When you think of individuals such Carl Icahn, Ronald O. Perelman and Nelson Peltz, you might think of their knack for business acumen, successful fund management and even philanthropy. However, there is one aspect of these personalities’ exploits that might get overshadowed by the overarching themes of their achievements – a specialty in turning businesses around.  

The reason it is a specialty is because not everyone has the means or frankly, the guts, to put plans in place to take a failing company and turn it around. 

Last week’s foray into the world of executives and portfolio managers at activist fund 180 Degree Capital Corp. (NASDAQ:TURN), Kevin Rendino (CEO) and Daniel Wolfe (President), touched on the reasons why companies consider and ultimately agree to shift the innards of their businesses around. In the end, it really comes down to making them attractive enough for investors to put their money into. We’d suggest that you catch up with that column after reading what we have lined up today.

So, speaking of turnaround specialists, we wanted to bring attention to a few famous ones who excelled at buying or taking a stake in underperforming or struggling companies to help them achieve profitability in various ways. 

We’ll touch upon notable investments made by the turnaround specialist investors above.

There’s going to be certain times when you need to think twice before believing bullish commentary from management teams. You need to understand that that bullish commentary can change on a dime. I learned this lesson when considering investing in some technology stocks right before and during the dotcom bust. At that time, as risk was escalating, many technology company management teams I interviewed commented that they saw no problem with their industry. They assured me that they’d be able to navigate an economic slowdown. Well, that couldn’t have been further from the truth as many of these companies pivoted on their bullish stance just weeks after these interviews.

We’d like to visit another story that could just as well have been part of our last weekly segment to prove that some management teams just get it right. We wanted to offer it up as another example of an almost perfect implementation of the use of capital, be it raised funds or cash on hand, to grow a company in an accretive manner through acquisitions. 

It’s basically a testimony on the fiduciary responsibility of public companies to handle the funds the way a public company should, as expected by shareholders..

The company in focus today is UFP Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:UFPT). The Company is a designer and custom manufacturer of components, subassemblies, products and packaging utilizing highly specialized foams, films, and plastics primarily for the medical market.

On most occasions, our microcap company standard of 50 million or less shares outstanding is and will always be unwavering. Now, you’re probably saying, ”it’s not the number of  outstanding shares that matters, it’s the value per share of certain statistics like earnings per share and valuation ratios like price to earnings and price of sales multiples that matters when determining if a stock is undervalued.”

While this may be technically true, think about it this way – A company that has a lot of outstanding shares may be giving you a clue that multiple offerings came about because the company was unable to use the money it’s been raising to grow cash flow, potentially raising red flags on the effectiveness of management.

My analyst team at MSM thinks it may have found what will be a classic successful ‘Big Cap Microcap’ (BigCapMicro) case study in a company that provides healthcare communication solutions internationally, delivering clinical information to care teams to enhance patient outcomes (clinical communication technology to hospitals). The company has two divisions, wireless (traditional paging) and related software services to manage the flow, delivery and analysis of communication. Some of its services include subscriptions to one-way or two-way messaging, voicemail services, call center services, equipment loss or maintenance protection, and selling devices to resellers who lease or resell them to their subscribers.