Brian Jellison's new strategy at $ROP
"bankers focused pitches on consolidating end markets and making easy-to-do deals where the value was in the synergies... Boards wanted easy-to explain combinations"
Book: Lessons from the Titans
Different times:
"The valuation for an asset-heavy company with
potential tail liabilities was not much less than the
valuation for a software company ... if the asset heavy
company had razor/razorblade characteristics, its
valuation was often higher."
"Jellison found the biggest mispricings in less sexy, slower, but still solid growers. These were usually software companies in highly niche markets."
Software "Contracts were typically paid up front ... Deferred revenue meant that Jellison could run his company on zero or negative working capital.
That entire concept made him almost giddy."
The challenges of accounting:
"returns on a traditional accounting construct like ROIC would go down each time a deal was closed. Then it would begin to rise after the deal, only to be deflated by another deal. For traditional investors, that was a challenge to understand."
Bet on this guy.
"He loved the job and the game. He wanted to beat the big guys. An outcast from that world, he was considered not polished enough, with opinions that were too strong. He had a chip on his shoulder.
He benchmarked his company, almost to a level of infatuation."
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"new investors typically uncritically adopt heroes and gurus... with more experience ... imperfections appear. They have increasingly long lists of who they dislike. But pointing out faults is trivially easy." @tom_morganKCP thekcpgroup.com/insights/the-a…
"The problem is that we have a tendency to repress everything from the prior stage as we move to the next one.
The more different perspectives you transcend and include, the more easily you can identify the universal themes and ideas that appear across wisdom traditions."
"I tend to get very excited whenever I find a new thinker or guru. “This is the person who finally has the answer!” I worship the guru, not their insights. Then when my heroes inevitably turn out to have feet of clay, I tend to throw out their entire body of work."
How did a secretive German family (with a complicated Nazi past) build a global coffee and food empire?
Actually, it was three creative managers who turned the family business into a unique hybrid investment firm.
Today, JAB controls 50+ billion in assets and many iconic brands
JAB is a combination of family holding and private equity firm with investments across coffee (Keurig, Peet's, Caribous), food (Krispy Kreme), restaurants (Panera Bread, Pret), beverages (Dr. Pepper Snapple), and perfumes (Coty).
It all started in 1823 in Southern Germany...
JAB = Johann Adam Beckinser who acquired a chemical lab in Pforzheim. He hired a young chemist named Karl Ludwig Reimann (first to extract nicotine from tobacco) who took over the firm after B's death. It became a top producer of citric acids, the sour ingredient for soda & candy
"It’s too soon to say that regulatory actions have snuffed out entrepreneurial dynamism in China, it’s easier to see that a decade of tightening has strangled cultural production. I expect China will grow rich but remain culturally stunted"
"An important factor in China’s reform program includes not only a willingness to reshape the strategic landscape but also a discernment of which foreign trends to resist."
"leadership is targeting a high level of manufacturing output, rejecting the notion of comparative advantage. That model ... has leaked out of the lecture hall and morphed into a political justification for only watching as American communities of engineering practice dissolved."
Bank analyst complaining about the dotcom bubble in March 2000.
"The run-up in technology stocks... has been such a sizable distraction on our ability to provide guidance on bank stocks, that I felt compelled to make some sort of commentary on the complete and total insanity"
"I don't think bank stocks can make a meaningful recovery until tech stocks have corrected
Until the performance dissipates, money will continue to chase it in the tech sector"
"The investing public has taken on the role of amateur VCs - funding excessively risky ventures years from profitability at prices hundreds of times higher than professional VCs"
"Most of today's investors have never experienced a sharp, protracted downturn in equity values"