Brad Jacobs

No management should do that.

All the businesses that we've bought, we've integrated very tightly into the business.

We don't run a loose confederation of lots of different companies, which you see some business models and some of them work.

I don't like doing that myself.

I feel out of control.

I like to have everything standardized and one way of doing everything.

The price does matter, but the multiple matters too.

For example, when we looked at ourselves in the mirror at XPO Logistics a few years ago, and we said, look, we've been trading at eight and a fraction times EBITDA for a while now.

That's what the market says this is worth.

We didn't think it was worth that.

We thought if you looked at the sum of the parts of the business, this should be trading many turns of multiple higher than that, significantly higher than that.

But we said, I don't think we're going to get there on our own because the market has spoken.

So we decided to do something that very few companies do, which is to make ourselves smaller.

And we divided the company up into three companies.

And those three companies, we put the circles around the different parts of the business of how we're going to divide it up with two things in mind.

One was, how can we run this business with greater focus operationally, execution-wise?

And secondly...

What will get a better model?

Because Wall Street generally likes pure plays.

As a general rule, not always, but generally likes pure plays.