IDEX Corporation: Culture & the 80/20 Principle

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Can you specify that or provide an example?

When you look at the business, it's highly engineered and occupies a protected niche with few competitors, which is how IDEX acquires businesses. It's like a small oligopoly. We could delve into the details of oligopolies, but essentially, this creates a competitive environment where it's easy to maintain a position but hard to grow beyond it. IDEX doesn't buy businesses with massive competitors entering the market. Rapidly growing markets attract big competitors, making growth difficult. Culturally, there's a tendency towards complacency, so ensuring energy, drive, and change is crucial. Finding growth opportunities is challenging, but aspects like pricing power and consistent price increases were textbook, which I found interesting.

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I mean, it sounds like common sense, but to make it work, the ex-CEO of Honeywell always said, "The trick is in the doing."

Yes, well said. In this case, that's exactly the situation. If you think about the 80/20 concept, the Pareto principle, 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your efforts, and so on. You know all that. What you do is start to quantify it by looking at customers and products. You've got your 80s and your 20s. The 20% of customers that give you 80% of your revenue are your 80s customers. Similarly, the 20% of products that give you 80% of your revenue are your 80s products.

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