgrounds. So most of our apprentices come from communities making less than $40,000 a year. Right? So think about what we're doing. What we're doing is we're identifying a massive talent arbitrage. The talent arbitrage is college graduates who did everything right, but generally come from first generation college going families. So basically poor people. They don't have the social network to get that good first job.

28:32
I'm going to probably be a little bit more transparent than I should be. But I got my first kind of real investment banker type job on Wall Street because my uncle knew somebody.

28:45
I bet you most of your listeners get their first job because they know somebody. And maybe not, know, maybe the internship, whatever. Think about our students. I have the uncle who knows somebody on Wall Street. Our students are the ones who, but they worked, you know, think about that they worked really hard, right? There's a guy named Ace Greenberg who had this term, PSD degrees, poor, smart, and driven, right?

29:13
We're identifying people who are really driven, who just didn't grow up in an environment where they had the uncle or the cousin or the father who could make that call to get them that job on Wall Street, or in the equivalent in their communities, whether it's Jacksonville, Florida or Louisiana or whatever. And so we identify those people. We didn't talk about how we do that, but we run a series of assessments, primarily digitally, to drive large volume people. We'll get...

29:40
100 applicants frequently for our programs for one slot. So our programs become more competitive than like Harvard. I think about how many of these graduates we have, we're getting amazing talent that's just overlooked by everybody else. And so we're bringing amazing talent into an ecosystem that is misunderstood, misunderstood, that's driving the value creation. So this concept that giving back

30:08
He might are disparate, at least in what we do, and I think a lot of segments of the economy is misconstruction of where we should be, which is we should be identifying areas where we can and should make more money because we're solving the world's greatest problems. What do you watch, read, listen to? Daniel, I know you're obviously a podcast yourself, so feel free to reference us to that. Do you recommend that others should check out, please?

30:35
Well, I do have a podcast it's called better money better world where we interview people who are solving the world's greatest problems by making them more money so encourage you to listen to that I I I have Become a fan of the acquired podcast which I guess is really like de rigueur at this point for too many people, but I just love listening to the stories of great companies

31:00
I read and watch and listen to whatever my kids tell me to listen to and or watch and or read. So I have recently read like Project Hail Mary because the kids like the movie and read the book. Ted Lasso, I actually think Ted Lasso is the best management training tool you can use. Strongly recommend you watch that read that. And yeah, I mean, what could be better than an American?

31:28
coaching a Premier League football team. Absolutely. Teaching us how it's done. You did use football, though, so we got that correct rather than something I have learned. Since I've watched it so many times, I know the difference. But if everyone could just come, next week is the Knicks. The Knicks are probably playing the same day as a World Cup match. So New York will be truly an epic place to be for about 24 hours. Lots of football.

31:57
going on in that time. one's basketball, one's football, but that's all right. We'll forgive you. Beyond me. There we go. Lots of ball activities going on. How does anybody get in touch with you post the podcast? they wish to do so? I'm pretty good about my LinkedIn and keeping that up to date. we also info at AchievePartners.com is a great place to start.

32:23
would be happy to interact with your ecosystem as you continue to build it out. Marvelous. Well, thank you very much for coming on to the podcast, giving us insights on exits and also fund performance, two topics relevant to everybody listening in to the podcast. thank you very much. to saving the world, as you would say there, the wheels to part, right? Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for coming on. And thank you very much to all of our listeners for yet again tuning into the Private Equity Podcast.

32:52
Till the next time, keep smashing it.