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The Cost of Leaving Your Lane
Blend built sticky software for banks, then stepped into a low-margin, people-heavy business at the top of the cycle. The result was years of cleanup, layoffs, and write-downs. There are some expensive lessons here for founders thinking about “strategic adjacencies.”
The Quiet Power of a Deep Dealer Network
Alamo Group stitched together dozens of niche equipment makers and turned them into a durable business. The real lesson here is that if you're in a business with a heavy parts and service component, an established dealer network is a surprisingly formidable moat.
Retention Over Growth: The Instructure Playbook
Instructure's Canvas software became the default learning management system (LMS) for higher-ed by being simple, stable, and hard to rip out. With the type of customers they're dealing with, they are burdened with higher implementation and support costs. But they are a good example of where I would trade some gross margin for great retention.
The Cost of Owning Great Hotels
Sunstone owns some of the best-located hotels in the country, but great real estate isn’t the same as great cash flow. Heavy renovations, rising costs, and higher debt turned 2024 into a tough year. This report breaks down what happens when a capital-intensive business hits a slowdown.
The Landscape Giant That Grew Too Fast?
In today’s breakdown, I dig into SiteOne, the 690-branch landscape distributor that quietly became a national monopoly. Revenue keeps rising, but margins keep falling, and the reasons are the exact traps most operators fall into when scaling. This is a case study in when growth stops creating leverage.
When 2% of Revenue Drives 50% of Profit
Everyone sees the giant revenue number, but the real story is hidden in the model. Only ~2% of Costco's sales come from memberships, yet that small stream revenue delivers over half the operating profit. This breakdown shows how the entire business is built around that.
How This Oilfield Rollup Grew Revenue From $148M to $748M
Flowco stitched together (ie. rolled-up) gas lift, compression, and methane-capture oil and gqs businesses and turned them into a single high-margin rental company. The big question: how will they survive the cyclicality in a notoriously brutal, cyclical industry?