$CBZ: stop the buybacks and restart the M&A flywheel? | Reference Equity
About this episode
Ryan Bunn discusses his proposal for CBIZ to stop stock buybacks and restart M&A activities to drive growth.
Ryan Bunn (Reference Equity) has a public proposal for CBIZ ($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…
Topics covered
- buybacks
- M&A
- equity
- investing
- financial analysis
Sponsors
AlphaSense
More episodes of Yet Another Value Podcast
- $PRKS: SeaWorld, an 8% cash yield, and a possible 80% short squeeze | Hawkins Entrekin
- Adam Wyden: buying someone else's pain in Stagwell $STGW and Driven Brands $DRVN | ADW Capital
- $VEON: a busted EM telecom hiding a 4x? | Samit Umatiya, UIG Funds
- Pershing Square Challenge 2026 finalists on MSA Safety: a hidden quality compounder? $MSA
- $FOX dropped 25% buying $ROKU. Is the market wrong? | Accrued Interest
- June 2026 Random Ramblings
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Yet Another Value Podcast podcast page.