Ryan Bunn (Reference Equity) has a public proposal for CBIZ ($CBZ): stop buying back stock at 9x earnings and restart the M&A flywheel that compounded revenue at 13%/year and took EBIT margins from 9% to 14% over the last decade. For someone like me who has always been a sucker for share buybacks, "stop the buybacks and issue equity" lands like a knife right in the gut, so I make him defend every piece of it.

We get into whether the $2.3B Marcum deal (the largest accounting acquisition ever, with the stock down ~70% since) deserves a mulligan, whether the multiple got crushed by 3.4x leverage or by AI headline fear, whether AI lets the Big Four come downmarket and eat CBIZ's middle-market lunch (or lets superstar producers hang their own flag), and whether long-term investors would really put primary equity onto the balance sheet at no discount. Ryan's math: the market prices credit risk, small 6-9x EBITDA bolt-ons restart the compounding machine, and a delevered, re-rated CBIZ has 100%+ upside.

Ryan's Restarting the Flywheel site (proposal + deck): https://cbizflywheel.com/

This episode is sponsored by AlphaSense. Most AI tools are very good at sounding right; the summary is clean, but can you trace it back to the filing, the transcript, the exact passage that drove the answer? AlphaSense owns the content (over 500 million curated documents, from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls) and the retrieval layer on top of it, so every answer links back to an exact, verifiable source. Try a free trial at https://alpha-sense.com/yavp

Chapters:

(0:00) Intro: an activist pitch to STOP the buybacks

(1:15) AlphaSense

(2:31) What is CBIZ ($CBZ)?

(5:01) Ryan's proposal: restart the M&A flywheel

(7:44) Buybacks at 9x earnings vs. getting back to M&A

(10:38) Post-Marcum, are there even deals left to do?

(12:52) The AI risk: offshoring and the Big Four coming downmarket

(19:24) Does AI let superstar accountants hang their own flag?

(23:41) The Marcum deal: mulligan or strategic masterstroke?

(28:59) Private equity competition and winner's curse

(31:38) Valuation: 9x free cash flow at 3.4x leverage

(40:00) Does delevering actually re-rate the stock?

(45:47) Management, the board, and alignment

(49:58) Why issue equity now? The FMC example

(56:57) Ryan's real ask: end the muddled capital allocation

(57:38) Wrap

Ryan Bunn / Reference Equity: https://cbizflywheel.com/

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

Adam Wyden runs one of the most concentrated books I know, and he came on to make the case for two stocks the market has basically left for dead: Stagwell ($STGW) and Driven Brands ($DRVN). On Stagwell, his pitch is that this is not a dying ad agency but a marketing-services and data business compounding toward $700M of EBITDA by 2028, sitting at a 20%+ free cash flow yield because it came public through a no-fanfare reverse merger and carried a dual-class and TRA overhang that kept institutions out. On Driven, he thinks the sum of the parts (Collision, Autoglass, and a 50-year-old franchise stub around Take Five) is worth far more than a low-teens stock, and he has been loud enough about it that the company started disclosing numbers within 48 hours of one of his letters.

I push back on both. On Stagwell I keep coming back to the agency model itself: WPP, IPG and the rest have trailed the S&P for 20 years because the human capital walks out the door every night and takes the economics with it, and AI arguably makes that worse. On Driven I press him on why a business this cheap has stayed cheap for four years running, and whether the corporate cost and the leverage ever get fixed without a private-equity owner. Adam's answer, more or less: the market doesn't care until it cares, and the best money he has ever made is buying someone else's five-year pain right before the aha moment.

This episode is sponsored by fiscal.ai: https://fiscal.ai/yav. Fiscal.ai is a modern financial data provider for global equities and one of the leading data connectors for Claude and ChatGPT, so you can pipe real-time fundamental data straight into your LLM. I signed up with my own money to plug it into my Claude cowork setup: more than 20 years of statements, ratios, segments and KPIs, updated within minutes of earnings, not days. Use my link fiscal.ai/yav for 15% off.

Chapters:

(00:00) Intro: Adam Wyden and two names, Stagwell and Driven

(02:44) Stagwell $STGW: the bull case on a marketing-services roll-up

(05:00) Mark Penn and how modern Stagwell came together

(08:40) Does AI break the ad agency model?

(12:50) The data moat and Stagwell's agentic operating system

(19:00) Is Stagwell a jockey bet on Mark Penn?

(24:20) Free cash flow, buybacks, and a stock priced to die

(28:20) Undervalued for four years: what is the market missing?

(32:15) Adam's activist stake and the August 14th tease

(37:00) Driven Brands $DRVN: the auto aftermarket bull case

(41:30) EVs vs ICE and why the aftermarket keeps compounding

(45:20) Sum-of-the-parts: Collision, Autoglass, and the franchise stub

(51:30) Activism at Driven, Roark, and where this business belongs

(58:30) Closing: the AI losers that become AI winners

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

$VEON trades like a busted emerging-markets telecom, but it owns 84% of Ukraine's Kyivstar and a Pakistani fintech, JazzCash, that already moves 15% of the country's GDP. Samit Umatiya of UIG Funds lays out the sum-of-the-parts case for why the holdco could be worth roughly 4x today's price, and Andrew pushes back hard the whole way: a not-so-storied history of value destruction, a sanctioned 45% shareholder, capital controls, and a long graveyard of telecoms that bungled every growth opportunity they ever had. The result is one long push and pull on whether the upside is real this time.

This episode is sponsored by Fiscal.ai. Fiscal.ai is a modern financial data provider for global equities, with a web terminal plus a self-serve API that plugs real-time fundamentals straight into Claude and ChatGPT. Andrew uses it himself. Get 15% off at https://fiscal.ai/yav

Chapters:

00:00 The setup: a sum-of-the-parts EM telecom nobody talks about

01:31 Sponsor: Fiscal.ai

02:35 Who is Samit Umatiya and what is VEON

04:19 Vimpelcom to VEON: the history and the Russia exit

08:14 Why is the market asleep on this name?

11:31 The sum of the parts: Kyivstar plus four frontier markets

13:59 Bridging the EV gap: Andrew's $8B vs the bull's $3B holdco

16:36 Valuing a telecom on revenue: the "it's a tech company" case

17:54 JazzCash: 15% of Pakistan's GDP, never independently valued

21:00 The bridge to ~$1B of free cash flow and a 4x

23:40 Organic vs. bolt-on digital growth

24:34 Capital controls and getting cash out of the op-cos

27:11 What the market is missing: demographics and under-penetration

31:09 Starlink: competitor or partner in Ukraine's rebuild?

35:31 Digital stickiness and retention

37:42 The Kaspi problem: a dominant super app that never re-rated

39:25 The AI 1440 strategy and a sovereign-AI moat

42:31 Is telecom just structurally bad at capturing growth?

45:11 Capital allocation and the next catalyst: a JazzCash spin

49:38 The elephant in the room: LetterOne's sanctioned 45% stake

54:05 Geopolitical turmoil as a feature, not a flaw

55:24 Is that 45% block actually an opportunity?

57:09 Founder DNA, CEO Kaan Terzioglu, and the spin-off playbook

1:01:56 Wrap

UIG Funds (Samit Umatiya) - https://uigfunds.com

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/