I’m sure you’re sick of these annual newsletter recaps by now, so I’ll keep mine brief. In a recent Acquired interview, Michael Lewis articulated what I’ve long appreciated about working for yourself in a creative field – that you don’t need to constantly optimize for the very last dollar. The marketplace may be rewarding certain […]
If I were to tell you about a company whose main job is to move freight from one place to another and whose primary assets consist of trucks and trailers, you’d probably think I was describing a capital intensive business with low entry barriers subject to brutal, commodified competition. And I could be! There is […]
Avantor is like Thermo Fisher in some respects. It distributes lab products and sells bioprocessing tools. It, too, was built through transformative M&A. It even has an analog to PPI – the kaizen-based continuous improvement framework Thermo Fisher adopted from Danaher – in the form of the Avantor Business System. But sadly, these surface similarities […]
Hi everyone – on Monday, I’ll share some thoughts on Avantor in my final post of the year. Immense gratitude for all your support. As rewarding as 2025 was from both a business and content perspective, I think 2026 is going to be even better. The research pipeline is in great shape. Writeups on LTL […]
Last week, a reader and Shift4 shareholder messaged me, raising questions about the company’s organic growth methodology. After speaking to IR, he learned that Shift4’s 3q25 organic growth calculation excluded revenue from Revel and Vectron, which were acquired in 2q24, from the year-ago base even as it included all the revenue synergies related to those […]
I left Part 1 with the observation that, starting in earnest around a decade ago, the federal government began encouraging procurement through a smaller set of omnibus vehicles that bundled a wide range of services – previously sourced piecemeal – under a single, flexible framework, tilting the playing field toward scaled contractors who could cover […]
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MBI and I recorded an episode of Never Sell recently (Serial Acquirer ROIC, Fiserv Debacle and Management Credibility, Wise and Stablecoins) (Spotify, Apple, YouTube, RSS feed) correction: in Fiserv’s October Massacre, I made the incorrect assertion that in the most recent 3q25 earnings call management failed to call out past reporting error regarding Argentina’s contribution to organic growth. What I failed […]
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TREX is down nearly 60% since I first profiled the company last August. You’d think the business encountered an irreparably devastating setback, but no. At 34x earnings, Trex was priced for perfection back then and when perfect didn’t happen the stock careened, to a valuation that now strikes me as cheap-to-reasonable for the first time in at […]
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