Human Capital vs. Human Resources: Investing in People for Private Equity Success with Joelle Marquis

[00:00:00] Sean Mooney: Welcome to the Karma School of Business, a podcast about the private equity industry, business best practices, and real time trends. I'm Sean Mooney, BluWave’s founder and CEO. In this episode, we have a truly wonderful conversation with Joelle Marquis, president of Arsenal Capital Partners. Enjoy.
So I'm very excited to be here today with Joelle Marquis. Joelle, thanks for joining us.

[00:00:40] Joelle Marquis: It's great to be here, Sean. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:43] Sean Mooney: I was really excited about this one in particular, and it really came out of a dinner that Joelle and I were at, and we were talking about kind of Joelle's rise in private equity and how it really is reflective of one, one of the top trends in private equity that I think is most important, but two just shows this kind of pioneering leadership that Joelle has shown in the broader private equity industry.
And so We'll jump into all of this as we go through our conversation, but just want to set the stage that this is going to be another really, really good one. Maybe before we go too far into the content here of teaching and learning, let's talk a little bit more about your background. So, Joelle, can you share a little bit about how you kind of came up?
How did you get into this industry that we know as private equity?

[00:01:30] Joelle Marquis: Great. So before joining Arsenal, which was now 21 years ago, it's hard to believe I'd worked in a variety of industries, Sean, and in companies that really ran the ownership structure gamut between private, mutual, public, and immediately before coming to Arsenal, I was the COO for high tech company.
I didn't even know what PE really was before I stumbled into it and joined Arsenal. I'd been really fortunate to have success throughout my career. But I always felt like my cadence was off from other people in leaders in the companies that I was in. I don't know if that resonates with you or the audience, but what attracted me to P.
E. and is what I still love. About this industry is the fast pace, the intensity and the ability to affect ultimately tens of thousands of lives. And I think as I look back now, I see some of the common threads throughout my career around fostering strong leadership, architecting differentiated cultures and innovating to really ready businesses for growth needs.

[00:02:40] Sean Mooney: I love that background and That's one of the fun things about doing this show with folks like you, Jewell, is that there's so many different paths into the industry now, where it used to be kind of like this kind of linear, 80, 20 kind of approach. Now there's all these ways in, into this world of private equity.
And one of the common themes just from all these conversations is that there's almost like this serendipitous draw where people are kind of getting pulled to it for reasons they don't even understand. And certainly that was my, I grew up in Texas. I had no clue what, I didn't even know what investment banking was, let alone private equity.

[00:03:16] Joelle Marquis: Yeah. I know. I always say to people. You're either cut from this cloth or you're not cut from this cloth. And once you get a flavor of it, if you are like, you never leave. I don't know how I would ever exit private equity and go do something else.

[00:03:30] Sean Mooney: Yeah. The only thing that you can really do that I found out is you can start a company that serves private equity.
And so that was the only way I got out and then someday I'll probably go back in. But I was like, all right, well I'm not going to totally leave it, but I'll get into the picks and shovels game, I guess. Maybe before we go into some more of the deeper conversations that we're going to have here. I'd love to get a little bit more of the rest of the story and kind of the offbeat parts of people.
And so, Joelle, if you were going to talk about one of the things that we would know you better if we knew this about you, what would be one of those things that doesn't maybe jump off on your LinkedIn page?

[00:04:10] Joelle Marquis: Okay, so, Sean, the first thing that comes to mind is a conversation I had probably two days ago with one of our operating partners and one of our two founders.
We were swapping war stories about being interviewed for jobs earlier in our careers, and I shared with them that in one situation the interviewer asked me what kind of animal I'd be if I were an animal and why. And I gotta admit, at the time, I thought it was a very odd question, and I still do, decades later.
But when the three of us were talking, I realized all these years later, my answer to the question and my explanation for why remains exactly the same. I can't remember exactly what I told him, but it was something along the lines of, my answer was, I'd be a seeing eye dog. And now, of course, they're called guide dogs.
But as a seasoned leader today, the parallels that I explained back then still hold true. I wanted to be the kind of leader that people could trust and depend on. So kind of navigating safely through various environments, which can easily see a guide dog doing and someone who's adaptable, able to move quickly and make changes when there are unexpected obstacles.
focusing on and avoiding distractions, right? Staying like really focused so that I'm able to lead us where we want to go. I think about being the kind of leader to communicate effectively by listening and also through my actions, my body language, my responses, and with a deep commitment to my role, to the people I lead and to accomplishing the objectives that, directionally, we want to get to.
So, Sean, I'm not sure what seeing myself as a guide dog says about me, but there you have it.

