YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Wilk

lines on the record: 68
first: 2025-03-09
most recent: 2025-03-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, thank you so much again for the invite. This has been really fun conversation. I appreciate all the thoughtful questions. My website's probably the best place to go. GraystoneValue.com, Graystone, is spelled G-R-E-Y. I'm also on Twitter at aK Wilk, and I have a Greystone Capital Handle as well. I'm always enjoying meeting, talking with, and getting to know like-minded investors. And I have a pretty active presence on there and share most of what I do publicly. So the website and Twitter are the best places to go. There's contact information on the site and always happy to hear from investors or anybody else interested in talking about these obscure small companies.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Larger focus of mine to just try to think about this sort of easily answerable question of will this information matter in five to ten years? And will I be thinking about it? Will it drive the results that I'm going for in the portfolio and really just focus on what I'm consuming? We're really centered when I'm consuming around that. Those sorts of questions, if that makes sense.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The types of things that they're doing in terms of their go-to market strategy that will best position them over time. In other words, how are any of these businesses that I own making themselves better over time, which then causes obviously positive financial results to flow through? And so I view a really large part of my job as, number one, determining where to spend my time, but also spending my time on the latter thing, which is, again, focusing on the actual businesses and the industry and uncovering the things that will help me when I research the next investment or will last a lot longer as patterns are built up in terms of what I'd like to look for and less on, again, the sort of short-term news of like, here's what happened, here's how share price reacted or how the market reacted. And then that information is kind of in one ear and not the other, in my head and outside of it as quick as it came in. And so it's become a much.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things, whether it's a single quarter or some piece of macron news, have very short expiration dates. So XYZ company earned 10 cents a share in Q4 versus Analyst expectations of 12 cents a share. That information, it becomes useless or irrelevant or goes away the second that you read the result if you're an investor. It has no use moving forward other than what it told you relative to expectations right in that moment. I think just having spent some time reflecting on this, it's not rocket science. But the more important thing to sort of understand and focus on would be what sort of factors are driving industry growth and why. How is the company setting themselves up and how are they best positioned to take advantage of what the industry is doing over time relative to competitors? What things are they putting in place relative to their bench, employees, their culture?”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not a business or an industry. And so, in terms of what the market focuses on, it's hard to say what matters and what doesn't on any given day, I would say. The market has become incredibly short-term focused. And I believe more so since I started Greystone, this can partly be blamed by the industry structure where the majority of active managers exist in these pod structures with very different risk reward profiles than Greystone and very different mandate. But they control a large amount of capital, not the majority. And also there's quantitative-based strategies and passive investing, which play a role amiss. But by and large, because of this current structure, I would say companies are judged very, very hard on the most recent quarter. And even their short-term outlooks. And macro news also plays a huge part in investor decision-making and kind of daily trading activity. And I think many of these.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of time just kind of taking long walks and thinking about what I want to include in my letters, which I try to make as useful as possible to both investors and people who are interested in looking at Greystone. And I went back and read all of the broad market commentary sections of each letter and walked away from that process with not a lot of useful takeaways moving forward in terms of the types of things that I'd like to focus or talk about or even just anecdotes that will help me over time yet I was spending a portion of time each quarter thinking about these things and trying to get an informed opinion and so I just it just became very obvious I could kind of draw a straight line to the lack of usefulness to talking about that sort of thing and kind of what I derived from it and so I just again one of those things where the evolution of what I'm doing over time and sort of put my foot down and decide I don't want to do it anymore and would rather focus on learning something incremental”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Snippet in my letter was very much inspired by Morgan Hausl's book, Shame As Ever, which is excellent. I finally got around to reading it this year and there's some amazing anecdotes and stories and data in there. But he had a chapter or so on permanent versus expiry knowledge. And I think he's written about it before and I've seen it in other places. And so that section of my letter”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time and there are lots of factors to discuss there, but I kind of had trying to lean more towards discovering those sorts of things among small companies and caused me to reevaluate a business like an N, which again will probably work out fine as an investment, but where if it got to a certain price target, now it would be my sort of way of thinking about cutting loose. And again, you know, with anything, I would evaluate that investment as well as at scale or as the share price went up or whatever. But I thought about the just what's behind that business very cyclical. They're not really in control of their own destiny if something goes wrong with the economy. It didn't check some attributes that I really like to stick to moving forward. And as a result, I don't think it shit very well. So it didn't make sense to kind of continue to hold that one.