More tantalising than revealing - he is focused on quanta tive metrics - that's good, he pays extra not to make mistakes, hell that's almost unique (I assume some bonus based on errors in stock reconciliation) - but what are his sales channels look like? Who are his suppliers and how does he handle them? Does operating under the radar give benefits better than just being modest?<p>And yes the big question - why now?<p>And the second big question - how many other quiet billion dollar or even just 8figure companies are out there?
Assuming this is why he is a former president:<p>“I tried to put our name on the trucks and he didn’t want any part of it,” said Edward Albertian, a former C&S president, to Bloomberg. “He wanted to continue to be stealth and operate in this little, dinky Keene, New Hampshire, marketplace.”<p>Little, dinky marketplace that brings in over a 1 billion dollars in sales...
> "[Cohen] has lots and lots of customers. And he delivers all of his goods in unmarked trucks, so that's how he stays secretive. C&S... does not have its branded trucks as other companies, like Sysco (SYY), its competitor, would so he's able to stay under the radar."<p>This makes no sense. "Under the radar" from who? Joe and Jane Average on the street maybe, but stores that are making orders are going to have reps dropping by, and the suppliers are going to <i>KNOW</i> that if Store A is carrying product XYZ, and it's not getting it from (e.g.) Sysco, it's coming from somewhere else. I can't imagine unmarked trucks keep C&S off the radar from anybody who actually cares.<p>Edit: On re-read, maybe it -is- supposed to be stealth from Joe and Jane Average. Initially I thought they might be attributing "stealth" to the success of C&S. I guess they really just wanted to be quietly (to the public) doing their work. In that case: great job invading privacy Daily Ticker. "Nobody's Business" indeed.
C&S is a fascinating company. As a former employee, the insight for me is that you can make a lot by disrupting a large, old industry.<p>What they don't highlight is that they grew from about $500m in revenue to $20bn in about 20 years from 88 to 2006: <a href="http://bit.ly/1a12pkU" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/1a12pkU</a>. C&S did this by innovating on management models at the warehouse, having a capital model which grew its cash position as it expanded, and helping to support the business case for private equity acquisitions of major US Grocery Chains.<p>This article also misses one major point. Rick is innovating again. ES3 (<a href="http://www.es3.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.es3.com/</a>) is the largest automated warehouse in the world. As this warehouse scales, it could take a full step out of the grocery supply chain for the east coast.
I've resigned myself to the fact that most really rich people became so doing things I'd have never in a million years imagined you could get rich doing.
Self-maintained groups and incentives based on performance. It would be interesting to adopt this in the tech area: the amount and quality of your unit tests means you get paid more.<p>You can also do code analysis: look at branching factors; code duplication; runtime performance; etc<p>This might be hard to implement in a company setting; but it may be easier to apply with contracting work.
Anyone at all interested could have found out about the company, it's been near the top of Forbes list of largest private companies for years (which is even mentioned in the companies Wikipedia article):<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/21/private-companies-10_land.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/21/private-companies-10_lan...</a><p>I'm guessing most people haven't heard of half the companies in the top ten, unless you're a consumer business you can be huge and almost no-one will recognize your name.<p>Here's a little test, how many of these companies do you recognize:<p>Bazaarvoice, Conduit, Klarna, nicira, Homeaway, Workday, Changyou, ServiceNow, Giant, Guidewire, DealerTrack, SuccessFactors, SourceFire, ArcSight, Popcap, ExactTarget.<p>They're all tech startups with valuations estimated in the billion+ dollar range. Unless you've used them you'll probably have never come across them.
“We’re the biggest company no one has ever heard of”, aka "My huge company/daddy is bigger and more obscure than yours!".<p>Although in this case, they might actually hold a better claim on that title than others it is often given to
Anyone else notice the similarities with Madrigal from Breaking Bad?<p>Low key, large profits, extensive distribution network. I may be paranoid but...<p>(Okay, probably just a coincidence/I've been watching too much tv recently.)