[00:05:59] Sean Mooney: As someone who grew up in Texas, there are few people who are bigger connoisseurs of a metaphor than I am. So, as you were describing it, it made a lot of sense to me, A, because that's the only way I know how to speak, but B, as I'm thinking about it, it makes a ton of sense, because in one way, you're help setting a path and leading the way But another, it's totally in service.
So it's service leadership. You're helping someone else along this path. It sparked a memory of a conversation I just had a week ago with another senior level partner at another P firm, and he's kind of checking up on his team, and he's like, we're really trying to coach up the team on being servant leaders.
But it's kind of like him, like, double secretly seeing how they were doing. And it's like, were the VP and the principal, were they? Doing all these things. I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They did all this great stuff. But what you're describing there, I think, makes sense in so many ways. And I think it'll be a great kind of lead in into what we're going to talk about in the minutes ahead here.

[00:07:00] Joelle Marquis: Yeah, I agree. I'm a huge proponent of servant leadership, the concept and helping people get it right.

[00:07:07] Sean Mooney: 100%. It's a great mentality that I don't know that I think a lot of leaders get to, but not always start off with. And so it's a great idea in a concept in a way of not only leading and business, but also life.
And so we'll get into some of these kind of themes in a moment here. But before we jump into some of that, let's get back to some of the fundamentals here. One of the things I use. these podcasts for selfishly is it's almost like mini coaching sessions for me because I spent 20 years of my life in the deal side of private equity where we don't necessarily get a lot of leadership training.
You kind of figure stuff out and not to say that I didn't have great mentors because I did, but I use these as great little sessions to kind of double secretly kind of Frankenstein myself into a better version of whatever I can be. And so I'm curious, Joelle, in terms of, You all look at hundreds of companies, if not thousands over time, you invest in tons of companies over time.
I'm curious, what are some of the traits that you look for in a company when thinking about this company either is a really good company or could or should or will be a really good company that in turn other business leaders should think about as well?

[00:08:24] Joelle Marquis: I think there are probably three that are coming to mind quickly.
I want to say talent, talent and talent, but I won't. So talent, strategic alignment, and the ability to have genuine partnership. I think the first trade of talent at the end of the day, most of the companies, any of us either buy, sell, or work for our people, businesses, right? And so they're driven by talent and talent is part of the human capital of the organization.
Like financial capital, it can be leveraged, multiplied and grown. So thinking about our talent in a way that allows us to put it on par with financial capital, I think is important. The second thing that comes to mind is the strategic alignment. So if the goal is Success at the end of the hold period and hopefully beyond, then I look for strategic alignment to me.
And that means where the business is when we start working together and having clarity of the multiple ways we can win with the company. And it includes things like well defined goals and objectives, resource allocation, making sure we have integrated communications and of course performance measurements.
The third one, the genuine partnership, leadership that's aligned with the strategy and execution expectations, I think is critical. And having an operating partner and a CEO, having close, trustful relationships is a must. And ideally there's confidence between and among the management team and the deal team.
And if people understand the leaders involved on both sides of the relationship, have the company's best interests at heart, and that they operate with positive intent, I think people will be more likely to contribute to and align with the company's strategy and ultimately the leadership agenda. When I think about this to kind of put it in some Maybe more tangible hands on facet.
I would say that on a scale of one to 10, if the leadership is only a seven, they're only ever going to be able to attract sevens and below there's a natural ceiling that gets created. Right. And I don't want sixes and sevens. I want nines and tens. And so we get them by ensuring that we have great talent, strategic alignment, and that genuine partnership.