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the actual business, not so much if they're hitting cash flow targets or what the multiples should be, is this worth 12 times or 15 times, but more so, is the business doing things today that will position it for success in the future? And how might that unfold over time relative to what their competitors are doing? And it kind of leans much more toward the qualitative side. Like when I say quality even, there's much more to be derived outside of the financials and quantitative work that comes across on a quarterly basis that I think is typically priced in. I think that's a big reason why you see some of these companies like in Amazon or Berkshire or even a Netflix, et cetera, just kind of grow into a new valuation over time because people start to come to appreciate these like culture competitive advantage and cultural aspects that really can't be replicated as a company scales and that kind of widening over.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I start doing that or overly focusing on future valuation or price ranges or start thinking about a business at a certain valuation and how I will act when it gets there, that means by definition I am not thinking about holding it for a long period of time. And the concept of intrinsic value can change very significantly for a business during the course of our ownership, both up and down. And there are many examples of businesses in the portfolio where despite higher valuation, the risk reward remains very good again referencing Lima. And I don't think that's something I would have been open-minded enough to sort of work through if I had a set valuation target for Limbock or other businesses. I think quality, that's why I kind of prefer leaning more towards the quality side or just owning a really good business because it allows me to think a little bit more directionally and not precisely and focus on what's taking place.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“time, similar to what I was just talking about with Limbach, meaning if things are working well, revisions are made to the upside, and there's a potential for very long-term holding period. And as I mentioned previously, my worst and best of mistakes have been selling great businesses run by great management teams too early. And I've done this enough in the past to hopefully put my foot down finally and stop doing it. On the great investment side, I always find that To just touch on NN Inc. for a second and the selling of that position, I didn't view that as a great business. And for the reasons I just described, it didn't make sense to continue to hold it in the portfolio. One of the reasons is because I do like the management team. I think it will work out very well. But with NN, I found myself thinking about a specific valuation target or like price upside. And whenever”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say that this is one of those things that again was not so much a conscious decision made, but more, as you mentioned, an evolution of how I think in kind of what types of businesses I want in the portfolio. I've been doing some work on this recently, as I mentioned in my letter, and kind of developed some clarity about how I want to move forward. And there's a big difference, as I mentioned in my letter also, there's a big difference between a great business and a great investment or a quality business and a great investment. And I have no opinion about kind of which one investors should own, but analyzing my own past mistakes and successes, I've kind of revealed that I should be leaning more towards the quality side moving forward. And that's because quality businesses, for many reasons, have much longer runways for growth. They're competitive and cultural advantages are much wider, or sorry, they widen over time. The market's understanding of them evolves over time.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Find a smaller company, ride it to a larger one, and now we can sort of participate in whatever institutional flows come from the company being above a billion dollars in market cap. And this happens very often where if I find an idea like Limbach, I'll kind of lay out the investment case. I'll find some insight into why they're going to succeed moving forward. And I'll bring it to people and I'll say, hey, you should take a look at this business for XYZ reasons. They might manage more money than I do and they'll say something along the lines of let me know when it gets to a billion dollars in market cap. And that's fine, but I like to ride it from 200 million to a billion or, you know, again, try to find those situations where it works. We can get the compounding engine going at a very small stage and make them larger companies. But if there's a takeaway from your question, which hopefully I've answered, it's that I'm really just looking for quality business, quality management, long runway for growth.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Become a larger one. And finding a company like Limbaugh that starked out when we get involved as $150, $200 million market cap, that can eventually become a billion dollar business. It's something that's really attractive to me. And if you're a larger fund, you have a very difficult time buying this business. You're probably spending less time on it, paying less attention because it looks overly cyclical. There's a number of...”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Become kind of a cash gusher. They're allocating capital to acquisition both organically and de-acquisitions where they can acquire businesses in their industry for very low multiple that are very accretive to their business. And there's a very long runway to do so. And at the time I found the company, they did check off some of these boxes if they could just focus on kind of the core business. But they had the service business as a very good core business. They had a very good management team, which had just changed. And there were these other special situation elements involved. Again, management change, strategy shift, changing margin profile that I didn't think were quite reflected in the valuation or what they could accomplish. And again, it has worked out brilliantly. Hindsight is 2020, of course. I'm not too much focused on the outcome. I'm talking about the business when I say it's worked brilliantly. And I think the runway is very, very strong. And so I really try to find one of the most attractive situations for Grayson is to find a