I have thought about this a lot over the years and tried to spot these companies - many of them are the type of business that Berkshire Hathaway would love to find.
Some of them are a little more visible simply because they’ve scaled and developed a moat - logistics, particularly trucking in the UK, and international cargo shipping, stand out here for me. But also social care, floristry and grocery wholesaling, weird sectors in aviation (I worked in that for a while), all sorts.
And then I look at family businesses that shouldn’t be able to exist all the time. In my nearest town centre there is a grocer, a fish shop and a butchers on the high street. Common sense tells us the extra large supermarket built on the outskirts of the town in the 1990s should have obliterated them, but no.
In the UK there is a common assumption that a lot of vape shops, barbers and even some takeaways are fronts for money laundering (and that definitely happens - there is a chicken shop in one Northern town I know that to my knowledge has no ability to actually sell you chicken, nor can the 4 others next door to it). But there are definitely some that are making good money via the legal route.
As a software guy I look for opportunities to sell to them and there’s one theme that stands out across many of them that is also an invisible sector: have you noticed how many small companies make and sell touchscreen tills/cash registers? In the UK it seems to be a thriving cottage industry.
I used to think that all those Persian carpet stores on University Avenue in Palo Alto were a way to get immigrants jobs in the US. But no. Turns out the carpet store guy had been renting upstairs office space to startups in exchange for an equity stake. That worked out very, very well for him.
Oriental carpet stores are interesting businesses. I always wondered how they stayed open until I met someone whose family has been in the business for several generations.
Individual sales are in the thousands, so they operate more like high-end jewelry stores than a "normal" business. One sale a day is minimum 250K/year.
The store itself seems to be more of just a show room. There are other sales routes too. Selling into hotels would be an example. There are also maintenance services, so a high end rug in some sense can be seen as a recurring revenue source.
Oriental carpet stores seem to be doing alright still in the bay; less so in Manhattan, though you would think the same opportunity to rent property to startups could exist. Many of them have shut down or are only open by appointment. None of them offer the personal service I suspect the author is insinuating exists still. Near as I know that level of bespoke care died off a couple of decades ago unless you are very wealthy. No doubt the competition (but not competition) of sites like etsy, temu, ebay, and the large number of people who think things look sorta like something nicer contributed to the death of the end-to-end streets of Persian carpet stores. I still remember purchasing a knock off for under $85 during the dotcom boom. Nothing was individually dyed; it was all mostly just meant to look that way, like most 'oriental' carpet now. The materiels going into making the new-fangled rug bears no resemblence to those which make an old-style one. God-forbid you drop the wrong beverage or something on a really good old hand-made rug and the dye runs. Shopping in those large Persian rug stores are still lovely, when you can find one that is open (by appointment or not). They rarely have posted hours either.
All of those are clearly AI-generated. You shouldn’t trust any “edutainment” videos made that way, chances are there has been zero fact-checking and that the creator hasn’t even watched the result of their slop.
Here is the entire article compressed from 21k characters to 176:
It’s easier to get away with large margins and not spawn competitors if nobody scrutinizes you, and it’s easier not to get scrutinized if you are small or the domain is boring.
Not a knock on the article. It’s nice to double-click on a concept and explore it with examples and from many angles. But for me, it would have been easier to start with that framing, because it took way too long to understand the purpose of the article, atleast for me.
There are many opportunities to start the your own invisible company. I once started a small business ($33k/year) that sold exactly one product to one company for a few years. One thing the article glosses over in the Steven Ross discussion is that this guy was clearly entrepreneurial: he was able to see the gaps and find or build solutions to fill them. You can in fact build a business around solving a "simple" problem for one business, and because it is a small scale you are essentially invisible to the would-be competition.
Our startup noticed our first major-brand customer had a high-stakes B2B process depend on a spreadsheet that looked handmade and perhaps error-prone.
There was a moment of thinking This could be one of those startup pivot points, when what you thought was the incidental to your exciting technology solution, is actually the simple CRUD app/integration SaaS that customers need even more.
Then there was a moment of thinking We don't want to be the communication middleperson on that high-stakes communication, if there was ever a dispute.
Also, either it wasn't a perceived pain point of the customer, or they intended their ongoing CRM-ish conversion to address it eventually.
So we listened to the customer on what problems they (or at least the stakeholder executives KPIs) actually wanted us to solve, and we continued to consume that spreadsheet in a manual and "zero-impedence" way, for the little bit we could use that info.