[00:10:51] Sean Mooney: I love that perspective as well. Cool. And I think one, it really reflects kind of your background in a way that in many ways has led to like the number one trend in PE in that you've got a lot of experience on the human capital, the human resources, the talent side in ways that early PE really didn't have.
And I think you brought a lot of that early into the industry and now everyone's doing it. And so a lot of people outside of the industry think they probably have a dated notion of what The private equity world is, and they think about like 1980s movies with Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas, and they think it's about cost savings.
And I'll tell you, maybe in the earlier days, it might've been, but the only way to make a healthy differential return is by transforming a company. And that takes lots of really, really good people in almost one and two projects PE firms, It relates to human capital, talent, and it shocks people when I tell that to them, because they're like, oh, it must be all like procurement groups, like, well, that's like 10th.
We get those calls, but on the talent, it's so important because you're right. I never heard that phrase before, like, if you're recruiting sevens, you're going to top out at seven. I haven't really thought about it in that way. Which makes me really, really afraid for the rest of our team here if it's, if I'm going to be like the ceiling on this company, so I might have to get that founderectomy plan going in early, a little earlier than I thought, but that's a whole different conversation.
We'll have it our next dinner, but I think it's such a good point. And then how you drove home, not only the talent, but are they aligned? Is it a bunch of individuals or is it a team? Does that alignment go not only through the portfolio company, but to the private equity partners, where there's at least certainly figuratively a marriage that goes on in terms of the coordination.
And then can you all work together towards a common goal? Because the only way that everyone wins is when everyone wins. That's right. It's a great answer and it's one that causes me to kind of pause and think and write down notes. So I appreciate that.

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[00:13:25] Sean Mooney: To kind of take that a step further, Have One of the things that a lot of people think about is they get into this kind of symbiotic nature of private equity, where it's not just kind of this regal come to name the big city and do a quarterly meeting.
It's a symphony of motion between the private equity firm, their deal teams, their operating executives, their corporate development executives, and the portfolio company leadership teams and their teams, everyone's working together towards this kind of common objective. And so I'm really interested to learn, how do you all manage this interplay at Arsenal to keep everyone kind of pulling on that oar at the same time?

[00:14:05] Joelle Marquis: What you've described is the ideal scenario, right? That's what we all certainly hope happens in those relationships. And I think critical components to every healthy relationship are trust and alignment. So for me, it's a strong belief in having a clear set of core values. That the firm believes in brings to life and demonstrates in action.
And in their words, I think it's vital to the PE Portco relationship and to the LPGP relationship. I mean, John, you know, it can't be just lip service, marketing speaker, something that's posted on the wall, frankly, and here at Arsenal, our core value or our cornerstone. I reference it frequently is genuine partnership.
And of course, That includes the must haves like trust and respect, but it goes much further. And to me, it means that we've got teamwork, collaboration, we're leveraging each other's best talents, like genuinely leveraging them. And as we talked about a little while ago, having servant leadership, I think it holds us to a higher standard and holds us to accountability.
And it does that personally at an individual level and then collectively as a group. So for us, we share this core value with our CEOs and with our LPs and we invite them into that genuine partnership and ask them to hold us accountable for behaving accordingly. So You think in today's world being transparent with our values and culture is no longer considered, thank God, kind of the soft stuff, the way our parents generation considered it.
And I'm pleased to see that people in culture leadership is getting recognized for being as complex as it is, and if done well, a huge competitive advantage. At the end of the day, my belief is that people can endure our leadership and our culture, or they can enjoy our leadership and culture. And that's clearly what I strive for.

[00:16:03] Sean Mooney: I really like that insight and perspective there. And maybe if we double tap on that, so I'm curious to see or understand, how do you kick it off to get it going right out of the gates? And what do you do when it gets off track, right? Because it's so important to just set that foundation, but Inevitably in business and life, it's not a straight line up into the right.
There's things that kind of go and you're just trying to, you really have to work for calibration. How do you kind of kick it off for success? And then what do you do when something kind of maybe meanders off the path?

