Hey Straw people,
I'd like to share with everyone the experience of the site visit and meeting with Wayne and Matt - the duo steering the LaserBond ship a few weeks back. (Disclaimer: I hold LBL in my real-life portfolio)
I had a really good time there at their HQ in Sydney. It was an incredible and eye-opening experience. Wayne and Matt were very friendly and approachable and throughout our meeting, were also very generous with their time and knowledge, shown in their willingness to listen to my line of questioning and how thorough their answers were.
I managed to ask them a few questions about their backgrounds, competitive landscape, organisational structure, and their thinking process on capital allocating topics. A few are as follows:
- "How do you measure success?" - to which Wayne suggested that a success to him is to watch LaserBond continues growing without him. Through Wayne's answer, I learned that his vision of success is tied to building a robust team and culture at LaserBond - one that can sustain itself over the long term. To this end, he has assembled a dynamic management team comprising heads of R&D, Operations, HR, Finance, and Marketing. They work together with the goal of driving LaserBond forward, allowing Wayne to shift his focus from day-to-day operations to strategic planning and capital allocation. For me, this tells a lot about Wayne's and the Company's commitment to nurturing talent and fostering a self-sufficient structure.
- "If you could choose one and only one ratio, for example profit per x or cash flow per x, to systematically increase over time, what x would have the greatest and the most sustainable impact on LaserBond's economic engine?" - I got answers from both of them. Wayne described this "x" would be around the efficiency-value contributed to customers (such as the number of hours of reduced downtime) and ESG standpoint (as in the number of worn parts that got scrapped). Matt said that for him, "x" would be the number of new customer orders from new industries/sectors - which somewhat reveals an important driver of LaserBond's growth story and tells me that the risk of economic dependency is always on his mind.
- Competitive Landscape - It is believed that most competitors are typically small family-run businesses that are just happy to be where they are hence no investments made in R&D, sales and marketing simply because "they don't want to grow too big" - this represents huge opportunity for expansion. Also on this topic, I got to ask both Wayne and Matt about the selection criteria for acquisition targets to which Matt assured that would not expand for the sake of doing it and actively look for businesses that are profitable and possess the right tool, equipment, complementing technology and most importantly, the skilled management team and labour force with expertise, given the challenges of finding skilled operators.
And to reflect on the general feeling about the business, I genuinely believe that there is a sense of cost-focus and a frugal approach to most things around the business. This was shown in minimalistic and functional offices and furniture (almost to me too simple and there's nothing that screams ostentatious or fancy), most of the tools and equipment in the lab are second-handedly purchased though still very functional, and the Wayne playfully refers to himself as T-rex - an analogy for having a deep pocket and short hands.
I talked and discussed about LaserBond a bit more here if you are interested in learning about the company.
I hope you find this helpful.
