Operational Velocity

In 2001, Bergman & Beving split itself in three. One of its daughters, Addtech, listed eight days before 9/11 with fifty subsidiaries, a nine-person head office and a telecom crash already under way. Twenty-five years later it runs more than 150 companies and sells about SEK 23 billion a year. This episode is about the number behind that growth: profit over working capital, with a 45% minimum for every subsidiary. We look at how the ratio works, why Addtech runs above 80% while its parent runs at 36% on the same target, and how one number decides what Addtech buys. We also cover how the model survived...

Meet the grandfather of Nordic serial acquirers, Bergman and Beving. Before Addtech, Lagercrantz, AddLife and Momentum Group, there was one Swedish technical trading house, founded in Norrköping in 1906 by two engineers, Arvid Bergman and Fritz Beving. In the spring of 1981, its CFO Anders Börjesson and his colleague Torsten Fardell wrote down a single ratio: operating profit over working capital (P/WC). Business units below a 45 percent threshold got no growth capital. Forty-five years later, that number still shapes how a family of six listed companies allocates capital.

This episode opens our Nordic serial acquirers season. We...

In 2011, Brad Jacobs bought control of a $158 million Michigan-based logistics company at approx. $7 a share. Fifteen years later, that one share has become three NYSE companies: XPO, GXO and RXO. This episode tells the XPO story as a logistics story, not a deal story. We map every freight mode Jacobs bought into, from brokerage and LTL to intermodal, last mile and contract logistics. Then we follow the Norbert Dentressangle and Con-way deals, the technology-led integration, the spin-offs, and what was left standing: a 300-terminal LTL network with more than 30% spare door capacity by design, its own trailer factory, insourced...

On 31 July 2026, Alimentation Couche-Tard, the company behind Circle K agreed to buy Poland's Żabka: more than 13,000 stores and around US$8.6 billion in equity value, the largest deal in its history. Just six days earlier, Seven & i, the owner of 7-Eleven, had pulled out of its own Żabka investment. A year before that, Couche-Tard had walked away from a US$47 billion pursuit of Seven & i itself. This episode opens up the operating system behind both decisions. We cover:

In 1984, a physicist wrote a novel to sell his factory software. It worked too well, but it cost him his company. Eli Goldratt's "The Goal" became one of the most influential business books ever written. By his own account, operations managers that read it got better results than clients who had bought his scheduling software. He refused to pretend otherwise, and his shareholders showed him the door.This episode tells that story, then opens the Theory of Constraints for operators: the five focusing steps, Drum-Buffer-Rope, and why throughput accounting starts fights with finance. We test the evidence: a Marine...

Lifco is a Swedish serial acquirer that owns approximately 275 small niche businesses such as: dental products, demolition robots, crane attachments, recycling machinery and reports EBITA of 129% of capital employed excluding goodwill. In 2019, they mutually parted ways with their longstanding CEO and arguably the architect of their operating model. Since that time, they managed to triple their EBIDTA. In this episode, we unpack Lifco's story and more specifically break down the acquisition screen, the two-person ethics committee, the put/call structure that keeps sellers invested, and the "install a chairman" operating model, and set it against Danaher's business system, Constellation...

In 1986, a delegation from a German equipment maker walked into an unremarkable office building in Charlotte, North Carolina. Only twenty-two people worked in it.  There was no executive dining room, no corporate jet, no chief technology officer and no R&D department. The man waiting for them, Ken Iverson, was about to commit roughly the entire net worth of his company to a casting technology that had never been run at commercial scale. A hundred companies' engineers had inspected the same machine. It took eight years for a single competitor to follow him. This episode is about why. Not t...

An eye surgeon in southern India sits between two operating tables. She finishes one cataract operation, turns ninety degrees, and starts the next on a patient who is already prepped and waiting. Six to eight operations an hour, against a conventional norm closer to one. They did not make the surgery faster. They removed the waiting. That single design choice is the seed of an operating system that now performs three quarters of a million procedures a year, gives away roughly half of them, funds itself without donors, and records infection rates of two per ten thousand cases. In...

Technology doesn't create value by existing in your business. It creates value when deployed against a specific constraint, with a defined metric, and someone accountable for delivering it. In this episode, Gautam Basu draws a hard line between technology as operational leverage, where it genuinely moves the P&L  and technology as narrative, where it mostly moves the slide deck.

From warehouse robotics delivering 2x productivity gains in weeks, to ERP implementations burning through 50–70% failure rates, to the one question that clears every boardroom fastest. This is the unsentimental, data-grounded case for deploying technology like a wrench, not...

Tim Cook arrived at Apple in March 1998 and inventory went from about a month to about six days. Almost nobody knows it's in Apple's own 10-K. The company disclosed days of supply in inventory as a line item: 31 days in FY1997, 6 days in FY1998, 2 days in FY1999. Inventory in dollars: $437m, $78m, $20m. This episode reconstructs how, using Apple's filings rather than the folklore and then asks the harder question: what did the doctrine actually build, and what did it cost? We cover the Cook's inheritance of Apple's operations, six moves he made in restructuring it's supply chain, balance...

Thirty years in the private equity ecosystem, most people accumulate a network in that time. Kit Lisle built a room. Mr. Lisle spent eight years as a US Army Military Intelligence officer, including a posting at the National Military Joint Intelligence Center under the Joint Chiefs. Then he founded  Acclaro Growth Partners and spenr two decades running commercial due diligence for PE firms, investment banks, and portfolio companies. More recently, Kit built TheOperators.pe, a leading collaborative peer community for PE-backed executives and operating partners. This conversation is about what he can see from inside that room that almost n...