(A management consulting firm or YOLO/fly-by-night startup might do that one, though.)
I worked for a different Steve Ross (Dolphins owner, Related Companies, etc), and we did this in house.
From 2008-2017, “we” (I was a contractor 08-09, and employee 15-17) basically turned every spreadsheet into a web application internally.
We added authentication and authorization, used a LOT of ETL-type processing to move data around. So many things could have been packaged and sold, but that was the “secret sauce” that kept the company so profitable.
Then the end in 2017 when a new CIO came in, killed off IT (laid off all non-managers over the course of a year), and replaced everyone with South African consultants to turn IT from a cost center to a profit center.
My impression is that these companies are less invisible than ever thanks to the massive growth in private equity since Ross' era (the 50s-80s). I keep hearing stories about pest control businesses and HVAC companies that get inundated with messages from search funds.
Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone strongly insinuates Kinney Services got started as a gambling front, so possibly a poor example of a boring business turning a healthy profit.
One of my favorite topics, and one that many people argue exists. The conventional thinker really dislikes this concept, as if it points out some personal flaw of theirs. I mention that only because it really sticks out, the personalized perspective people take on this idea of invisible companies they cannot see.
Some of them are a little more visible simply because they’ve scaled and developed a moat - logistics, particularly trucking in the UK, and international cargo shipping, stand out here for me. But also social care, floristry and grocery wholesaling, weird sectors in aviation (I worked in that for a while), all sorts.
And then I look at family businesses that shouldn’t be able to exist all the time. In my nearest town centre there is a grocer, a fish shop and a butchers on the high street. Common sense tells us the extra large supermarket built on the outskirts of the town in the 1990s should have obliterated them, but no.
In the UK there is a common assumption that a lot of vape shops, barbers and even some takeaways are fronts for money laundering (and that definitely happens - there is a chicken shop in one Northern town I know that to my knowledge has no ability to actually sell you chicken, nor can the 4 others next door to it). But there are definitely some that are making good money via the legal route.
As a software guy I look for opportunities to sell to them and there’s one theme that stands out across many of them that is also an invisible sector: have you noticed how many small companies make and sell touchscreen tills/cash registers? In the UK it seems to be a thriving cottage industry.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/165_University_Avenue
Individual sales are in the thousands, so they operate more like high-end jewelry stores than a "normal" business. One sale a day is minimum 250K/year.
The store itself seems to be more of just a show room. There are other sales routes too. Selling into hotels would be an example. There are also maintenance services, so a high end rug in some sense can be seen as a recurring revenue source.
It's a interesting little corner.
Probably 2 or 3, all based in China, that will happily print your company logo on the machines.
Dry cleaners.[1]
Parking lots.[2]
7 boring businesses.[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0cASirKyE
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La4SAUvmKz4
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebaiF97mCtM&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gnrp_caPvo
It’s easier to get away with large margins and not spawn competitors if nobody scrutinizes you, and it’s easier not to get scrutinized if you are small or the domain is boring.
Not a knock on the article. It’s nice to double-click on a concept and explore it with examples and from many angles. But for me, it would have been easier to start with that framing, because it took way too long to understand the purpose of the article, atleast for me.
Our startup noticed our first major-brand customer had a high-stakes B2B process depend on a spreadsheet that looked handmade and perhaps error-prone.
There was a moment of thinking This could be one of those startup pivot points, when what you thought was the incidental to your exciting technology solution, is actually the simple CRUD app/integration SaaS that customers need even more.
Then there was a moment of thinking We don't want to be the communication middleperson on that high-stakes communication, if there was ever a dispute.
Also, either it wasn't a perceived pain point of the customer, or they intended their ongoing CRM-ish conversion to address it eventually.
So we listened to the customer on what problems they (or at least the stakeholder executives KPIs) actually wanted us to solve, and we continued to consume that spreadsheet in a manual and "zero-impedence" way, for the little bit we could use that info.
(A management consulting firm or YOLO/fly-by-night startup might do that one, though.)
From 2008-2017, “we” (I was a contractor 08-09, and employee 15-17) basically turned every spreadsheet into a web application internally.
We added authentication and authorization, used a LOT of ETL-type processing to move data around. So many things could have been packaged and sold, but that was the “secret sauce” that kept the company so profitable.
Then the end in 2017 when a new CIO came in, killed off IT (laid off all non-managers over the course of a year), and replaced everyone with South African consultants to turn IT from a cost center to a profit center.
He lasted another couple years then left.