Nerd Out on Business

Reverse-Engineer the Best Companies Before Your Coffee Gets Cold

Day traders study charts. Business builders study companies. Guess which one builds wealth?

Nerd Out on Business is your daily 5-minute breakdown of real companies. Real tactics you can swipe today.

Archive

The Disneyland of Pumpkin Patches

The Disneyland of Pumpkin Patches

Inside Vala’s Pumpkin Patch, a 400-acre seasonal powerhouse where family tradition meets serious reinvestment and execution.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
Backup power meets the AI gold rush: inside Generac

Backup power meets the AI gold rush: inside Generac

The standby generator king wants a seat at the data-center table. But can backup power become a front-line business?

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
How Diana Shipping makes money when the seas get rough

How Diana Shipping makes money when the seas get rough

A look inside how one Greek ship owner profits (and struggles) with the world’s most volatile index.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
Amcor: The quiet giant of packaging (and what you can learn from it)

Amcor: The quiet giant of packaging (and what you can learn from it)

How a “boring” packaging firm built a $15B cash machine. I also share some information on a new software product I'm building called Nerd Out.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
The Art of Boring Growth: How Kellanova Wins With Snacks, Distribution, and Execution

The Art of Boring Growth: How Kellanova Wins With Snacks, Distribution, and Execution

What Kellanova’s 35% gross margins teach about premiumizing your core products.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
Taking a Few Weeks Off

Taking a Few Weeks Off

My dad is quite sick so I'm taking some time off to focus on him and family.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
GlobalFoundries: Winning Without the Cutting Edge

GlobalFoundries: Winning Without the Cutting Edge

After walking away from the bleeding-edge race in 2018, GF doubled down on mature and specialty chips. The pivot shows how focus and discipline can carve out durable niches.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
Equipment Makers Want You Forever, Not Just Today

Equipment Makers Want You Forever, Not Just Today

Ingersoll Rand’s playbook shows how to convert hardware sales into recurring revenue through service contracts, financing, and monitoring. Entrepreneurs can copy the lesson: your first sale should set up years of repeat business.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
Lemons, Land, and Leverage

Lemons, Land, and Leverage

Limoneira’s lemon orchards deliver thin margins, but its housing JV has a crop that is hard to beat: cash. The real estate story is less about citrus and more about turning farmland into a pipeline of lumpy but meaningful cash.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
Moats in a Cyclical Industry

Moats in a Cyclical Industry

Teradyne’s fortunes rise and fall with smartphones, servers, and memory. Their survival strategy (services, software stickiness, and a net-cash balance) shows how to design resilience into an otherwise lumpy business.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
Hurco’s CNC Edge: Controls First, Scale Later

Hurco’s CNC Edge: Controls First, Scale Later

With zero debt and a service annuity, Hurco has staying power. The problem is gross margin compression and operating losses that remind us why scale matters in capital equipment.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
From Blue Water to Red Ink

From Blue Water to Red Ink

Free water testing and loyalty rewards helped Leslie’s lock in repeat customers. Yet shrinking margins and mounting debt highlight the thin line between a recurring-revenue engine and a profit squeeze.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
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