[00:16:38] Joelle Marquis: In order to kick it off successfully, we're really intentional about a, what we're communicating as our core values.
What's important to us? What are our expectations going to be? I believe firmly in having a plan in place coming out of the gate. Lots of people talk about 90 or 100 day plan. But in addition to that, I think it's really important to think about how do we accelerate the assimilation period that we have together.
Take a new CEO, for instance, right? You hire somebody, which we do 50 percent or more of the time as an industry. You hire a new CEO. The ROI on that person is generally the last count was about six months. Well, we don't have six months in this industry. So how can we reduce that? And we actually measure that and we've got it down to kind of 2.
4 months. And so it's the clarity, it's the alignment, it's really focusing on it. And then to the second part of your statement, I think, how do you make sure it's on track? It's constant communication and checking in and monitoring. And how are we doing? Is the deal team asking, how are we doing questions?
Are we scorecarding ourselves? Are we scorecarding the relationship? Not just The metrics that we're looking at, not just the EBIT on the revenue and the cash flow, but are we really paying attention to how the relationship is going? And if we feel like it's slipping out of green and to yellow and heaven forbid red, we've got to be proactive about that.
We had to call it what it is. And that's something we do every month and then quarterly in our portfolio reviews. So it's really a critical component for us.

[00:18:18] Sean Mooney: I love that. As you mentioned that last part, it's something that you kind of actively measure and monitor and it's in the scorecard. Private equity is very much a scorecarded world, but that's how you speak to the team members because we kind of all believe in kind of the John Doerr measure what matters world and approach to life.
Because if you can understand how something's trending, you can do something about it. Very few actually put what you're talking about in the scorecards. I love that.

[00:18:44] Joelle Marquis: Yeah, it's our language. It's the language we speak.

[00:18:46] Sean Mooney: I was talking with. It's kind of maybe a life hack for people hoping to serve private equity.
And we had a really good executive assessment. They came from more of the psychological world and they're walking through, it's like, okay, well, how does this really work? And like, wow, what we're really looking for is like, we're measuring like the number of times they say certain words and the propensity.
And then we quantify that. And that gives us. Levels of kind of intensity of behavior and what's important to them. And I go, okay, I'm going to give you a trick. Don't call this psychological assessment anymore.

[00:19:19] Joelle Marquis: Absolutely not.

[00:19:21] Sean Mooney: You're going to call it analytical psychology. And as soon as they did that, it's just like, yeah, people start winning projects and doing great.
Cause it was really cool the way they did it. But I was like, talk to your customers the way they want to be talked to and your stakeholders so that you can kind of Rosetta stone things. And what you're doing there is I think really smart. And so as we kind of take that further, I mean, I think what's really interesting is you're kind of getting into this kind of servant leadership.
Communication is a really hard thing, particularly I think amongst any business builder, but particularly private equity, because you're doing lots of things at once and you have to be really intentional about it. And so I appreciate that in terms of how you're putting it on one of the sheets that you measure.
that means it matters most to you all. And maybe if we take that to the next level, for people who may or may not know more of Joel's backstory, she had all these different industry experiences, but was really one of the first pioneers that I think can probably be a credit to certainly on the Mount Rushmore of human capital and PE.
It just didn't exist. Like my reviews, even internally for most of my career in PE was basically a wire that hit a bank account. And so I'm like, uh, what does this mean? Yep. Yep. I was raised by investment bankers. You were really one of the first ones to bring and shine a light on the importance of human resources in private equity, which then, of course, going back to our first conversation, speak to your stakeholders the way they wanted to be spoken to.
So it's now human capital and private equity, and then everyone latches on. And I think part of that and why you were able to rise so quickly in the organization now to the president of one of the top private equity firms in the world is because of. that focus that you've shown on the importance of human resources, human capital in an industry that absolutely needs it and benefits from it and is tripling down on it.
And one of the things I think you were really pioneering on in particular was having this really strong focus on this leadership and culture mindset within PE. And that's something that candidly is really, really growing right now is important, but it's kind of like still on the upswing as people kind of latch on to see the strategic value and the ROI and leadership and culture, both inside P and outside.
And so can you share It seems like a simple question, but it's a really complicated one, actually. Why does leadership and culture matter?

