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

Taking a Week Off

Taking a Week 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
Alarm.com’s Quiet Growth Playbook

Alarm.com’s Quiet Growth Playbook

Margins are expanding, revenue is steady, and dealers stay locked in. But growth depends on keeping big tech at bay and managing an increasingly hardware-heavy channel.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
The 20% Toll Booth on Streaming Ads

The 20% Toll Booth on Streaming Ads

While Google and Meta guard their ecosystems, The Trade Desk thrives by playing referee. Its model shows how enabling both sides of a market can build loyalty without needing exclusivity. With that said, marketplaces are HARD.....builder beware.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
The 96% Rule That Built a $150B Insurer

The 96% Rule That Built a $150B Insurer

Behind the quirky ads, Progressive’s edge is ruthless process power. With a TTM operating margin near 16% and a combined ratio well below industry averages, they show how simple rules can scale into billions.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
A Business Worth 14x EBITDA ($4.5 billion)

A Business Worth 14x EBITDA ($4.5 billion)

Envestnet gives financial advisors billing, planning, and rebalancing tools that are tough to replace. They also have a unique pricing lever where the majority of their revenue comes from asset-based fees, which enables them to grow as assets and markets increase. They were acquired by Bain Capital for $4.5 billion.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
Incumbency Pays Dividends (literally) in Defense Electronics

Incumbency Pays Dividends (literally) in Defense Electronics

Leonardo DRS makes the kind of gear you’ll never see, but militaries can’t function without. Once their tech is qualified into submarines or vehicle platforms, it’s nearly impossible to swap them out. Incumbency their real moat.

Nick Horob
Nick Horob
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