They say a great way to lose money is to open a restaurant. Costs, pricing pressures, and low barriers to entry tend to eat into your capital. Dad pun intended. Food, rent and labor inflation are stubborn and every extra dollar counts. All costs matter. Some restaurants make it work and build lasting brands with…
Category: Thought Leadership
Lawson’s Laws
We’re in the season of reading and quoting executives. There’s Amazon’s letter from Jeff Bezos on customer-centricity, Jamie Dimon’s on employees, customers, and better regulations, Buffett’s on the tailwinds of America’s economic machine. Jeff Lawson, CEO and co-founder of Twilio, has his own words to add. His company “enables developers to build, scale and operate…
On Tailwinds
Anyone who wants to understand business should read Warren Buffett’s letters*. All of them. Even his partnership ones when he was in his 30s. I read them about 10 years ago, and continue to intellectually salivate near the end of February when a new one is published. They’re especially an interesting respite and cross-disciplinary perspective…
February’s Index
A monthly list of interesting facts and figures from the world of healthcare, finance, and public markets. 2/3: The estimated number of Medicare quality metrics deemed uncertain or invalid by a NEJM study. 25%: the percentage of healthcare costs attributable to the top 1%. 1%: the likelihood of being in the top 10% of healthcare…
Averages Over Time
In many ways, I’m a below average driver. I only drive about 4,000 miles a year so I don’t get much practice. I use a blinker most of the time but I’m not always courteous. Sometimes I cut in at the last minute, which I recently read is actually good for traffic flows, even it…
January’s Healthcare Index
Inspired by the monthly Harper’s Index, this is 2019’s first index on healthcare and finance. The average ratio of Medicaid-to-Medicare payments spending across the US across all services: .72; In CA: .52. The factor by which commercial insurance payments exceed the reimbursements from Medicare: 1.88x The net assets of HCA, the largest publicly-traded hospital in the…
2018 Highlights
This journey started small but 48 posts later and I can say I wrote down my thoughts, observations, and research. For over 90% of the weeks, I put meaningful time and research into 2018’s blog posts. My work and research have taken me to Boston to learn and work on promoting programs like Quizzify; there…
On Hidden Risks and Volatility
Volatility in investing can be a great thing. The attraction to Bernie Madoff’s scam can be better understood by its lack of volatility. His funds showed annual returns of an eerily consistent 10-12% and at one point reported 72 consecutive months of positive returns. His strategy used a split-strike or collar options strategy (not related…
Medical Bankruptcies in America
Financial valuation uses multiple approaches to estimate the value of a company, whether a shoe factory, a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants, a software company, a bank, or a law firm. The questions are framed around what a firm is worth relative to cash flow, book value, relative to similar assets, recent industry transactions, or others….
Cadillac Consequences
Mothers and psychologists remind us that we have a built-in bias to do what’s easiest or to follow the path of least resistance. Water and electricity are like this. We are naturally lazy so to stick to an exercise plan, it should be something we like, with shoes left by the bed, perhaps done with…