To shift a services-oriented company to a product mindset, frame productization as a competitive advantage. Repeatable, productized solutions offer greater market differentiation than purely custom builds, leading to more effective competition and new deal wins. This tangible benefit helps secure buy-in from sales and leadership.

While competitors retrench during recessions, Amphenol leverages its strong balance sheet to accelerate M&A. This counter-cyclical strategy allows it to acquire strategic assets at attractive valuations, ensuring it emerges from downturns with increased market share and strength.

Avoid a fixed allocation of resources between core products and new initiatives. Instead, treat the investment mix as "seasonal." Periodically and purposefully reassess the balance based on the most pressing business needs—whether it's stabilizing the core for large customers or pushing aggressively into new markets for growth.

Amphenol runs as a federation of autonomous business units. This structure is key to its M&A success, as acquired companies retain their brand, culture, and customer intimacy. Sellers prefer Amphenol because they know their business won't be suffocated by a monolithic corporate hierarchy.

Amphenol's components are a tiny fraction of a customer's total cost but are critical to system performance. The real value proposition is not the part itself but the confidence that the larger system won't fail. This dynamic creates high switching costs and pricing power.

Earning a high return on invested capital is only half the battle. True compounding requires the ability to redeploy large amounts of capital at similarly high rates. Amphenol achieves this through its disciplined M&A playbook in a fragmented market, answering the crucial question of reinvestment.

While adjacent, incremental innovation feels safer and is easier to get approved, Nubar Afeyan warns that everyone else is doing the same thing. This approach inevitably leads to commoditization and erodes sustainable advantage. Leaping to new possibilities is the only way to truly own a new space.

Fal treats every new model launch on its platform as a full-fledged marketing event. Rather than just a technical update, each release becomes an opportunity to co-market with research labs, create social buzz, and provide sales with a fresh reason to engage prospects. This strategy turns the rapid pace of AI innovation into a predictable and repeatable growth engine.

With no single market over 25% of sales, Amphenol's diversification acts as a shock absorber during specific industry downturns. Offensively, this breadth ensures it always has exposure to the world's most significant growth trends, whether it's aerospace, EVs, or AI data centers.