[00:22:01] Joelle Marquis: Gladly. And maybe we'll circle back in a few minutes to the difference I see in human resources and human capital. It matters so much because, first of all, we all know that PE moves faster than any other industry.
We just know that. We also know the speed of technology and innovation ends up meaning that products and business models are threatened regularly, if not daily. Thank you. In our current market, in the pace of today's business world, the greatest competitive advantage is a healthy culture. It needs to be able to adjust.
It needs to do that routinely. It's got to adapt to changing conditions and really help be a creator of different ways to win. I think it was a McKinsey survey that was done over 3 million people were included in the survey and something like a thousand organizations. And they had top quartile cultures.
And posted a return to shareholders that was 60 percent higher than median companies and 200 percent higher than those in the bottom quartile. You're kind of hard to argue with those numbers. And I think that we are all familiar with culture and we know it exists. It's shared values, it's shared beliefs, but Sean, What we sometimes forget, I think, is that each of us is part of the culture of our organizations, either intentionally or unfortunately by happenstance, right?
And my hope is that BluWaves listeners, whether current or future leaders and whether they're LPs, GPs or providers will be intentional about culture. I am far from perfect at this, but for me, I try to pay attention to three things. First, I take responsibility for the culture. I can't delegate it. As the leader, I have to be the culture carrier and I need to focus on encouraging the encouragers in our organization.
Second, I think the work I'm doing has to truly be aligned with the purpose of the organization. That just gives me a clear sense of the true north and third. I think as the leader I'm part of ultimately the immune system for arsenal using leadership and culture to protect the firm from infections and toxins And all the other stuff out there

[00:24:22] Sean Mooney: I love that just being a champion and a protector of the culture because it matters and it drives results and is I reflect back on my career and there's a thousand things I would have done differently, but that's part of it.
I don't trip on the past, but I try to have it inform the future. People who were drawn to private equity, they're high achievers. They're really objective oriented. They want to kind of achieve landmarks and get ribbons and badges and those types of things. And that's how they kind of survive the gauntlet to get into the industry.
I have a lot of conversations with like West coast, East coast friends. And East coast is like strategy wins, west coast is culture wins. What I like about PE who adopt this is they use the word and versus or. We can have strategy and culture, but you can't have one without the other. They're symbiotic.
They're in orbit, one another. And what I didn't really appreciate is when I was maybe. The younger kind of self is about achieving objectives and building these companies and part of those objectives make other people successful. And so having that servant leadership, but not really understanding why.
And then when I started BluWave eight years ago, I just talked to probably a hundred different people that started companies because like, I'm not going to burn down, I've worked my whole life to become a partner at a PE firm to do a 20 percent chance of success in a startup. And time and time again, they're like, get the culture right first.
And so we did that. certainly well early in year one, and then every year we've checked on it and it's made a huge difference. And it's something that to your point, Everyone's got to be a champion of it because it also constantly wants to lose calibration.

[00:26:05] Joelle Marquis: Oh, absolutely. I mean, organizations are living, breathing organisms, right?
If we don't tend to them, they ultimately could die off. But there's a whole lot of bad that can happen between today and the death of it. And it's painful. And I think you just have to be really, really intentional about so many facets of how you're functioning. The how is as important as the why and the what.
And sometimes I think we just forget that.

[00:26:32] Sean Mooney: You all look at hundreds of companies a year. What do you see is the difference between one where you can say like, Oh, they've got this amazing culture versus one that doesn't. And is there something you can do about it as these fixers and builders of businesses?