small business that can”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is uninvestable under the prior CEO, and the management team changed a few years ago. My ears perked up. They handed the business off after an extensive search to an internal candidate. They promoted the COO, who was somebody who had gotten to know and who has just been excellent as an operator and capital allocator. And in addition to that management change, which is in line with some of those special situation elements we were talking about, there was also a strategy shift where the new CEO said, well, now we're going to focus on the higher margin, more attractive, less cyclical part of our business, and we're going to return kind of to common sense and start doing things that make sense for our cost structure, our margin profile, and our cash generation. And that's exactly what's happened. And so they kind of shifted the business from 80% construction, 20% service to now 70% service and 30% construction today. It's had the effect of transforming the margin profile.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More the service business, which is much more recurring revenue, high margin, less economically sensitive, lower cyclicality. And then they had this other shiken other business that was very much construction focused, where they would participate in large scale construction projects with building owners in terms of renovations and even building construction element of their business had run into some furious issues for a number of years. It was lower margin, it was much more labor intensive. significant cost overruns and project delays, but it was something that the prior CEO spent a lot of time focusing on because it grew their revenue and he could take these large-scale projects and they wouldn't add to their backlog. And even if it was lower margin, he was much more focused on what he thought, I think Wall Street or the market wanted to see in terms of the business growing. And as a result, the business suffered. And I had followed Limbock for a number of years.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, I kind of had to re underwrite my assumptions over time, and the earnings power has grown so much that what I initially underwrote is no longer true. And as I mentioned Limbock being a great example of kind of everything that has worked out well, that's an excellent situation for Greystone to continue to hold and for continued evaluation. So there's the expectation I was very wrong about the business to the upside in terms of what I thought they could accomplish. They've exceeded all of my expectation. And as time has gone on, as I mentioned, the earnings power has increased so considerably that I believe that the upside remain and the risk reward remains really, really favorable. But they possess all of these really interesting characteristics where happy to get into specific detail, but at a high level, there were a number of moving parts with the business where they had two different segments at the time. The one I just described that is much”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chess as well. I mentioned syllogist earlier, which I won't continue to harp on, but there's another company in the portfolio called Limbach, and that has been a great example of everything that I just described and kind of captures the business itself, captures nearly everything that I look for in a long-term holding. And Limbach is a building system solutions firm. So they partner with building owners, commercial building owners in the healthcare space, the data center space, industrial space to service their critical systems like their mechanical, their engineering, their plumbing, their HVAC systems. And when I got involved with the business, they were maybe $150 million or 200 million dollar market cap. The market cap is now over a billion dollars. Obviously, that has worked out well. But as the business has grown and as I guess the stock has worked, which is kind of a lower priority focus.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My winners, I think, a few things in common, a really high quality core business, as we were talking about, a great management team and a really long runway for growth with earnings power that is growing over time. And where I can get some real juice on the return and kind of where things work out very, very well is when that earnings power for some reason is not apparent just by looking at the financials or reading the filings. And that is definitely I think provided a little bit more torque for the investments that have worked out very well. And obviously there's a lot of nuance there, but high quality core business, great management team, long runway for growth with the changing to the positive earnings power is very common characteristics for the investments that have worked out the best. I think changing expectations, as I talked about before with kind of a changed view of the business has been a really good formula for success.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got involved. I think an important part of my process to just be more patient and to kind of let the management teams execute and to see if I missed anything in my sort of initial due diligence because a really important thing that happens if you own companies for a long period of time is that I will get to know a business a lot better no longer I own it and after I start buying shares than beforehand and obviously I do my best to check on my boxes and manage risk as best I can prior to entering into an investment but there's no substitute for owning the business there's no substitute for following the sort of quarterly cadence over a period of a few years and I've learned through that process that it's again depending on the situation very okay to average up over time but usually very beneficial if things are working out well and if the runway for something remains long”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought that's been a big part of my process. But in terms of the moving forward and how I approach physician side thing, I think my process has evolved to the point where I become much more patient now. There was a time, I think, when I first launched Grades and before where I would be, I was not hesitant to enter into very large positions at cost. And that has changed for a number of reasons. You know, it does happen where I where I can kind of skirt the rules there if the right situation presents itself. But now I can be much more patient and I'm not afraid to average up or down in any particular position. And I really like to see a company execute so I might sit in a core to seven to eight percent position for a period of time. And then as risk is removed or as the company executes, I would be happy with scaling that up, which I've done for a lot of the businesses in the portfolio. Sometimes at multiple tire than where I initially.