5 Lessons from 5 Companies We Analyzed
We analyzed 5 companies across 5 industries. Here's what we learned.
Since January 2026, we’ve released 10 deep dives. From serial acquirers such as Topicus and Tasmea Ltd. to insurance companies, payment service providers, and even gym compounders.
We went back through our last five deep dives: Topicus, Service Corporation International, Shelly Group, Tasmea, and Basic-Fit, and extracted the most important lesson from each. Something you can apply to the next company you research or your investing process.
Here’s what we actually took away.
Lesson 1: Show Me the Incentive
🎯Lesson: Perfectly aligned incentives are rarer than you think, but worth paying for.
🏢 Company: Topicus
📏 Market cap: ~€5.2 billion
💰 Revenue: ~€1.55 billion
Topicus is a European vertical market software serial acquirer, spun off from Constellation Software in 2021. It buys small, niche software businesses across Europe. Businesses like library management systems, municipal permit tools, home care scheduling platforms and holds them forever. They then (try to) reinvest every euro of free cash flow into more acquisitions. Since listing, revenue has grown at a 23%+ CAGR.
But the number that stopped us wasn’t a revenue figure. It was this: executives must invest 75% of their annual bonus into Topicus shares, with a minimum four-year holding period. The CEO earns a base salary of ~€350,000, modest by any standard. His real upside is through his family holding, which controls roughly 30% of the operating company. COO Daan Dijkhuizen’s family holding controls another ~9%. Two insiders. ~40% of the operating business. Then there’s the CFO, who doesn’t receive a single euro from Topicus because he’s on Constellation’s payroll.
💡Why it matters: Compensation structures tell you where management’s focus will be. If the CEO’s bonus is tied to quarterly EBITDA or sole revenue growth, that’s where attention goes. If 75% of that bonus gets locked into shares for four years, management starts thinking like an owner because they are one.
We want to be honest here. Compensation structures alone don’t make a business. Plenty of companies have textbook incentive structures and still destroy capital. We’re partly praising Topicus’s setup because the company has performed well, and that introduces survivorship bias. Keep that in mind.
A great question to ask when researching any company is, what percentage of their net worth is at risk alongside yours? Preferably shares bought, not granted. At Topicus, Van Poelje’s stake is worth multiples of anything he’ll ever earn in salary. He’s not working for his paycheck. That’s the difference.
Lesson 2: Essential Services or Products?!
🎯Lesson: Durable demand is not the same as a durable business model; consumer preferences can erode the second even when the first stays permanent.
🏢 Company: Service Corporation International (SCI)
📏 Market cap: ~$11.8 billion
💰 Revenue: ~$4.3 billion
SCI 0.00%↑ is North America’s largest deathcare company. It operates over 1,400 funeral homes and 400+ cemeteries. Pre-need funeral plans, cemetery plots, and everything that comes with saying goodbye to someone. Founded in 1962, it has spent six decades folding independent funeral homes into a cluster model that lifts margins and reduces overhead.
The lesson we took away was simple but is often forgotten, especially in the rapidly changing age of AI. Bezos once said: “Don’t ask what will change in ten years,” but ask “What won’t?” People will always die. That part is settled. The demand doesn’t go away. People will always want to mark it with something meaningful.
That creates a business with $16 billion in pre-need backlog, 30–40% EBITDA margins, and a float structure that looks more like an insurance company than a funeral home. Revenue grew at only 5% CAGR over the past decade. But normalized free cash flow per share grew at 12.5%. The difference is share buybacks: 57% of outstanding shares retired since 2004, funded by a business that generates cash almost regardless of the economic cycle.
But here’s where we want you to be careful. The fact that people die doesn’t change. But the fact that they’ll spend $10,000 on a casket and a burial plot? That’s already changing fast. Cremation rates went from 3.6% in 1960 to almost 64% in 2025, and projections put them at 82% by 2045.
Revenue per service is structurally declining. That’s not a small headwind for SCI.
So SCI is still a compelling example of durable demand, just not the clean one we initially thought. It’s a business that needs to successfully transition from selling caskets to (up)selling experiences. Even deadly boring businesses can be disrupted by changes in consumer taste and preferences.
💡Why it matters: A business can serve a permanent human need, death, food, shelter, transport, and still watch its business model slowly hollowed out by a shift in how people want that need met.
The question to ask isn’t just “Will people always need this?” It’s “Will they always want it in this form, at this price point, through this channel?” For SCI, the answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second is increasingly no.
Before you buy any business on the logic that its demand is permanent, dig a little deeper. (Pun intended… sorry.)
Lesson 3: Checking Every Box Isn’t Enough
🎯Lesson: Innovation is not a moat if the competitor across the table has a trillion-dollar ecosystem; product quality is eventually irrelevant.
🏢 Company: Shelly Group
📏 Market cap: ~$300 million
💰 Revenue: ~$`120 million
Shelly makes smart home devices: plugs, switches, sensors, and relays, that integrate with virtually every major smart home ecosystem. The products are genuinely good. The technology is solid. The growth has been real. Management is sharp. On almost every checklist, Shelly looks like an attractive small-cap growth story.
