Royce Yudkoff
speaker
143 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Royce Yudkoff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
People call us often when they're struggling with something. Something just isn't clear to them and they want to go back and have somebody to talk to that they think is smart or clever or nonjudgmental or something. So we get a lot of those phone calls, I think.
I was going to say, and often they call me when they have this sense that they might be wrong. Because you always say, Rick, feedback is a gift. I say feedback is a gift. And I'm willing to say to somebody, that's really stupid.
I think that's correct because you're always more cheerful after this. I'm like, what happened to these students? Why do they want to buy such a crappy business? And you're like, oh, I talked to so-and-so.
They have such a great deal.
It's 80% recurring revenue. And I said, I don't get those.
They call me with a pizza joint.
That is a great case. And it's nice to start off with one that we know is going to work out pretty well. It will usually do that as our very first case of the year. I was going to pick one that will probably make your teeth hurt. Can I pick two? Because they're very similar, actually. No rules here. One is a company called Capital Digital.
And what I really, really like about Capital Digital, it was purchased by a student of ours, Nick Anderson. And as all good cases came, I was at another student's wedding and happened to be sitting beside Nick. And I said, how are things going? And he said, I can't tell. And he described his first year of owning the business, which had its challenges.
But what was hard for Nick was it was almost impossible to figure out what was really going on. And it just highlighted how special small business is. Small businesses are small and their information systems are small and the evolution of information is small. And so in this instance, there was nothing wrong with the business.
But it sure looked like there were things that were wrong with the business. And it was just that the firm needed to worry about its product mix a little more carefully than it was. But it was very subtle. And it took them a few years to figure it out. But once they figured it out, they've been tremendously successful in the years since.
But it's this evolution of information that I find fascinating. And my other favorite is a really odd choice, Royce. It is Brian Bonk and the Palfrey's case. So we close our course with this case. Every time when I'm getting ready to teach this case the night before, I say to myself, and sometimes I even call Royce, and I say, Royce, whose stupid idea was it to have this case as the last case?
Because this is just a terrible, terrible case. It's a story about a young man who gets his PhD in biology at MIT. And while he's in the process of getting his PhD in biology at MIT, he comes and takes our classes and decides there's a lot of smart biologists in the world, but there aren't a lot of smart biologists that own small businesses. So he's going to go buy a small business.
Royce and I work with him and we really enjoy working with Brian. And he finds this business Can I say what it does, Royce? Is that okay? Yeah, absolutely. Finds this business that is in a most unusual marriage of businesses you can imagine. It is the largest rabbit slaughterhouse in the United States.
And who doesn't want to own that and just be able to say to their grandchildren, I killed 5,000 bunnies this week. I have to be careful. My grandkids sometimes listen to this. And a biotech version that takes the byproducts of the rabbit meat and turns them into biological products that turn out to be essential into development. of so many things like Prevnar and a whole bunch of vaccines.
So it is a really interesting business. Half really appeals to Brian, as you might imagine. Anyway, the last case is about Brian's attempt to close the business. I think it takes, I mean, we have the number of days in there, but it's like 280 days or something crazy like that. I mean, Moses got to the promised land more quickly than Brian gets to closing. And it's a video case.
And the way we did the case was we had Brian record his impressions whenever he wanted to on his iPhone. And then the magic of editors pulled that all together into this video case, which is about an hour long. And you see this journey and it's like, well, I thought this issue was resolved. And Brian says, well, this issue's back. I thought it was resolved.
This is the fourth time it's not been resolved. I don't know what to do. I'm just so frustrated. I guess I just have to get back to work. And it just is this, oh, my word. It so shows the frustration of search, the challenge of search, why it's hard, because information isn't always available at one time. Anyway, that's kind of a favorite of mine. It's a weird favorite, right, Royce?
The question I always have is why more people don't do it. We have 920 students graduate every year. Ought to be 100 people searching. We get like somewhere around 20, 25 a year. And then probably another 20 out of that class over the next three or four years. Right. Not 100 for sure. But not 100.
And that doesn't mean there aren't great jobs in private equity and in corporations and in consulting. But for me, for my taste, this is such a better career path than working for somebody else.
Not anymore.
Showing 121–140 of 143 · page 7 of 8
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