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have extensive knowledge and industry experience that can help move a business forward in a positive way based on what they've done with larger companies, that the company can rely on if they run into some issues. That's a huge one. And none of that exists. They were polished. There's a company in our portfolio, innovative food holdings. It's a food distribution, especially food distribution business that I believe has probably the highest quality management team on board for a company of that size that I've ever seen that y'all very excited about that business but and obviously check all of my boxes in terms of the management and corporate governance. And so that's been a big part of improving what I'm doing moving forward is just evaluating that side of things and trying to as best I can. This is very hard as well, but trying as best I can to spend time with the management teams and the boards and just get a sense of who they are as well and kind of how they're thinking about the business. I like people who are kind of singularly focused on the opportunity set, likely again because their owner.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not that it wasn't before, but I just made enough mistakes with evaluating that people involved that I changed some things and evaluating corporate governance and making sure there's very shareholder friendly management teams and boards in place is very important as well. And with Polish, there was not. And I think I overlooked it given the upside, the potential upside of the business. And that was also a mistake. There were some significant problems with the board, with the experience level there. which the way they were treating the business and how they thought about moving the company forward with their communication policy and all those things again yellow flag that kind of lead into red flag that i failed to act on and so that's been i think evaluate within small companies i'm i've come to understand that lack of evaluating corporate governance can be a source of inefficiency kind of finding businesses that are growing but have these really really strong boards and management teams in place that”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My focus on people and track records and incorporating some aspect of that into my process, whereby I no longer almost always am no longer interested in backing a first time CEO, their exception, meaning like a CEO that has started a business but has operated for 10 years and then takes it public is very different from a first-time CEO who's operating a business that is public for the first time. And there's also nuance in there. Young CEOs with a lack of track record and history are likely things that I avoid at this point. And the evaluating of people side of things is also there have been a lot of parts of my process that have been tweaked to do that in terms of the time I spend with management. There's been some much more pointed questions that have emerged from the process of going through polished and that investment that I think have helped me better assess the people behind the investment. Again, that sort of area of the due diligence has been just moved up to a higher priority.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I certainly impartial career out approach that you mentioned, but I'll get to that in a second. It's very hard to derive a process changing portfolio management rule from a single mistake. At least that's what I've learned. It's more a collection of things and then reflecting on kind of what went right, what has gone right and what has gone wrong. My biggest investment mistakes have actually been selling poly businesses with long growth runways too soon. It's not been indestroyed I got wrong and I've been fairly decent at portfolio management side of managing the stakes by hopes maybe others would disagree. And I'm pretty cognizant of when I've screwed something up and having to exit. In this case, again, the behavioral mistake was not doing so. And so the biggest lesson from polished specifically was that the position size should be zero and cut ruthlessly. As soon as there's evidence that the thesis is not no longer intact or that I'm wrong about when I thought about the business, the two most important things that emerge from that are”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The position. And yeah, it resulted in one of the, I think, worst and best of mistakes I've ever made, but a lot of sort of rich data to take from that that improved my process. And again, happy to get into specifics about what I tweaked and changed, et cetera.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Level, I think that investment was the perfect storm of financial portfolio management and behavioral mistakes. And I severely overestimated the quality of the business and the quality of the management team. And then when red flags emerged, I failed to act quickly and decisively enough. And as I think we had talked about, you and I had talked about previously, I did a decent job of managing the position through many of the ups and downs of holding it. And then at the very sort of tail end of the investment, I sort of compounded the mistake by adding to the position pretty significantly when the company announced that they would be trying to sell themselves and hired a bunch of people to take steps in that direction. And it ended up in a pretty nasty permanent loss of capital. And a lot of lessons that came from that. But again, the mistake was a perfect storm of both business related mistake, management mistake. And then behavioral mistakes in terms of managing.