Successful turnarounds are often more about continuous improvements than about radical change. Those improvements occur behind the scenes in ways that make interaction with patients and physicians simpler.

A recent profile of Cornerstone Medical Center provides an example. From the outside it may appear that not much has changed; yet inside, life is getting better for patients and physicians.

​One change has been the addition of ER Express, which enables online reservation and schedule for the emergency room. Another improvement is the application of ER Passport, which enables referring physicians in the North Georgia community.

​Link to the article from North Georgia News: here

On December 1st, Visa and MasterCard announced a three-year delay to the liability shift for gas station owners related to adopting the EMV standard for hardware and software to process point-of-sale payments.  EMV, which is also known as chip cards, has been the standard outside of the U.S. for years; it was adopted by U.S. retailers whose sales occur inside the store in 2015.  For "pay at the pump" retailers, it was supposed to occur in October 2017.  Now it is October 2020.

The three-year delay greatly impacts the financials of equipment manufacturers (such as Gilbarco Veeder-Root owned by Fortive (FTV) and Wayne, owned by Dover Corp (DOV)) and distributors of petroleum equipment; it impacts how their customers - petroleum retailers (think: gas stations) consider spending.  Manufacturers, distributors and companies that install this equipment had staffed up and added costs to meet this giant leap in demand.  Now everything has changed.

Fluctuation in industry demand highlight the importance of a concept that renowned author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, wrote about in Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (Amazon link) in 2012.  He writes:

"Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better" 

Our portfolio company, Guardian Fueling Technologies (@guardianfueling), is a large beneficiary of the EMV demand.  Management has focused on building a business model of resiliency as we look beyond the EMV cycle.  Our goal is to reach Taleb's antifragile state so that we become stronger in times of stress.