TIP772: How Great Compounders Turn Time Into a Superpower w/ Kyle Grieve

23:25Preston Pysh:All right, back to the show. Chris gave a really interesting breakdown of his own research from speaking with people in Sweden and had two primary reasons why he thought Sweden had been this kind of hotbed of serial acquirers. And the first is just trust. So Swedes tend to have more trust in their culture. So a business model that utilizes decentralization makes a lot more sense. And the second was just Bergman & Beving, which is a company that we're going to be going over a lot today. So this is a business that achieved considerable success by spinning off multiple companies that were also highly successful.

23:55Preston Pysh:So Chris believed that there's probably a lot of this kind of Silicon Valley aspect to Sweden in that people in Sweden could see this very clear success from Bergman & Beving and then just simply tried to clone them. So the book's authors have achieved pretty considerable success investing specifically in the Nordics, and they provide their own reasoning for that. So the first was that Sweden had simply embraced innovation and globalization. Because they didn't have constraints on this, they were able to take a lot of advantage of the opportunities that were provided to innovate and create products that were viable at a great price.

24:33Preston Pysh:They also have a history of expanding globally through acquisition, which dates back to the mid-20th century. So riding on what Chris mentioned to me regarding trust, the book states that Sweden ranks high on international indices for ease of doing business, global innovation, perception of corruption, and human development. This high trust environment provides a solid foundation. And since trust is so high, so is transparency, which allows for large amounts of public information to be readily and easily accessible by the public. Now, there are really two pioneers of decentralized philosophy in Sweden that are worth mentioning here.

25:06Preston Pysh:So there are Hans Verithen, the former CEO and chairman of Electrolux, and Jan Valander, the former CEO of Handelsbanken. So Verithen was integral to the evolution of Electrolux's culture. He created a culture that avoided bureaucracy and centralization that limits quality growth in countries all over the world. He also empowered lower level employees with decision making, as they were the ones closest to the customer and therefore had unique insights into what the customer exactly wanted. So Verthin was also highly frugal. One of his first moves of CEO was to move the HQ from their luxurious spot in Stockholm's business district to a much more modest and lower priced location on the outskirts.

25:47Preston Pysh:He also eliminated unnecessary staff, budgets, and forecasts, and minimized internal meetings. And in Electrolux's cases, all these initiatives worked absolute wonders as sales and earnings grew 80 times while he headed the company, achieving a remarkable kegger of 20 % over 25 years. Now Jan Wallander was also someone who simply loved decentralization. However, it was a concept that he had to really work hard to push through as he initially encountered quite a bit of pushback on it. So here's Wallander's philosophy. Decentralization is a management philosophy that can release the full potential of people in any corporation because it is in accordance with human nature, not against it.

26:26Preston Pysh:People are the only sustainable competitive advantage. So, Volander shares many similarities with Sverathen. He just did it in the context of a bank. So, he eliminated annual plans and budgets, as well as fixed performance contracts, which he felt stifled innovation. He gave power and responsibility to branch employees, allowing them to make their own decisions. Now, while this decision was highly scrutinized at the outset, it ended up paying off very well long-term as Handelsbranchen's credit risk decreased. He also rewrote the functions of the headquarters. Instead of being the centralized hub of decision-making, it became a center of service for frontline employees who were already accentuating the customer-first approach.

27:08Preston Pysh:As a result, he was able to increase efficiency, with HQ staff count decreasing by 33%. And because the business's service was just so good, they no longer had to rely so heavily on marketing, reducing their marketing staff from 40 to only one person. He also developed this culture of healthy competition between the branches. So we organize incentives based around profitability and capital efficiency to increase the odds of success over time. And the system clearly worked very, very well. So reading this makes me think that TIP is actually run in many similar ways. You know, Stig gives hosts a very long leash to get creative and encourage it to a very high degree.

27:44Preston Pysh:He also expects us to take responsibility for any mistakes, which keeps me on my toes and helps me strive to be the best podcast host that I can possibly be. But by the same token, if you come up with a great idea and execute on it well, you're also very well rewarded with the incentivization structure that he creates. It's a culture really unlike anything that I've ever been a part of before, but it really works well for me. I can understand why it wouldn't work for everyone. I was just speaking with my vehicle insurance representative, who I know well, and he was actually just asking me quickly about my job.