But there’s a structural problem that no amount of product quality solves: Shelly is competing for the same living room as Google, Amazon, and Apple. Not against them directly, necessarily, but for the same customer’s attention, trust, and ecosystem loyalty. And those three companies have ecosystems worth hundreds of billions, hardware at cost, and the ability to absorb losses in smart homes indefinitely if it serves a long-term goal.
The money is almost the secondary issue. The primary issue is that when a customer is already inside the Amazon or Apple ecosystem, switching costs accumulate in ways that have nothing to do with whether Shelly’s relay is better than a competitor’s. The loyalty is to the platform. Shelly is a peripheral.
Shelly’s best-case scenario might genuinely be acquisition. A larger player buys the technology, the installer network, the integrations and folds it into a platform that can compete at scale. That’s not a bad outcome for shareholders at the right price. But it’s an entirely different thesis than owning a standalone compounder for a decade.
💡Why it matters: Before buying into an innovative company, ask one question: who else wants this market, and what structural advantages do they have beyond just money?
A company can have better products, better engineers, and better management and still lose because the competitor has a distribution layer that makes the whole game asymmetric.
Lesson 4: The Most Inconvenient Commute
Lesson: The most durable competitive advantages aren’t always the most complex ones. At times, the moat is just the fact that no one else is going to show up.
🏢 Company: Tasmea Limited
📏 Market cap: ~A$1.2 billion
💰 Revenue: ~A$548 million
Tasmea is an Australian serial acquirer of industrial maintenance businesses. It buys companies that service mining equipment, electrical infrastructure, water systems, and civil construction in some of the most remote corners of Australia. It pays 3–5x EV/EBIT for acquisitions. Tasmea targets 15% organic EBIT growth per year. And since FY21, EBIT has grown at a 37.5% CAGR.
The numbers are impressive. But the reason behind them is more interesting than the numbers themselves.
Tasmea’s subsidiaries are often the only qualified operator within hundreds of kilometers. A mine in the Pilbara doesn’t have three electrical contractors to call. It has one. When important infrastructure breaks down at 2 AM in a small town in Western Australia, there is no open bidding process. There’s a phone call for whoever is already there. Tasmea made sure that’s them.
This isn’t brand loyalty or switching costs in the traditional sense. It’s something more fundamental and more durable: physical presence in places where establishing that presence is genuinely hard. Getting licensed, hiring locally, building relationships with remote clients, and maintaining equipment depots in locations nobody else wants to operate from. That takes years, and it takes commitment most competitors simply aren’t willing to make. Customers don’t negotiate hard when the alternative is flying in a contractor from 800 kilometers away.
💡Why it matters: Most investors search for moats in the obvious places: brand, patents, network effects, and switching costs. Geographic isolation rarely makes the list because it requires doing a little more research. Not just in the company itself, but in its competitive landscape and geography as well. But this specific advantage is one of the most reliable that exists, precisely because it requires something that capital alone can’t fix: time, local presence, and the willingness to operate where nobody else wants to.
When researching any business, ask where the customers are and how easy it is for a competitor to physically reach them. The best moats are sometimes just the ones that require the most inconvenient commute.
Lesson 5: Copy. Paste. Repeat.
🎯Lesson: The most durable playbooks aren’t exciting to describe.
🏢 Company: Basic-Fit
📏 Market cap: ~€2.4 billion
💰 Revenue: ~€1.4 billion
Basic-Fit is Europe’s largest budget gym chain. It has 2,184 clubs across the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Spain, and Germany.
The model is straightforward: low prices, 24/7 access, low or no reception staff, and high club density in urban areas. Revenue per club is quite predictable. Mature clubs target 30% ROIC. The company opens a location, waits three years for it to mature, and repeats.
The playbook isn’t original. Dino Polska does something structurally similar in Polish grocery retail: cluster entry, cost leadership, and systematic rollout. Planet Fitness runs the same model in the US. It’s about consistent execution over years and the structural cost advantage that comes with scale. At 2,000+ locations, Basic-Fit buys gym equipment at prices no local gym can touch.
💡Why it matters: The most durable businesses usually aren’t the most interesting ones to read about. The playbook at Basic-Fit is almost boring to describe. Open cheap gyms. Open them close together. Keep prices low. Repeat. The reason it works is that most competitors can’t sustain the economics of doing it at scale.
When you’re evaluating a growing company, a good question to ask is, does this model get stronger as the company gets bigger? At Basic-Fit, every new club makes the marketing more efficient, the supply contracts better, and the membership more valuable. That’s a flywheel. It doesn’t need to be complicated to compound.
💭 Ending thoughts…
Five different companies. Five different industries. But the same questions underneath every one:
Who bears the downside if this goes wrong?
Is the demand structurally durable or dependent on conditions holding?
Does the competitive position get stronger or weaker as the company scales?
What would it cost a deep-pocketed competitor to take this market?
Get those four right, and you’ve done most of the work.
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Good post and lessons! And I will take a closer look at Tasmea.