[00:26:48] Joelle Marquis: Yeah, I think it does start with the leadership, right? So kind of what is the way they're interacting with their peers? How are they interacting with you when you walk in? Just observe how are they treating your team when they come into your offices for maybe a management team meeting or if you're going there, how are they treating people up and down the hierarchy of your own team?
Do they just want the attention of the most senior person at the table or are they comfortable engaging with other individuals? Humility is a big thing for me. I've established over the years, really good humility radar. And so making sure our team understands what that looks like, what that smells like, and able to kind of suss it out.
Because I think if you're humble, it brings other natural, good leadership qualities with it, right? You tend to be curious. You want to learn more. You want to understand things. You want to double click on a lot of stuff. You invite other people to the conversations. You invite them to the table. So we've walked away from deals because of the management team.
We've walked away from deals where the person at the top is just not somebody. That we can easily see making a change in and if that person is not strategically aligned with us or is not aligned with us in terms of how we believe a culture should exist in an organization, then we're just going to say no on that deal.
That's really hard to do, and it's hard to have the private equity team understand that. That's critical to do. We've got amazing operating partners here and they understand that. So it's something that our deal teams have that combination, right? Of operating and investment professionals on them all the time.
And so that combination of people and skillsets and backgrounds really helps make sure that they're assessing for that in all interactions with the leadership.

[00:28:40] Sean Mooney: There's just so much consistency in our conversation here about what really matters and what drives results. The fact that you're measuring it throughout your organization, their organization, the whole process when you're holding the business and you're walking away from deals when you don't see it, that shows like how much it matters.
And this is a really important thing I think for our listeners to hone in on when they think about their own organizations and building their culture and building their value in their businesses is like, get this right, spend time, invest in it. And then you got it to your point, your business is a living, breathing organism.
You've got to tend to it. It's not just, uh, do a word scramble exercise on the wall once and here's our culture. Exactly. One last thing on this topic that you mentioned. So you mentioned there's a difference between human resources and human capital. What is that?

[00:29:32] Joelle Marquis: Yeah. So, I mean, when you think about resources, just the word resource and the word capital, right?
Resources are, I think in this day and age, something we're used to using up. They expire, right? We use them. We apply them. They're gone. Capital, we invest. We think about how do we multiply it, how do we expand it? And so I think just the mindset shift of, Are the people working with us resources to be used?
And just that word alone is kind of icky. Or are they a set of experiences? Are they bringing insights and innovation to the table and things that are characteristic of them that we can actually leverage and have exponential returns on? Just the word alone to me is very telling of the way that we're thinking about the people in our organizations.

[00:30:25] Sean Mooney: That is a fantastic description. I'd been in the P industry, geez, from like late 90s.

[00:30:32] Joelle Marquis: Careful now.

[00:30:34] Sean Mooney: And yeah, I'm like, well, let's be, I'm not going to fully tell you which year. But I never really totally thought like, why is human capital capital? I didn't think of it that way and versus resources the other way.
And it's, I love that you're saying is like, yeah, resource sounds like it's something that's consumed and depleted. Whereas capital, in the truest sense, you're deploying it to invest and grow and nurture and turn something from a caterpillar into a butterfly. And so the way that you say it completely changed the way I think about that term.
And so. I'm going to write that down.
Hey, as a quick interlude, this is Sean here. Why don't you address one quick question that we regularly get? We 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 BluWave 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.
Visit our website at BluWave. net. Thanks back to the episode.
Joelle, as we kind of bring our conversation full circle here, one of the things that I think people who interacted with me know that there's few things in this world I love better than a life hack. Yeah. It's just, probably it's just because, like, some often, like, When I was in P. E., it's just like, you have so much going on, and there's all this motion and commotion, and I'm spinning 50 plates above my head all the time and running one from the other.
And so I just kind of fall in love with these little things that make life a little easier, a little fun, a little more interesting, because it gives me like the sense of serenity and just curiosity, because I like to gizmos and gadgets and how things work. I write this email once a month that I send to the industry and almost every one of those has like a life hack or some sort of trick or treat.
And it's just the last thing I do. And it's kind of enabled me to have bad habits in this regard, but that's okay. It's a different conversation. So I am really curious, Joelle, like what are maybe some life hacks that you've kind of brought into your life or. think about that might make some other things a little more easier, fun, interesting, curious, et cetera.