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“SEO presence was such that they had kind of the secret sauce in their geographies. They were nationwide pine retailer, but they were excellent at reaching customers and getting people to visit their site in order appliances. And the high-level thesis at the time, it's been some time since I revisited it, but the high-level thesis at the time was that the business was growing pretty significantly in the post-COVID world. The majority of appliances would likely shift online over time. This was an incredibly big market. They were set to capture a portion of that. It was run by really passionate entrepreneur who had grown the business from zero to 400 million in sales. At the time I got involved. And their cost structure was such that there would be some pretty decent operating leverage as they continue to scale. And I thought that the company could reach a billion in sales at some point and they would have marginifically in excess of their brick and mortar pierced. And I was wrong about all of that at a high level.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, we could probably do an entire episode on Polish alone. But when I first came across the business, it seemed like it was incredibly mispriced because earnings power was increasing considerably. The company, there was a number of special situation attributes in place in terms of the way the company went public, the lack of eyeballs, therewith a management change, and a number of areas that pointed to this could be the company was discounted for these specific regions and polishes and e-commerce appliance retailer or was the company filed for bankruptcy. So that is a good foreshadowing to where we're headed here. But the company was an e-commerce appliance retailer. And that's actually a fairly good business. They were fairly asset-like. They were growing very fast. They had a very different cost structure than the brick and mortar stores. And they were excellent at marketing online.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just for the company specifically, and a management team that scores highly on those attributes is a really good sign just in a vacuum, but it doesn't make for an investment, a good or bad investment. It's just kind of a way to aggregate the data that I'm gathering and the information that has come across. And it kind of tries to make the process a little bit more quantitative. But again, it's a very, it's a people thing. It's about evaluating human beings, which is very, very difficult. And so it's always going to be this imperfect giant. And I've been blindsided kind of in both ways, good and bad with some of these companies. And so I would just say that I try to be as precise as I can and gather as much data as I can, but it's an imperfect process and it's an ongoing, ever-changing, ever-evolving sort of thing that takes place.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you can take, if you can paint a good picture based on that information, and then both of you, both management and myself analyze the kind of competitive environment and get a good understanding of how they're reacting to things relative to their competitors or their peers. That's a very interesting subset of data, both stuff to sort of work through that's written and, sorry, quantitative, but also anecdotally. I usually, it's an ongoing process, but I come out of that process initially and ongoing with a lot of metrics to plug into this sort of manual scorecard system that I've developed. And it's very unscientific, but it gives me an idea of the various attributes I'm looking for in a management team and how they kind of score or grade on those criteria relative to the other investments in the portfolio, the other things that I'm looking at.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've owned for a long time, and I just feel like I'm getting to know the management teams on kind of a deeper level. And that's been very eye-opening to me just to see how things unfold over time. And you kind of get, I realized I kind of get let in on more and more things, the deeper that relationship is, not talking about the company specifically, but just kind of like what problems somebody is facing. And that can be very eye-opening as well. And just finding, if I can find sensible people who have a good understanding about their business and the industry and they know how to telegraph that, you can kind of build up a pattern over time and you get this sort of cadence of how they communicate and putting all that stuff together, it just paints a very nice picture of like, again, what kind of person you're dealing with, how they're likely to react in certain situations, how the business might perform. Obviously, there are always surprises, but how the business might perform in certain economic environments and then how they might react to that.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More and more, the longer I do this in the small company space, you don't always get that sort of history, but again, I'm very big on track record. So looking back over a management decision making history, both throughout the company and through their career is very important. How do they speak about the business and how does that align with what is actually unfolding? So do they have a really good understanding of the company? And are they able to communicate that in a, again, sort of like sensible trajectory? Do they, I'm not even talking about guidance per se, but if a company has an estimate of their earnings power and cost structure, but every single quarter they're whiffing on those estimate, that brings up a question of credibility, among other things. And so there's a number of examples that we could go into that help kind of paint this picture of what the track record is like. But it's a very, it's very much an ongoing process. Sometimes it takes years and there are companies in the portfolio now where”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that my worst investment mistakes have been backing young or first time CEOs in the public market space. It has never worked out well for me. And I can definitely see the sort of allure or sorry, appeal they're dusting in very large businesses with very long track record in industries that don't change that much because you have a very strong”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the issue is you don't know if they're lying. And so, what the best way to go about that is to try to piece together information that provides some kind of insight into those questions and getting to know the person is very helpful. One of the things I like to do with management teams get different touch points with them. So obviously there's a formal business meetings, there's the calls that I undertake to get to know the business. But then if I can, if we're in a shared geography, I like to try to get together for a coffee or a meal. I like to learn a little bit more about them personally. We have plenty of channel checks to see kind of what they're like outside of what they tell me. And I try to get to know, again, just sort of piece together this idea of what kind of person I'm dealing with here and how likely they are to do certain things moving forward. And then I'm very big on track records. And that's kind of been, I think, a relatively new part of my process. Maybe over the last couple of years, based on some nasty mistakes made on the management side.