Why Aren't There More Intuits?
Intuit is simultaneously more profitable than glamorous startups and growing faster than established incumbents. This is the Tom Brady of its industry—performing at the top of its game at an age when its onetime peers have long since stopped playing.
Capital Thinking • Issue #134 • View online
Why is Intuit still here?
It’s No. 8 on Fortune’s new ranking of the Future 50, the companies best prepared to thrive and grow their revenue rapidly in coming years. Yet at age 34 it’s older than almost all the others.
Its business, specialized personal-computing software, is brutally competitive. All its peers from 1983 (Flexidraw, VisiCalc) are long gone.
Yet Intuit is not just surviving, it’s blowing the doors off.
Revenue, at $5.2 billion, is up 36% since 2012; profits are at an all-time high. Return on capital is a towering 60%, while cost of capital is a measly 6.9%, according to the EVA Dimensions consulting firm, which ranks Intuit’s financial performance in the 99th percentile of all public companies.
Intuit is simultaneously more profitable than glamorous startups and growing faster than established incumbents. Even as its stock hits new highs, nearly all analysts rate it a buy.
This is the Tom Brady of its industry—performing at the top of its game at an age when its onetime peers have long since stopped playing.
- by Goeff Colvin, Fortune
Brian Halligan, of Hubspot, recently made a case as to why we don’t see more Intuits on the world stage in a recent post. Let’s see what he has to say on the subject.
“When you look across the business software landscape, there are many large software companies (market cap >$10 billion) out there that sell to enterprises: Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Workday, Salesforce, Adobe, IBM, Citrix, ServiceNow, Symantec, CheckPoint, CA, Red Hat, EMC, and maybe a few I forgot.
There’s only one large software company out there that focuses on SMBs: Intuit.
Why is that?
It turns out it’s easy to start a company in the SMB space, but it has been traditionally very hard to scale a company in the SMB space for two interlocked reasons that I’ll attempt to explain in this article.”
Brian Halligan
How Intuit Reinvents Itself
Of course, the fact the company is well-run, metric-driven, has developed a culture of performance, and is highly adaptable might have a something to do with it.