[00:33:05] Joelle Marquis: I love the question and that this is important to you. It's kind of neat. And you think about kind of weaving the collection of these together over time, as you hear from different speakers that in and of itself would be interesting and entertaining. I'm going to stick on the theme of like the organization and the team.
There are three things I'd share. And I've used them for many, many years, but they remain favorites of not just me, but of our team. So the first one is what we call the three knock rule. And the three knock rule essentially means that if somebody is going off on a tangent, if they are repeating something someone else already said, nobody in private equity likes to hear themselves talk, right?
If that's happening, by happenstance, then everyone is invited to either say or actually knock three times. And the purpose of that is to bring that tangent to a close and bring us right back to the point that we were on. And it's amazing to me the positive impact that that can have on a conversation.
And there are no hats. No one gets to wear a hat in these conversations. The receptionist can knock on the founder. Anybody can knock at any time. It brings a lot of humor to our meetings now. That's number one. The second one is assuming positive intent. If we can assume that the people we are listening to are coming from a place of positive intent, we hear them differently.
And if I'm speaking and I have to check myself and make sure I'm coming from a place of positive intent, we have a different kind of dialogue, right? You and I have had positive intent here together today. And I think a lot of times, especially in private equity, we're brought up to negotiate. And so there's this kind of fight mechanism.
It can be lovely conversation, but seldom do we kind of put the issue out in the middle of the table and attack the issue together. A lot of times it's in the dialogue, it feels. More like a push and pull. So assuming positive intent is one. And then the last one is just asking the team, like what mistakes did we make this week that we can learn from?
I think you said earlier, I'm not going to trip over past mistakes or something along those lines, right? It's the same thing. Let's illuminate the mistakes that we made this week so we can all learn from them. Not just me as an individual with my own mistakes, but a bigger team.

[00:35:37] Sean Mooney: Those are all amazing. And all of which I've been writing down as you say, because I think they really matter.
Now, the only fear I have from the thing that you shared here. Is that our team here is going to be listening to this episode and every meeting I'm going to start hearing knocking every time I talk and it'll be totally validated and appropriate. It's

[00:35:59] Joelle Marquis: really healthy. I mean, it's, it's amazing when you, you get knocked a couple of times.
It doesn't take you long to get back on the right path.

[00:36:07] Sean Mooney: There's going to be a lot of knocking going on for a little bit in the BluWave offices, but. As some people will tell you, I'm often accused of saying, why use one word when two will suffice? And so, it's going to cause me to sharpen my game up a little bit.
So I like this. There you go. All right, Joelle. Well, this has been a really fun, truly educational experience for me, where I've learned a ton of things that I wish I knew before. And that's a tremendous gift. So thank you, thank you, thank you for joining us today, sharing your wisdom, perspectives, and ideas.
And doing what you do both within your firm and within the broader world here.

[00:36:45] Joelle Marquis: Well, thank you, John. It was great to be here. I really feel honored.

[00:36:59] Sean Mooney: That's all we have for today. Special thanks to Joelle for joining. If you'd like to learn more about Joelle Marquis and Arsenal Capital Partners, please see the episode notes for links. Please continue to look for the Karma School of Business podcast anywhere you find your favorite podcasts. Including Apple, Google, and Spotify.
We truly appreciate your support. If you like what you hear, please follow five star rate review and 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 that are deployed and trusted by the best business builders in the world, including hundreds of private equity firms, thousands of portcos. And you can do the same. Give us a call or visit our website at BluWave. net. That's B L U W A V E. net. And we'll support your success. Onward.

Private equity insights for and with top business builders, including investors, operators, executives and industry thought leaders. The Karma School of Business Podcast goes behind the scenes of PE, talking about business best practices and real-time industry trends. You'll learn from leading professionals and visionary business executives who will help you take action and enhance your life, whether you’re at a PE firm, a portco or a private or public company.

BluWave Founder & CEO Sean Mooney hosts the Private Equity Karma School of Business Podcast. BluWave is the business builders’ network for private equity grade due diligence and value creation needs.