In 1961, a young professor published a five-page proof of a formula everyone used but no one had verified: L = λW. The number of things in a system equals the rate they arrive times the time they spend inside. It looked like a footnote. It turned out to be the physics of money. This episode follows that little law out of a Cleveland classroom and into the real world through three companies, across three eras, that stopped competing on products and started competing on time. One drained its inventory to survive scarcity and accidentally built the most studied production system i...

In 1950, an unknown American told 21 Japanese company presidents they’d take over world markets in five years. He was wrong, they did it in four. His name was W. Edwards Deming.  During the Second World War, the United States trained more than 31,000 people in quality methods. It was the largest quality training programme ever built. After the war ended, America was the only major economy left with its factories standing and quality stopped being a differentiator. The control charts came off the walls. Thirty years later, Detroit lost four billion dollars in a single year and the US government had...

Nick Howley founded TransDigm in 1993 with $25 million of equity and four aerospace parts units nobody wanted. Over the next 28 years, the firm compounded at roughly 33- 37% a year, almost identically under private equity ownership and under public-market scrutiny. Today the company runs 54% EBITDA margins on manufactured hardware. The operating system was three items long, finished in 24 months, and never revised: price, cost, new business. But the drivers only explain half of it which very few people analyze:  the aerospace supply chain  (OEM, Tier 1, Tier 2/3), and service parts economics, the AOG clock that makes price elasticity functionally zero, the exponential re...

Everyone's knows about Elon Musk as a visionary, but few know him as an operator. This episode is not a profile about Mars,  "first principles" as a personality type, or the ten-companies-one-genius arc. This is an operator's autopsy: how Musk actually ran two of the most consequential manufacturing systems of the last twenty years, what he built, what he broke expensively and publicly, and the five-step doctrine that emerged from the wreckage. The Model 3 production collapse: first-pass yield as low as 14%, robots pulled out, a tent assembly line improvised in a Fremont parking lot and the five-step improvement algorithm i...

Mark Leonard, the founder of Constellation Software is a private man. He doesn't give interviews or speak at conferences but for twelve years he wrote annual shareholder letters that practitioners described as among the best capital allocation writing since Warren Buffett. Mr. Leonard founded Constellation Software in 1995 with CAD $25 million in seed capital. By the time he stepped down as President in September 2025, the company had completed over 1,000 acquisitions across more than 100 industry verticals, employed more than 50,000 people worldwide, and generated $11.6 billion in annual revenue, compounding shareholder returns at approximately 30% per year since its 2006 IPO on the Toronto Stock...

In this episode, we analyze four companies in four different industries with one core discipline that differentiates them from their competitors. We break down how Seven-Eleven Japan engineered a convenience store replenishment system so precise it killed the bullwhip effect in a 10,000-store network. How Ken Iverson of Nucor Steel ran a four-billion-dollar steel company from a 22-person headquarters and compounded earnings at 17% per year in one of the worst industries in the world. How Frito-Lay built and defended a 15,000-route direct delivery network that most CFOs would have outsourced — and why that "expensive" decision is the source of th...

In this episode, we dive into the story of two brothers, Steven and Mitchell Rales, who built a unique operating acquisition machine from a Montana fishing trip, a dormant REIT, and a diesel brake factory in Connecticut. The result was 40 years of compounding, 180,000%+ total shareholder returns, three complete portfolio transformations, and a spinoff machine that kept producing independent, high-performing companies long after Danaher itself crossed $130 billion in market cap. We go deep into how the brothers leveraged the philosophy of Kaizen, the anatomy of the Danaher Business System and how it was built at Jake Brake and scaled across 200+...

In this episode, Gautam speaks with Rachel Lawler, Founder and Managing Director of Aperture Growth, to discuss the missing layer between operational alpha and commercial execution. Rachel makes a precise and uncomfortable argument: most mid-market businesses don't have an operating system; they have tribal knowledge, disconnected software, manual workarounds, and people filling the gaps between systems. They can tell you how much revenue they generated. Very few can tell you how that revenue was generated. Rachel describes why dashboards report outcomes but can't explain causality, what operational traceability actually means and why it matters and how the infrastructure most...

Most private equity firms will tell you they do operations. Platinum Equity is operations. In this episode, we go deep into one of the most consistently successful and least talked-about private equity firms on the planet. Thirty years, 500+ acquisitions, $50 billion under management, and a trademarked methodology that treats the "O" in M&A&O® not as an afterthought but as the entire thesis. We trace Tom Gores from a grocery store in Genesee, Michigan to a $7.2 billion acquisition of Ingram Micro — and unpack exactly what his firm does differently at every stage of the deal cycle: how operational diligence sta...

In finance, alpha is the excess return on an investment relative to a benchmark,  the portion of performance that can't be explained by market exposure or beta alone. It's the measure of whether a manager actually outperformed, or simply rode a rising market. For decades, private equity manufactured alpha through cheap leverage and multiple expansion, buy at a discount, add debt, wait for the market to re-rate the asset, sell high. That playbook, which accounted for the majority of buyout returns through 2022, no longer works in a higher-rate, higher-multiple environment.

Operational alpha is what's replaced it: excess r...

This is the introductory episode of Operational Velocity, where host Gautam Basu (PhD) lays out the thesis that underpins everything Operational Velocity is: cash flow is an operational outcome, not a financial one. That every metric your board cares about (e.g.) EBITDA margin, free cash flow conversion, return on capital employed has an operational driver sitting upstream of it. The episode works through four lenses: value creation through operations, operations-first leaders, technology as operational leverage, and what private equity has taught us about operational urgency. Each lens is a different way of seeing the same truth. Case studies...