In two days, I will have posted this 2 years ago. About a week ago I said I’d write something, so here it is.
Re-reading it again, I would probably only take out the part where I was discussing the commodity price of paper, and I’d have put more emphasis on information and security compliance. Because that is what will keep Redishred together now and into the future. It’s what’s going to help them grow once they’ve purchased these proshred franchises from retiring managers with all their typical industrial succession issues. The commodity of PS 37 will do what it will, and there’s always been a correlation that bobs around with diesel to offset the volatility of paper. Everything seems to generally be improving.
The only really big shame about Redishred, in my view, is Jeff’s never going to pull the trigger on price hikes that would satisfy your typical FICO 0.00%↑ shareholder.
I say this is a shame because customers of Redishred aren’t in large motivated by pricing, they’re motivated by fear of loss of documents that will cost them piles and piles money if that information gets into the wrong hands. For Jeff to insert a 50% annual price hike, well, that’s like $75 USD or less for a transaction that happens once or twice a month if not bi-monthly. Pivoting to self-vending isn’t an option for most of these places, and these sums of expense are so far to the bottom of the totem pole of budgeting concerns that Jeff probably could sneak by a number of years of extremely egregious price hikes without losing a ton of their customers.
Basically what I’m saying is that Jeffery Hasham has made it his priority in running his company to grow and take of his customers and his employees in order to have a healthier company. His amortization of acquired intangibles, in part due to his behavior, is an accounting fiction that only serves as a tax shield. He may hug that wall a little too close, and it makes some of his acquisitions look quite a bit more expensive than they are at times. Philadelphia comes to mind. But it’s mostly clear that he just wants to run a clean operation with happy employees and happy customers.
So, he may not satisfy the platonic ideal of a public manager in a boring industrial where he’s willing to pivot capital allocation on a dime given where his stock trades, and he might not be willing to be a rent seeker on his acquired intangibles. But so far, he’s done a pretty good job running a company in a “dying industry.” Often too much is expected from these smaller companies where survival is more important than making the per share figures better as fast as possible. He’s a simple guy to understand and it’s obvious he’s grown tired of running a public company and doing IR. I believe it was the last AGM, but there was a transcript I was reading where he just wanted to leave and go do work that he felt was productive for his company. Frankly, that is great.
I appreciate managers that realize IR is not going to be what helps you, especially if you don’t need funding. Just keep shredding more, Jeff. More customers, higher prices, greater route density, lower costs.
Ending things off and keeping it short-
If you’ve been following along, especially recently, you know I’ve been reaching in blind & deep into the cookie jar of corporate incentives to explain motivations that can plausibly work against immediately modifying the label to best in class mycological and complete cure values for MOB-015.
There’s only two good answers I can come to. One is far clearer, it accomplishes quite a lot at once, but it is still ultimately not what I believe to dominates this little universe of corporate incentives. I’ll be dedicating a video to the lesser of two incentives just because it’s cut and dry: the impacts on prescribed volumes.
My curiosity to this point is motivated by this:
Look at how Moberg initially described the whitening and look at the aesthetic cure values during washout from prior trials. That description of how the whitening occurs and then resolves over some slightly longer than 4-week zero application period suggests they risked almost nothing with complete cure by walking once daily down to 36 weeks. If achieving a modified label with a high complete cure and high mycological cure really was their primary motivation, this dosing looks incredibly greedy or stupid.
If they’ve accurately described the whitening and shown us how it behaves on thought to be disease free keratin (mycological cure), there was nothing worth risking their primary objective of a label change on a potential dosing response cropping up. So, the only logical answer remaining if you’re unwilling to excuse all of this away as incompetence or greed (this is the default assumption), is that label modification wasn’t their primary objective at all. In fact, I’m inclined to think Moberg wanted to salvage that 76% mycological cure value on the daily label by doing something that’s highly creative.
Fellow shareholder here✋
With respect to Mobergs goals, would the shareholders desired outcome from this trial be enablement patent the whitening effect as needed for fungal death (which would include the new, patent protection into 2040s), combined with confirmation of efficacy of a longer daily application that would drive higher sales volume? This combined with prescribers coming around to the idea that Aesthetic cure is not an important end point due to 1. whitening it being transient, and 2. "whitening" actually being a requirement for the Myco cure with this product?