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Jaffer Ali Profile picture
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16 Dec, 4 tweets, 1 min read
1/ IMPORTANT: UPS & FED EX have bills with so many line items. We have a contract outlining all charges. Both overcharge by "mistakes". We discovered and reversed 3.4% of Fed Ex's bill over the last $5.4 million in charges by downloading their bill and into a program we created.
2/ We saved $160,000+ by dissecting their bills. Nearly all of their mistakes were in THEIR FAVOR, which means of course this is a planned practice. Examine their bills and do not take THEIR word.
3/ @dwnhogendoorn @Jed_Trott To connect this to the thread of anecdotes versus data, this 2-tweet anecdote could, AND SHOULD, be powerful enough to enter decision space. If I read a tweet like this, I guarantee we would decide to look over FED Ex/UPS bills. No?
4/ The overcharging is not a bug but a feature.

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More from @Jaffer22915438

Jaffer Ali Profile picture
29 Nov
1/ This thread inspired by @ndehouche response to my thread on forecasting. Once upon a time, I believed forecasting was just a matter of grinding away at assumptions and perfecting the "model". I figured all was needed was working harder on the math and when confronted with my
2/ limitations with math, we hired statisticians, PhD's in math (even MIT IYIs)...Moved well beyond regression. Wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on failed models. I did not know why they failed. They added more and more variables and forecasts got even worse.
3/ We decided to stop running our business BASED ON FORECASTING DEMAND. We still projected inventory needs (demand), but we KNEW they would be wrong. Our business started to flourish because we placed clipping left tail risk ahead of maximizing right tail profit.
Read 6 tweets
Jaffer Ali Profile picture
29 Nov
1/ Chief Justice Warren was a friend of Kennedy and did NOT want to lead the faux inquiry of the JFK assassination. With tears, he signed off on the report that bore his name. If you want an enlightened evening, research how the *apparatus* got him to sign off.
2/ Chief Justice Roberts was appointed by Trump and has made several *surprising* rulings that ran counter to his former judicial philosophy. Spend another evening researching how he may be compromised due to blackmail
3/ The Supreme Court is an essential institution that MUST follow *the apparatus*. Everyone knows in totalitarian regimes the court system serves power. Only in the mind numbed lib democracies is the illusion of an independent judicial system believed.
Read 5 tweets
Jaffer Ali Profile picture
24 Aug
1/Once you recognize a any biz opportunity, each person/org needs to reappraise what resources they have available. This is personnel, capital, inventory, relationships, processes, etc. And these resources often can be reshuffled in new ways to benefit from a situation.
2/ Of course one needs to first start understanding what is the most you are willing to lose (clip left tail) and then you need to understand how fat tailed success looks like? For our company's retail strategy, 1 Masks & More Outlet store is not worth the effort.
3/ It doesn't become material for our company until we have 5 stores open. But we evolved quickly to add partnerships and something looking like franchises. This could result in quick growth. These last two ideas are still percolating. These stores have a limited time frame.
Read 4 tweets
Jaffer Ali Profile picture
10 Jul
1/ A lesson is non-ergodic marketing. Fancy words but when the future does not (or may not) resemble the past, you need to assume it does not. We discovered when we did infomercials that all the profit were in tail events...meaning "the hits". And a "hit" was NOT PREDICTABLE.
2/ We nearly went bust after we "caught" a hit campaign on TV (Riverdance over 20 years ago) because we chased the next hit and did not clip our tail risk. The cost of failure was overwhelming.
3/ But this lesson CAUSED us to figure a way to limit risk in between "hits". We now test 400 new products a year and maybe 1 in 20 are hits. The only way to make money is to cut the cost of failure on the 19 products that are not hits.
Read 9 tweets
Jaffer Ali Profile picture
4 Jul
1/ If one wants to counter the premise of racism in the US, a good strategy to not deny the charge directly. It is far more effective to point out the absurdities of the "movement" protesting. In this way, the discussion moves from the real issue to
2/ trivial issues like changing "master bedroom" to "primary bedroom" and dozens of other inane issues and topics that are barely window dressing for peering into the issue. This then becomes a way for status quo folks to shift from denying racism to absurdities.
3/ This happened in apartheid South Africa...with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Vietnam, etc. Name most topics. Diverting attention serves a real purpose. "If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation." Don Draper
Read 7 tweets
Jaffer Ali Profile picture
14 Jun
1/ Yesterday I read about an interesting conundrum for the M&A industry. Seems the pandemic has thrown all of their *valuation models* out the window. Using TTM for cash flows and EBITDA is playing havoc with their spreadsheet formulas.
2/ If a business did poorly, M&A types want to "normalize" for the pandemic and treat it as if it did not exist. If a business did well, they also want to "normalize" the benefits.
3/ The pandemic reveals the inherent weakness of valuing companies based on numbers...and the subjective hypothetical normalized numbers are guesses. "Painting by numbers" is not going to yield a vibrant result in valuation or paintings.
Read 5 tweets

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