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Management team who's very competitive and communicates openly and honestly and most importantly treats our capital well. I like to see the last point is really important because preferably because they are invested alongside of us or it's an owner operator. I do make exceptions to that. But as I mentioned, for the evaluation part, I lean pretty heavily on my experience in sports. And one of the hardest things to evaluate about a player or a person is how hard they will work when given an opportunity. And from a basketball perspective, that was probably the toughest thing to figure out. We never knew how that would unfold until a player arrived at the organization. And it's like this impossible thing to sort of work through because human beings are interesting. They will tell you almost anything that you want to hear or that you ask them.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Limited access to him in terms of being able to shit with him in a meeting, figure out how he thinks about things, understand what the problems are that he's facing. Obviously, there are videos and publicly available interviews that can give you a sense. But the sort of machine that he had built over time, obviously Amazon sharded as a small company, but the sort of machine that they built up over time means that there were a lot of other elements in place that he could kind of oversee that would drive the business forward and obviously still remained an integral part of the business. It's very different from a small in terms of a small company where there may be one product or service line, one go-to-market strategy, less employees in general, a smaller revenue base, a different cost structure where a very smart operator, entrepreneur, and capital allocator can really drive the result positively or negatively over time. And at a high level, I guess it's important to just define what I'm looking for, which is really just a sensible.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, it's an imperfect giant, definitely evaluating people is incredibly difficult. It's probably the hardest part of my job. And I'm not even claiming that I have it 100% right. But it is a huge focus of mine, just given my experience in sports and the importance of it there and my experience evaluating human talent, which is very different from like a business. I do believe it's a point of differentiation for Graystone. I like to develop relationships with the management teams that run our businesses. I like to get to know them over time. I'm not saying that in and of itself is an advantage, but I think in small companies specifically, the people drive the results much more so than their large company counterparts. Obviously, some of the best entrepreneurs and CEOs in the world exist at some of these large businesses. Jeff Bezos being a great example, who probably could do anything with his life and have a ton of success just based on the way he is and how he thinks.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's try to find some pieces that represent that that may be obscuring the earnings power and see where we come out on the other end, but less so in a type of investment in and of itself, if that makes sense.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changes the core business was excellent, and I spent a lot of time with our customers to high level being most of them said these guys could raise their prices 200% and I wouldn't go anywhere. That was very telling. But outside of that, sort of this business is not going anywhere. It's very low churn, very attractive for the reasons that I laid out. But there's all these other pieces that are less certain and are kind of obscuring the earnings power of the company. The future looks very different from the past. The margin profile historically looked very different from where it was going. Again, there was a new management team who had to execute, so there was risk there. And if you could do the work on kind of the quality business itself, you could get comfortable with these other elements of the investment. And I would definitely view those pieces, those moving parts as special situation like, but the business itself represents everything that I look for in kind of a high quality compounder. So it's more of the special situation angle today for me is more.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a category, it's not something that I sort of seek out. I think special situations have become their own investment type in today's age. And the portfolio is not split between the two. But I love, as I mentioned earlier, a business in transition with special situation element as long as the core business is very high quality. And so, again, we can talk about Leon's, but just going back to the syllogist example, since I already kind of laid out the business case. When I came across the company, they had undergone a management change. The new management team should drastically change the capital allocation policy. So they cut the pretty hefty dividend that they were paying. There was a strategy shift. So the company was historically a slow growing business that focused on M&A. They were going to stop all of their M&A and focus on returning the business to organic growth for which the opportunity set was very good. And outside of that,”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having said that, like Leon's, which we can talk about, there are elements of almost each one of our businesses that contain special situation-like elements, for lack of a better word. And that can be something as simple as a management change or a rights offering or a portfolio of real estate that is not being, whose full value is not being reflected on the balance sheet or anything that can somewhat disguise the earnings power of the company. And I like to look for those situations that I kind of refer to as special situation because they can exist inside of the wrapper of a quality core business. And that's a really good situation for me to evaluate