Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of

More tantalising than revealing - he is focused on quanta tive metrics - that&#x27;s good, he pays extra not to make mistakes, hell that&#x27;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&amp;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...

So why are we hearing about the company now? Is this how you sell a successful but previously-unknown company?

&gt; &quot;[Cohen] has lots and lots of customers. And he delivers all of his goods in unmarked trucks, so that&#x27;s how he stays secretive. C&amp;S... does not have its branded trucks as other companies, like Sysco (SYY), its competitor, would so he&#x27;s able to stay under the radar.&quot;<p>This makes no sense. &quot;Under the radar&quot; 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&#x27;s not getting it from (e.g.) Sysco, it&#x27;s coming from somewhere else. I can&#x27;t imagine unmarked trucks keep C&amp;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 &quot;stealth&quot; to the success of C&amp;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. &quot;Nobody&#x27;s Business&quot; indeed.

C&amp;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&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit.ly&#x2F;1a12pkU</a>. C&amp;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.es3.com&#x2F;</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&#x27;ve resigned myself to the fact that most really rich people became so doing things I&#x27;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&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;lists&#x2F;2010&#x2F;21&#x2F;private-companies-10_lan...</a><p>I&#x27;m guessing most people haven&#x27;t heard of half the companies in the top ten, unless you&#x27;re a consumer business you can be huge and almost no-one will recognize your name.<p>Here&#x27;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&#x27;re all tech startups with valuations estimated in the billion+ dollar range. Unless you&#x27;ve used them you&#x27;ll probably have never come across them.

I thought once companies got to a certain size they were forced to go public? Or is that in Canada only?

“We’re the biggest company no one has ever heard of”, aka &quot;My huge company&#x2F;daddy is bigger and more obscure than yours!&quot;.<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&#x2F;I&#x27;ve been watching too much tv recently.)

I find this post is awful, i mean don&#x27;t people in Britain do have rights on Privacy? Their Photos etc?^^

Bloomberg acting like a mini little NSA. Finding rich people and violating their privacy.