28:14Preston Pysh:He actually said that he had an employee who was working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He observed that this one worker's production absolutely plummeted when she was working at home, but she was absolutely incredible when in the office. So he mentioned that she had this dog and she just catered to its every whim when she was at home. So when her dog was at home barking, she'd go and address it among other things, which significantly impacted her productivity. And I think this just demonstrates that you need the right people to make a decentralized structure effective. And that might be why you haven't seen it embraced at the same level in North America as you've seen in Sweden and other Nordic countries.

28:51Preston Pysh:Now let's dive into the first business that's mentioned in the book, which is LIFCO, which I've analyzed in some detail many years ago, but never ended up taking a position in, unfortunately. So LIFCO currently has about 257 companies, operates in 37 countries, and is divided into three primary segments, dental, demolition and tools, and system solutions. Part of what has made LIFCO so successful over the years is in its leadership. Its CEOs include Frederick Carlson and Perth Waldemarsson. Under both of these great managers, the business has compounded earnings at 14 % and per share free cash flow at 21 % per annum since 2006.

29:29Preston Pysh:Another interesting name deeply entwined with LIFCO is Carl Bennett, who owns about 50.2 % of the company's shares and 69 % of the voting rights. So he was the one who hand put Carlson as the first CEO of LIFCO. He was taught business during his tenure with Electrolux, and he gradually worked out to become the CEO of his own division inside of Electrolux. Bennett and a partner eventually purchased this business called Getinge, a former struggling part of Electrolux's medical division. Bennett helped turn Getinge around simply by raising prices, a strategy that the business had not tried in nearly a decade's time.

30:05Preston Pysh:So Lifco was eventually spun out from Getinge. The business struggled for a time, and Carlson had to make some kind of long-term decisions that he knew would not be well received by public investors. So as a result, Lifco was just taken private. So one initiative that Carlson did while the business was private was to sell off the non-performing assets inside of the business. So this ended up shrinking the business by 40%. So you can see how a public equity holder probably wouldn't be very happy with that. But over the next few years, he was able to actually four times Lifco's operating profit margins from two to 8%.

30:36Preston Pysh:And today they're at 16.5%. So the book covers several areas that have contributed to Lifco's success today. The first is discipline and capital returns, which are essential for a successful serial acquirer. If you're just not disciplined with what you're paying for an acquisition, the system just falls apart. Therefore, it's no surprise that Lifco pays no more than eight times EBITDA for acquisitions. But buying a business is only the beginning. The principal value add for a company like Lifco is the ability of management involved in the acquisition to boost the business's growth organically.

31:09Preston Pysh:So inside Lifco, the person heading the acquisition is also incentivized to organically improve the company's profitability, which helps them achieve or not achieve their incentive. So they do this by increasing specialization, which allows them to raise prices, which helps them unlock their bonus. Speaking of incentives, they're most effective when they align the interests of management and shareholders. But Lifco took this a step further by also aligning the seller of the business with these two key groups. They achieved this by allowing sellers to retain a portion of their ownership in the business.

31:42Preston Pysh:Lifco tested this out and found that they had much better performance post-acquisition when the seller retained an ownership stake. The second point is on decentralization. Bennett learned from Hans Werthen and passed it on to current CEO Per Valdemarsen. Lifco has a very lean staff. The CEO just doesn't even have an assistant. it. Many of the decisions for individual businesses are made at that individual or group level, which reduces the decision-making authority for the CEO and upper management. This enables Lifco to eliminate everyday corporate-wide expenses, including business development, strategy, HR, and finance.

32:19Preston Pysh:These are all pushed down to the individual company level. So regarding HR, CEO Per Valdemarsson has said, hiring an HR person looks good for about two years, but five years down the road, we have to risk having five employees. So the last advantage is being able to find talent within the company. Group managers who manage multiple companies simultaneously are all brought up from within the company. And because all group managers were also CEOs of operating companies, they really understand the nuances of running them properly. And they're expected to perform. And when you perform, you're very well compensated.

32:54Preston Pysh:The current CEO, Per Valdemarsson, is an excellent example of this. So he actually rose through the ranks while Frederick Carlson was in charge and gradually worked his way up to the very top. And as a testament to the amount of trust that Carlson had in Lifco and the culture that he helped build, he actually bought Lifco shares on the day that it was announced that he would be removed as Lifco CEO. The next business I would like to discuss is another notable Swedish acquirer called Indutrade. So Indutrade has five business segments, which all have attractive tailwinds. They are industrial and engineering, infrastructure and construction, life sciences, process, energy and water technology, and system solutions.

