Ben Guthmiller
Ben Guthmiller founds and edits Axiom Research and writes The Operator's Brief. Each month he takes one real company apart from the public record, finds the mechanism that made or leaked the money, and scales it down to a business you could run. He also leads Axiom Capital Group, which buys, builds, and grows businesses with sticky, recurring revenue.
What informs the work
Fourteen years at IBM in enterprise value creation, M&A integration, and finance, currently Vice President of Enterprise Transformation & AI Value Creation. He owned G&A integration on IBM's $2.3B software carve-out of webMethods and StreamSets, served as Chief of Staff on a $4.5B efficiency and reinvestment program, and built the analytics behind IBM's product-led SaaS growth. The foundation underneath is finance: a Columbia MBA and a finance and economics degree with an econometrics focus.
What he publishes
The Operator's Brief, monthly. One documented case, the model behind it, and the move for the week, with every number labeled as observed, estimated, or inferred.
Method and standard
Every issue is built from public records: court filings, settlements, and company reports. Estimates are marked as estimates. If a published number is ever wrong, the correction is public.
Elsewhere
Research by Ben
- The Cost of Coming Back · HVAC return-visit pricing
- The Wash You Meant to Take · recurring-revenue economics
- Eight and a Half Phone Calls · referral-channel economics
- The Override Tax · field-service operations