The Work - How I Read a Business

How I read a business.

Owner-lens breakdowns of how real companies actually make money: pricing, revenue engines, unit economics, and what makes the whole thing compound or break. Named companies. Real numbers where I can find them, honest about the estimates.

PricingRevenue enginesUnit economicsMoatsMarketplacesThe Europe↔US crossing

Flagship breakdown · HR SaaS

Personio: the pricing model is the whole business

Personio bills per employee per month, so when a customer grows from 80 people to 160, its bill roughly doubles with no new sale. That one choice, plus the stickiness of payroll-grade software, is why a company in an unglamorous category carries a multi-billion valuation, and why the same meter cut the other way when European hiring froze.

PricingRetentionEuropean SMB~12 min read

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Breakdown · Greentech

Enpal: when the sales engine is the moat

A relentless, large-scale direct-sales machine selling solar on subscription. In a category of confused buyers and expensive purchases, distribution, not the panels, is the product advantage.

Direct salesUnit economics~11 min read

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Breakdown · Global Employment / Fintech

The EOR model: fintech hiding in an HR product

Employer-of-Record platforms sell a per-employee HR subscription, but at scale they're moving money across dozens of currencies. The most interesting economics aren't in the subscription; they're in the float and the FX.

Per-unit pricingMoney movement~11 min read

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Breakdown · Software / Capital Allocation

Constellation Software: capital allocation is the product

Buy small, durable vertical software companies, never sell, reinvest the cash at a hurdle rate that never moves. A study in why what you do with the cash eventually matters more than operations.

ROICHoldcoCompounding~11 min read

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Five frames I come back to.

The companies change. The way of reading them doesn't. These are the lenses underneath every breakdown. The actual method, not the examples.

The binding constraintAt any moment, one thing is holding a business back, and it's rarely the thing everyone's working on. Find it, fix it, and don't get pulled onto the rest.

The hook vs. the engineWhat wins the customer is rarely what earns the margin. I separate the thing that opens the door from the thing that makes the money.

The offer before the funnelA weak offer can't be out-marketed. Get the offer, the believability, and the friction right, and the same traffic starts converting.

Payback before profitNot whether it pays off eventually, but how fast the first sale repays what the customer cost to win. Earn it back fast and you can outspend anyone; wait on lifetime value and you're renting growth.

Where the demand really comes fromMost businesses lean on one source harder than they admit. I find which one is carrying it, whether they own it or rent it, and what breaks the day it's gone.

You don't really understand a business until you can explain its economics in plain language.

I have spent my career on the commercial side of B2B companies: selling, building go-to-market, and running partnerships, working across Europe, the US, and Africa. The whole time I was studying one thing: how businesses actually make money, and what makes that money compound instead of just arrive.

So I take them apart in public, the way I'd analyse a company if I were deciding where to put my own capital and time. If you build, run, or buy businesses and think clearly about how they work, I'd like to know you.