Welcome to The Business Buying Academy with Sieva Kozinsky. 🔑 How to acquire $4 billion in outdoor brands In the 1950s, three business partners developed an early snowmobile prototype using spare parts from a farm. Today, the company they created is worth over $4 billion. The business has done some of the best acquisitions in the outdoor industry, rolling up several iconic brands within a $4 billion empire. Let's jump into the story of Polaris. Brothers Edgar and Allen Hetteen and friend...
7 days ago • 3 min read
Welcome to The Business Buying Academy with Sieva Kozinsky. 🔑 From pushing a tea wagon to raking in billions. They started by pushing a wagon down a crowded Manhattan street to sell tea. Within a few decades, they invented the modern grocery store and became one of the biggest businesses in the world. This is the story of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company. Known more commonly as A&P, the business started in 1859 on the busy streets of Manhattan selling tea and later coffee and...
14 days ago • 5 min read
Welcome to The Business Buying Academy with Sieva Kozinsky. 🔑 They kept buying niche businesses. Now their company is worth $4 billion. In August 1980, two ambitious entrepreneurs made one of the coolest acquisitions I've ever seen. Wade Thompson and Peter Orthwein acquired the struggling, but iconic, Airstream travel trailer brand from Beatrice Foods (yes, the dairy company owned a travel trailer business). Beatrice had to unload the business amid a recession. Trailers were outside their...
21 days ago • 3 min read
Welcome to The Business Buying Academy with Sieva Kozinsky. 🔑 Tech Optimism and the Allure (and Peril) of Diversification In business, history always repeats itself. Capitalism is defined by the same cycle playing out over and over: A boom period, which creates euphoria and overexpansion, followed by a bust cycle, where everything contracts back to a more natural state. You can see this play out across every industry over the years. I want to highlight an example of this today. Two companies...
28 days ago • 5 min read
Welcome to The Business Buying Academy with Sieva Kozinsky. 🔑 From Edison's Secretary to Billions in Assets Let's talk about one of the wildest rises and falls in American business history. He started as Thomas Edison's secretary. Then he built his own utility empire - and quickly destroyed it. Meet Samuel Insull, the guy who lit up the Midwest (and a bunch of other places), built one of the largest utility companies in the world, and then watched it all come crashing down in the Great...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Welcome to The Business Buying Academy with Sieva Kozinsky. 🔑 First they cleaned stoves, then they sold one of the world's favorite toys What if I told you that a company making soap to clean coal-burning stoves became one of the most successful toy companies of all-time? It sounds unlikely. But that's the story of the Kutol Products Company, which started making household cleaners for stoves in 1912. Back then, cleaning soot off of interior walls was a big problem for households. Several...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Welcome to The Business Buying Academy with Sieva Kozinsky. 🔑 Airlines buying hotels, oil refineries, and even pest control businesses What's the world's largest airline? The answer is complicated. It depends on which metric you use. If you prefer financial measures like revenue, profit, and market cap, the largest airline is Delta. If you think number of passengers carried annually is the best measure, then the answer is American Airlines. And if you look at total fleet size or an airline...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Welcome to The Business Buying Academy with Sieva Kozinsky. 🔑160 years to roll-up the world's most boring industry I love talking about the world's most boring business rollups. It doesn't get more boring than this one. Packaging Corporation of America is a $20 billion publicly-traded company that's been around for nearly 160 years - and you've probably never heard of it. The generic name alone could put some people to sleep. But the rollup strategy is one that business history nerds like...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Welcome to The Business Buying Academy with Sieva Kozinsky. 🔑 Starting with 1,100 square feet, they built a $13 billion business This is one of my favorite stories of rolling up a fragmented market. In the 1970s, health food stores were uncommon. There were ~1,000 total in the United States and they were usually small (a couple thousand square feet). Compare that to about 180,000 regular grocery stores that existed at the time. Health food was niche. So in 1978, no one would have predicted...
2 months ago • 3 min read