33:30Preston Pysh:The company has grown its cash flow at a 14 % kegger since its IPO in 2005. And during that same time period, the total shareholder return has compound at 22%. So the business was formed from a group of three firms that merged to form a company called AB Nilsdak. The CEO of one of these three companies was this gentleman named Gunnar Tindberg. and he was a significant fan of growing by acquiring other businesses that were also operated by highly talented entrepreneurs. Another strong suit of Indutrade that was passed on from Tinberg was in its relationships with its customers and suppliers. So because they focused on maintaining these relationships and making sure that they were strong and healthy, many additional benefits emerged.

34:11Preston Pysh:For instance, in one meeting with a purchasing agent from Atlas, Copco, Tinberg asked their representative who their best supplier was. And they named this business called Kali Group, a business that Indutrade still owns. So, Tinberg retired in 2004 and was succeeded by Johnny Alverson. A year later, they went public. So, much of their culture was based on very similar traits that I've discussed today, you know, frugality, decentralization, and meritocracy. One initiative that Alverson undertook in the business was to shift from technical trading companies to a more manufacturing-oriented companies with proprietary technology.

34:49Preston Pysh:He brought the sales mix from companies with the proprietary product from mid-single digits all the way up to 50 % while scaling their acquisitions from 60 to 200. Another advantage that Alverson observed was in adding businesses that were outside of the highly competitive Nordic companies. So he started looking at companies in the UK, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland where the competition for acquiring businesses that he was looking at just wasn't as high. Alverson stayed in the business for about 13 years and compounded EBITDA at 14 % during that time while compounding total shareholder returns at about 24%.

35:23Preston Pysh:Now, once he retired, their next CEO was a gentleman named Bo Anvik, and he picked up exactly where Alverson left off in terms of evolving the business. So Anvik was a great blend of Tinberg and Alverson in terms of understanding technical trade, manufacturing, and international growth. He helped continue to improve international expansion, governance, and empowering from within Indutrade. Another key to Indutrade, which is a concept that I really like, is in their products. So primarily, this was because many of their products accounted for a small percentage of the total cost of the machine or system that they were involved in.

35:59Preston Pysh:These were kind of consumables, valves, transmissions, fasteners, pipes, pumps, and filters. A serial acquirer needs to ensure that their subsidiaries continue to grow cash while maintaining this kind of decentralized structure. Now, this can be kind of challenging, but one way to achieve it is by creating the right incentive program. Instead of going in and making massive changes to a business from the top, if you have the right person in charge of the company with the proper incentive, you can just trust that person to right the ship for you. That's what Indutrade does so well. Not only does Indutrade require profits to grow, but they should also only grow when generating an attractive return on invested capital.

36:36Preston Pysh:This creates a situation where businesses just can't grow by simply decreasing margins or having poor working capital management or by giving significant discounts to customers. So one argument I get against Cira acquires is often why would a company sell to them rather than to private equity? And the argument is that private equity will likely be the highest bidder. And while that's probably valid in the majority of cases, there's more than one reason that someone is going to sell other than just money. For instance, the owner of a business might want to continue improving their business, but maybe just require some capital and know-how from others to help them do that.

37:14Preston Pysh:Indutrade is a company that can offer this without making significant scale changes that would likely result in things such as layoffs or rapid shifts in a company's culture. Another initiative that I respect that Indutrade does is this three-year post-performance review. This keeps management's eyes on the future rather than worrying about just the following year or the current year. If your business possesses this type of incentive program, you're creating a business that's optimized for a multi-year time period rather than just making sure things are performing well in the very, very short term.

37:45Now, the next business we're going to go over

37:48Preston Pysh:here reminds me of where Constellation Software is probably going to end up in the next 10 years, which is a successful mothership with multiple spinoffs running similar playbooks to that mothership. So we're going to be going over Constellation more later on this episode. But for now, let me introduce you to Bergman and Beving, which is one of the pioneers of serial acquirers. So Bergman and Beving, which I'm just going to refer to for the rest of the episode as B &B, is an owner and developer of niche products for the construction and industrial industries. So two defining characteristics mark B &B.

38:18Preston Pysh:The first is a dedication to decentralization and the second, a firm that's committed to self-finance growth through profit goals. What I found most interesting about B &B, having not spent any time really researching them before are reading about them in the book was their emphasis on point two, especially regarding working capital. So working capital is an area that I've been spending more and more time really, really trying to understand in a deeper fashion in 2025. And the catalyst for understanding working capital came from my deep dive at adoption of using owner's earnings as kind of this uniform metric that I use for basically all of my businesses.

38:54Preston Pysh:This allowed me to identify which companies were growing this metric at a healthy clip, as well as having a healthy owner's earnings margin. The more I tracked owner's earnings, which I'll simply define here as operating cash flow minus maintenance capex, the more I started to emphasize the importance of working capital. Working capital can be a significant source or a major drain on a company's operating cash flow. So let's use an example of Joe Safety, which is a subsidiary of BNB. So this business is a leading supplier of workplace safety signage, information signs, and safety markings. They would clearly need to have inventory, right?

39:30Preston Pysh:To sell to their customers to make money. Now to buy inventory, you have to hold cash. And once you sell that inventory to your customers, they don't always pay right away. It may take 30, 60, 90 days, or even longer to pay, which will be reflected in the company's accounts receivable. When you haven't collected that payment, you're tying up cash. Now I have no insights into Joe Safety's actual balance sheet. So this is purely hypothetical. So bear with me here. So let's say they had millions of SEK and inventory and accounts receivable. That's obviously a significant drain on their cashflow. However, we then introduce another beautiful aspect of the balance sheet, which is accounts payable.

40:08Preston Pysh:Now, if Joe Safety has to buy pieces of their signs from their supplier, they also have cash that can stay in their accounts for extended periods of time, which they can then use to finance their customers. So let's say their suppliers offer them 120 days to pay. In this case, the seller is essentially financing Joe Safety's business for 120 days for free. This allows them to generate more cash versus if they needed to pay suppliers on just a monthly basis. So when I saw that BNB had a metric that they called profit to working capital, I was quite intrigued. So they use this number as a ratio and they want it to stay over 45%.

40:47Preston Pysh:So this means that if profits are 10 million SEK, then the working capital needs to be below 22.22 million SEK. Or another way to think of it is that for every dollar of working capital, you must produce at least 45 cents of profits. An interesting event that happened to BNB was an experiment with centralization. And as you might've guessed, given how much we've spoken about decentralization, this experiment did not end very well. So the year was 2001 and BNB had just spun off two segments of the business, creating ad tech and logicrons, as well as the original B &B business. Instead of relying on the business model of decentralization, which had served them so well for decades, they decided to flirt with centralization.

41:29Preston Pysh:They changed their name to B &B Tools, and they decided that they could obtain synergies by integrating product companies with wholesalers and resaler entities that they've already purchased. Now, this kind of reminds me of the efficient market hypothesis. It looks clean and understandable on paper, but it fails to be usable by anyone really in reality. BNB tools had created detailed presentations that revealed that profits could scale. And for the first six years, it actually worked. They were able to increase operating profits fivefold over that time. But then comes in 2009 and profits slipped by more than 50 % in the one year.

42:04Preston Pysh:During the lead up to 2009, they'd also been aggressively buying acquisitions and piling up debt that was now threatened by that lack of profits. BNB Tools decided to appoint all Lilius to help right the ship. And he did right the ship, focusing on one thing, decentralization. Once they began focusing once again on pushing decision-making as close to the customers as possible, the business started to improve. BNB Tools during this centralization process de-emphasized the profit-to-working capital KPI, but Lilius re-emphasized it. which made for much better decision-making. They then spun out the reseller business as Momentum Group.

42:43Preston Pysh:Now, when I was reviewing this profits to working capital ratio, I wondered what the significance of this 45 % number was that they chose. And the reasoning behind it is that a business can be considered self-financed if they can achieve that lofty metric. So here's what the book says. By achieving a profit to working capital over 45%, the business can generate necessary cash to cover taxes, interest, and dividends, and make required investments inside of the existing business through capital expenditures, working capital, and financing acquisitions. The goal of self-financed means that growth, whether organic or through acquisitions, will not dilute current shareholders through equity raises or rely on heavy debt financing.

43:23Preston Pysh:The 45 % can be further broken down to three categories. So the first 15 % was allocated to cover taxes. The second 15 % is reserved for dividend payments, which will be distributed to the parent company. And the remaining 15 % is internally invested for future growth and maintenance. So there's six levers that can be pulled by a business to boost the ratio. The first three involve raising profits. You can do things such as increase your sales volume, you can raise prices, and you can reduce costs. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Spending my days digging through the financials of the world's best businesses, and one thing becomes obvious fast.

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47:31Preston Pysh:All right, back to the show. The second three involve working capital management. You can reduce inventory, you can speed up customer payments, or you can extend supplier payment terms. Another vital part of BNB is their internal benchmark system known as the focus model. This integrates the 45 % profits to working capital KPI and applies it across all operating companies within the group. Each group and the companies inside are then ranked according to that KPI. The focus model has three levels to it. The first level is for businesses that require a lot of work. This is a profit to working capital below 25%.

48:06Preston Pysh:Increasing revenue is not the right solution for this segment. They need to focus on improving working capital management and profit margins. The second level is a profit to working capital of 25 to 45%. This strategy isn't too dissimilar from level one, but once you hit the higher end of the range, then you can start making growth investments to improve that top line. Now, the pinnacle is obviously when you get to a profit to working capital of about 45 % or higher. If you have done this work to get to this point, then you can focus on profitable growth via acquisitions as well as organic growth initiatives.

48:38Preston Pysh:So what's most interesting is how Bergman and Beving uses this metric to improve its business. Once you know your level, you can focus on aspects such as product performance, analyzing specific markets and customers, using them as a tool for assessing potential acquisitions, and even negotiating better supplier terms. And while some businesses claim to do all of these things, many companies fall short because their employees are not appropriately incentivized. B &B does a great job of incentivizing employees to progress to a higher level actively. As the book says, the overarching goal is for all employees to quickly see measurable impacts on financial performance.

49:20Preston Pysh:An example of this might be a salesperson who is incentivized to do good things that would reward themselves, the business, and shareholders all simultaneously. This might be things such as raising prices, avoiding discounting, asking customers for quicker payment or extending payment terms with suppliers. Now I could go on and on about BNB because the business is really excellent and has spawned numerous spinoffs, but I'm going to transition here and speak about two of the spinoffs that were covered in this book, which are Logarcrons and AdTech. So Logarcrons is interesting because it's a case study that a turnaround can really turn around, but we'll get back to that shortly.

49:56Preston Pysh:So Logarcrons was spun out of BNB in 2001, and it's actually been a hundred bagger ever since then, while compounding free cashflow at 16 % and owning a 19 % return on invested capital. So what do they do? Today, it's operating five divisions, Electrify, Control, TechSec, Niche Products, and International. Similar to B &B, each of the companies in each division has a leading position inside of its niche market. Since Logocrons is a generalist in their acquisition criteria, they can be very flexible and stay adaptable. Now, remember how I mentioned that B &B experimented with centralization here for a time.

50:32Preston Pysh:So Jorgen White, the CEO, then shifted similar to Logocrons, focusing more on niche products and businesses. So to write the ship for Logocrons, they realized that their customer concentration was too high using their specifically this distribution business model. Jorgen Vy, the CEO, then shifted similar to Logocrons, focusing more on niche product businesses. So one interesting initiative led by Jorgen Vy was the addition of these new divisions. So they didn't always have these five divisions that I mentioned. They actually started with three. So in 2012, they added this niche products division, which really took off for them.

51:06Preston Pysh:Now the book names a business inside of this division called ASEPT International, which makes ketchup dispensers. Now this business couldn't really be labeled and put under the original divisions. So they just created a new one and obviously had a lot of success. This niche product category was a major strategic victory, which allowed Logocrons to consolidate a number of higher margin businesses that just raised the bar for the entire company. They also ended up cloning one of BNB's most prominent traits in terms of incentives. They also used the 45 % profit to working capital KPI. A few other incentives that have worked well for this business are 15 % annual earnings growth rate over an entire economic cycle, and they achieved this in a particular way.

51:46Preston Pysh:So they do this via about one third organic growth while allowing the remaining profits to just come from value-added acquisitions. They aim for about 8 to 12 acquisitions per annum, and they aim also for a 25 % return on equity. Now, these are just excellent KPIs that really keep the business running well and adding shareholder value over the long term. Now, let's turn our attention to another B &B spinoff here, AdTech, and see what differentiates AdTech from B &B and Logarcrons. So similar to B &B and Logarcrons, AdTech has been a cash-generating machine since it was spun out in 2001. Since then, it's compounded free cash flow per share at about 19 % while delivering total shareholder returns up a massive 26%.

52:27Preston Pysh:AdTech seems more similar to Logocrons though than BNB, but differentiates itself in its divisions, which are automation, electrification, energy, industry solutions, and process technology. As his name implied, the focus of the business is more on technology. So this business learned a lesson that I have spend a lot of time focusing on, and that's that serial acquirers that do not prioritize performance through economic cycles tend to have a pretty tough time thriving over the long term. So I own two micro-cap serial acquirers that specialize in trust manufacturing and industrials. They both were somewhat of a market darling immediately post-COVID when money was cheap and inflation was rampant.

53:07Preston Pysh:Now, these two things acted as tailwinds for the business. While it's nice to have a business that can take advantage of these types of economic environments, the critical thing to remember is that these environments are not normalized. Ad tech went through a few periods, as all businesses do, that also weren't normalized, and they learned some vital lessons from it. Now, the first period was immediately after it IPO'd. So it actually IPO'd a week before 9-11. Horrible timing. At that time, ad tech was exposed to telecommunications, a sector which had been absolutely ravaged by the dot-com bubble bursting and then also by 9-11.

53:42Preston Pysh:Attec earned about 34 % of its revenue from telecommunications and automotive, and the business suffered as a result of this high reliance. So the business focused on improving profitability, increasing margins from 3.6 % to 6.7 % three years after the IPO. Then they began expanding their income streams, investing into a medical business that was eventually spun into ad life. Then in 2008, another headwind was offered up in the form of the great financial crisis. Specific segments of the business had massive drops in earnings, and some reported drops of 30 % in orders. So the company shifted focus even more decentralization, removing its centralized M &A function and separating its business into these four units, which could be more independently run.

54:26Preston Pysh:And during the shift, profits were actually plummeting. So they plummeted about 42 % in 2009. But on the plus side, cash from operations only decreased 5%, showing that the businesses that were inside of ad tech were able to make the best situation possible from some of the tweaks that they were working on inside of working capital. Since ad tech relies more on tech, there are particular upsides and downsides to that business model. The apparent upside is that technology obviously tends to have a lot of torque when it's in favor. This allows for the possibility of pretty high organic growth in individual businesses.

54:59Preston Pysh:And when a product is in high demand, it also offers great pricing power. But the downside is that technology obviously can become obsolete. If you went out to buy a horse carriage business that was utilizing some technology the year before the car was manufactured for public use, you probably didn't end up doing very well on that acquisition. So you have to really balance what you buy with both of these things in mind. And while this is challenging for most businesses, AdTech has demonstrated that it's entirely possible. I think AdTech is an excellent example of a great company. While I don't think they ever had bad management, the business also has gone through three different CEOs since 2001.

55:36Preston Pysh:Here was the performance of the company in terms of sales and shareholder value. So the first one was Roger Bergfuss from 2001-2008. He catered sales at 8 % and shareholder value at 19%. The second was Johan Shio from 2008 to 2018. He compounded sales at 6.6 % and shareholder value at 21%. And the current CEO is a gentleman named Nicholas Stenberg, whose compounded revenue at 15 % and shareholder value at 32%. So the business has incrementally increased its value for shareholders as it ages like, you know, a fine wine. It's very impressive. Now, the key to this business, like most others, is in its culture.

56:15Preston Pysh:As long as the culture of the company stays intact and is run by someone who fully embraces and can incrementally improve that culture, then chances are that shareholders are in excellent hands. Next, we move to a business that many of our listeners are going to be very, very familiar with, and that's Constellation Software. Constellation Software was engineered by its founder, who recently actually stepped down as CEO, and that's Mark Leonard. So Mark figured out early that VMS businesses were fascinating because they generated a lot of cash, but the downside to them was that that money couldn't really be reinvested.

56:48Preston Pysh:So he brainstormed ways to just reinvest the cash and came to the conclusion that he should just buy more of them with the cash that each of them generated. This created the flywheel effect that we see today. Generate cash that just reinvests that cash into more cash flow machines. It's the same strategy of basically every business in this book, which should tell you something very critical. Constellation has compounded operating profit at 33 % annually since its 2006 IPO, while maintaining its returns on capital employed by over 30%. Both of those resulted in the business being a 200 bagger, and that takes into account Constellation's recent over 30 % drawdown.

57:24Preston Pysh:So what are the ingredients for a business to succeed like Constellation Software has done? It's not too dissimilar from the businesses that we've already discovered, but Constellation puts its own spin on things. So the first here is the vertical market software VMS industry. While most people find these businesses boring due to their lack of growth, that's where the true advantage lies. Since Leonard realized he could gobble these up with very little competition on bids, he knew that he had an investment runway that could last for a very, very long time. The attractive part about VMS businesses are that the ones that Constellation looks for are usually the number one or two in their given market.

57:59Preston Pysh:They make up a low percentage of their customer's revenue. They have deep integrations into their customer's workflow and operations, and they are critical to the functioning of their customer's business model and backend systems. So as a result of all this, customers just tend to stick around, demonstrating the switching costs of the VMS business model. Additionally, since many of these businesses have these very, very deep integrations, they're much less likely to switch to a competitor if prices are raised. If you have a company that has depended on software for the last decade, it's going to be timely and energy-sucking to switch to a new software provider.

58:36Preston Pysh:You can also annoy your employees who are forced to train on new software that they just don't know how to use, which can even cause increased employee turnover. As Constellation scaled, Leonard realized that a decentralized model was necessary for its continued success, which is why I'll see Constellation broken down into smaller units that make up the whole corporation. The group under corporate level are known as operating groups. Each group is separated by the verticals inside of it. Then you have individual businesses inside of each of these verticals. For instance, the Jonas operating group encompasses the following verticals, hospitality, clubs and resorts, spa and fitness, construction, payment, and moving and storage.

59:15Preston Pysh:The individual verticals are then further divided into business units or individual companies. Each of these groups and business units is incentivized to continue to create cash flow that goes straight to the parent company. Constellation has, in my opinion, the best incentive program that I've ever seen in terms of alignment. So the incentive program has a variable incentive that's the key to the whole thing. So 75 % of employees' compensation goes into purchasing CSU shares on the open market. The shares are then held in escrow for three to five years. The variable incentive is based on achieving a ROIC of above 5%.

59:52Preston Pysh:This helps the business's capital allocators focus on optimizing for returns on invested capital and not just on returns. So let's say that you're a vertical inside of the Jonas Group, let's say in construction. Maybe you have a few million dollars to invest. You have two options. You can invest in your current businesses to increase organic growth, or you could acquire a new business. This decision will be guided by your incentive ROIC. If you achieve a ROIC of 28 % investing into one of your business units or have the option of a ROIC investing into a new business, you're probably going to opt for the higher ROIC option to optimize your incentive.

1:00:30Preston Pysh:In reality, CSU adds a bulk of its value adding new companies as long-term organic growth has averaged only about 2%. Now, one of my favorite Mark Leonard stories, which highlights just how good of a CEO he is, is when he decided to reduce his salary to zero and waive completely any bonuses. This made him purely into a shareholder of Consolation Software. In his 2015 annual letter, he wrote, This year, I'll take no salary, no incentive compensation, and I am no longer charging any expense to the company. This is not something you see every day, but shows a leader who is laser focused on creating shareholder value.

1:01:07Preston Pysh:It also shows a leader who did not think of the business as his own personal piggy bank. Many CEOs are drawn to the job because of the perks of working there. Leonard's perk was that he got to lead a business that he created and believed in, and continued to compound it to new heights. Now the final three businesses discussed in this book are Heiko, Amatec, and Judges Scientific. I'm going to summarize a few key lessons from these three businesses. So Heiko is a business which focuses on supplying critical parts to the aerospace industry, has some superb lessons from it. The first one is that a multi-generational family-run business can succeed at a very high level.

1:01:41Preston Pysh:Of course, this only works for specific companies where the next generation is actually interested in becoming involved with the family business, which is probably not the norm for most families in North America. Another area that stuck out to me with Heiko was its kind of courage to really just take on large and powerful competitors in the OEMs, original equipment manufacturers. So OEMs tend to have a stranglehold on spare parts. They can cause a lot of pain to their customers who may decide to go elsewhere if they wish. On top of this, when you're talking about parts that are highly regulated and scrutinized, it's just not easy to get a foot in the door and compete with them.

1:02:18Preston Pysh:But the Mendelsohn family has been doing it for three and a half decades incredibly successfully. Another key to Heiko's success as an acquirer is in retaining talent. While they buy enough of the company to be a majority owner, they know how powerful it is to have the seller involved in the business. So they often allow the seller to keep some skin in the game to keep them focused on the company and on making it better and better each year. For Amitech, a business that is widely diversified into industries such as aerospace, healthcare, energy, and advanced technology, I learned the importance of excellence.

1:02:49Preston Pysh:So excellence is a trait that, you know, anyone would love to have, but I think few actually possess. And in order to maintain it, it's a mixture of this natural inclination towards excellence and incentives. And I think Amatec really embraced excellence as part of its culture. Although Amatec runs a decentralized operation, there's always room for improvement. So Amatec has these specialists, which they call black belts. These are Amatec's experts in eliminating waste and reducing variations and defects. These black belts will steer week-long Kaizen events to help explore inefficiencies in a subsidiary and help create solutions to fix them.

1:03:27Preston Pysh:Now, I think this point on Amitek going to their individual subsidiaries is crucial because I believe there are some misconceptions with investors when looking at successful CEO acquirers and assuming that the good CEO acquirers only acquire perfect companies that don't require any coaching or help to improve. For instance, a former Constellation Software performance manager in the TIP mastermind community told me, quote, at Constellation Software, the portfolio CEO's job is mostly to coach their business unit leaders to high performance beside finding new deals. And as you've seen with a lot of the compounders that we've gone over today, there have been many bumps in the road on the way to success.

1:04:05Preston Pysh:So when you're looking for a compound in the future, just realize that just because a business is maybe going through some headwinds and the parent company needs to get involved with the individual business units, it doesn't mean that that business is not any good. And the last business that I'm going to cover today is Judges Scientific. They specialize in acquiring niche, highly profitable instrument companies. I find Judges Scientific fascinating as they've only completed about 25 acquisitions since their IPO way back in 2003, yet it's already a hundred bagger. Their CEO, David Securel, has a great quote on acquisitions.

1:04:40Preston Pysh:We are not interested in the speed of acquisition, but in the speed of value creation. My big lesson from Judges Scientific is just how vital organic growth can be. So when you think about it, for a business to compound at a 24 % kegger, organic growth is obviously going to have to be massive if you are only acquiring new businesses at a pace of about one per year. And that's completely true. So judges has averaged an organic growth rate of about 7 % to 9 % annually. Another aspect of judges that I really appreciate is the emphasis on the KPI that they use, which is return on total invested capital or ROTIC.

1:05:19Preston Pysh:Securel uses ROTIC instead of return on capital employed because he feels that return on capital employed is just an accounting fiction. So returns on capital employed allows the denominator to get smaller as assets are amortized or goodwill is adjusted. ROTIC does not. Securel being, you know, highly rational, believes that returns should be calculated based on the actual capital invested and not in make-believe numbers. So a simple example will suffice here. And we'll use judges scientific. So in judges latest earnings release, they noted a row tick of about 18%. Now let's create an amortization of intangibles and goodwill of call it 40 million pounds.

1:05:57Preston Pysh:Now this one adjustment makes the return on capital employed 38%, which is obviously a much higher number than the row tick that they use as their KPI. Now, the key lessons from the compounders that I think investors can really take away revolve around recognizing the power of time, capital efficiency, and culture in driving long-term wealth creation. The book emphasizes that shareholder value is created when companies consistently have a return on invested capital above their cost of capital, and that the very few exceptional businesses that are capable of doing this over long periods of time deserve premium valuations.

1:06:32Preston Pysh:Traditional valuation frameworks often fail to capture the potential of these firms simply because investors tend to discount future cash flows too heavily. The company's profile demonstrate that a sustainable reinvestment at high rates of return, combined with disciplined capital allocation, is far more critical than short-term valuations. What truly distinguishes these businesses is a combination of decentralization, performance-driven culture, and a durable reinvestment engine. The great compounders empower people closest to the customer, maintain a lean structure, and use very, very clear incentives that align management and shareholder interests.

1:07:08Preston Pysh:This decentralization not only nurtures entrepreneurship and accountability, but also prevents bureaucracy from choking innovation. Meanwhile, these companies protect their downside through diversification across industries and geographies, and they build resilience by continuously reinvesting profits into heroic opportunities, whether that be organic or through disciplined acquisitions. Ultimately, investors should recognize that identifying the next compounder requires pinpointing businesses that can leverage time as a competitive advantage. It's the rare combination of a long runway, consistent reinvestment, and a culture that rewards excellence that drives exponential growth.

1:07:46Preston Pysh:Compounding is not just a mathematical phenomenon. It's an organizational one. The investor's job is to recognize and hold onto businesses that can sustain high returns over decades, even if they appear expensive in the short run. Because the magic of compounding only reveals itself through time. That's all I have for you today. Want to keep the conversation going? Follow me on Twitter at IrrationalMRKTS or connect with me on LinkedIn to search for Kyle Grief. I'm always open to feedback, so please feel free to share how I can make this podcast even better for you. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

1:08:21Kyle Grieve:Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow We Study Billionaires on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor's Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.