and step in front of where I have a really good quality core business that fits the attributes that I'm looking for. But then there's also this other element that is causing the market to maybe underappreciate the business. And so again,”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So honestly, that language in my founder's letter should probably be updated because the portfolio comprises mostly just high quality businesses that I'd like to own for a long period of time. And I'm not necessarily looking for what people deem a”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Purchases. And again, it's worked out really, really well. Limited growth is required for the result that we've achieved. And so it's very situation dependent, but I would say above growth, a change in expectations is the much more powerful force. I think a business in transition can be an excellent source of return along with growth and earnings power that's improving sometimes suddenly. And growth can come before that. Growth can come after that. Again, there can be limited growth path, but there's a It's a very situation dependent. And for each investment, I think graystone owns 10 companies right now. For each investment, each one has kind of a different flavor of growth, capital returns, what's happening with the cost structure, whether they're in transition or not, the runway for growth, et cetera. And it just kind of becomes one of the pieces of the mosaic that I try to put together when evaluating a business.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's not a requirement. Of course, there are smaller companies that can become larger ones, and that's a great situation if Depp and Tronox and there are multiple examples of companies in the portfolio that shit that framework. So it's not something I shun, but it's also not a requirement. There are two companies now made three in the portfolio that don't reflect a lot of growth, at least on the top line, but there are other very attractive aspects of the business. One of the best performing investments I made during the past year plus was not growing fast at all. I think about three to four percent top line growth, but they made some changes to the cost structure and to capital allocation that have worked brilliantly and the investment has worked really well as a result. And so it depends. I like opportunities like that as well, like the one I just described. This is a high quality business, great management, strong capital allocation, and a high free cash flow yield that's kind of being ploughed into reproductive.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, what the narrative is or what investors think about companies being low quality, or this is going to stay cheap forever. I basically walk away from something like that and I have a different view. And then I can act on it. And going back to what I was saying about this labor intensive process, it just takes time. And sometimes an insight isn't always derived and there's nothing to take from the process. But in this case, having visited 20 to 25 nonprofits and speaking to their technology teams and their decision makers and doing a number of other things led me to this idea that based on a number of factors this could work out very well. And that's, again, very independent of the sort of broad narrative out there.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when I got involved, there were concerns regarding growth prospects. There were concerns regarding the quality of the business and the margin trajectory for a number of reasons. But after spending a lot of time with a customer base and industry experts, I kind of developed this view that their product offered an incredibly high value prop. It was a really integral part of what their customers needed in terms of their day-to-day workflow, the technology use in general among nonprofits and government organizations was kind of set to explode post-COVID for a number of reasons. And they were really well positioned to capture Dumbed Add growth. And as I mentioned, there were also aspects of that business that mirrored some of these compounders that I'd studied and the trajectory for syllogist could be very similar, not the same, but very similar. And so when something like that is the case, and I've put some boots on the ground and done some work on actually sussing out what the quality is, it doesn't really matter to me.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gets pushed too far, whether it's company specific or just talking about broadly all small companies are terrible. And the kind of separate myself in this area and to find come differentiated insight, I do a lot of primary work and I speak to a lot of industry people. And I really think hard about the quality of the business and the competitive environment. And there's a business that we own called Shilogist. It's a software focused business that sells software to nonprofits and government organization. It's a great business. There are some public market peers that kind of mirror what Sillo just does have been long-term compounders for a really long time. The business has a very high value prop, excellent fundamentals, high margin, very sticky, incredible cash flow conversion characteristics. There's a real opportunity long run way for growth here. And by and large, it kind of hits on every metric for a quality business that I love.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Markets. And I think the issue is that it can apply disproportionately to micro capped, where there's a lot of garbage, some $50 million. There's promotional shady management teams. There's businesses that don't understand capital markets. There's lower quality business models, whether the product, whether you're talking about the product or service. I kind of have to weave through this area to find what I'm looking for. I think the biggest sort of wreath and why small companies are viewed at lower quality is because they may have one product or service line that could suffer more in an economic downturn. They may have less access to capital. They may be less conservatively financed. Their competitors might be able to gain share while they lose it in an adverse business scenario. But what's interesting about Greystone is that I'm not screening for those qualities. So I'm looking for the opposite. And so a lot of times, as I mentioned, I can kind of make money when a narrative.”
2025-03-09 · We Study Billionaires · TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT