Adam Wyden

Wyden’s core Stagwell $STGW math: at $7.40 he frames the stock at roughly 4.9x 2027 EBITDA and more than 4x 2028 EBITDA—not earnings—alongside a “22% free cash flow yield in 27 and 26.5 in 28.” He estimates ~$570M EBITDA next year and ~$700M in the 2028 political cycle, versus company guidance of $1B EBITDA by 2029. At Publicis’s 9% FCF yield it’s an $18 stock; at a 16x market multiple, $25-26.50. “These businesses are priced as if they’re going away, not like they’re growing.”

His anti-“AI loser” case is that big-budget marketing works like investment banking, not gig creativity. Large CPG clients spending roughly $200M bring their own advisers to agency pitches—“an investment banker deciding which investment banker you’re going to use”—while Stagwell layers 30-plus years of agency data and its own agentic operating-system effort on top of human “chutzpah” that LLMs cannot replicate. He separately discusses IBM’s “machine,” which he says is being developed with Palantir.

Andrew Walker’s sharpest pushback: management has publicly called the stock undervalued in Q2 2022, Q2 2023 and 2024 while it went nowhere. Wyden’s answer is multiple contraction plus legacy issues—dual-class structure, a TRA and declining revenue from divestitures—and that the divestiture-and-investment slog is ending: “the market doesn’t care until it cares… suddenly you have that aha moment, the stock’s up 300%.”

The capital-return kicker: Wyden expects ~$340M of free cash flow over Q2-Q4, thinks roughly $150-175M of additional stock can be bought back, and sees another ~$170M of cash, potentially enabling ~20M more shares to be retired. He estimates a ~$2.8B year-end EV and “Buffett math” approaching a 50% return with no multiple expansion. ADW holds 5M shares plus a million options and teases: “stay tuned for the August 14 filing.”

On Driven Brands $DRVN, the pitch is that Take 5 alone “is worth more than the entire market cap.” Quick-lube economics—a $75 oil change versus roughly $400 at a Porsche dealer, 40% cash-on-cash returns on new units, and roughly 1,300-1,400 stores with a stated goal of about 3,000—ride the DIY-to-do-it-for-me shift and an aging, K-shaped car parc.

The sum-of-parts unlock both men converge on: Auto Glass Now could be worth roughly $600M, with current EBITDA estimated at $30-35M and a cash-pay opportunity of $60-75M; collision could represent ~$50-60M of EBITDA at 13-16x, or roughly $900M. Walker’s math treats those proceeds as roughly covering $1.5B of net debt, though Wyden says the proceeds would not quite cover all of it. That would leave a ~$2B market cap holding franchise EBITDA of ~$100M plus a ~$400M-EBITDA Take 5. Wyden models $550M total 2027 EBITDA; Walker argues he’s “going to be proven low.”

The EV bear case gets dismissed on the data: new-vehicle sales swung back to roughly “97 and 3” ICE-versus-EV, average vehicle age has gone from 7.5 to ~13 years (“why can’t it go to 17?”), and cheap Chinese EVs are “not happening given the political climate.” Charging infrastructure, the grid and available power are, in Wyden’s view, far from ready—“fantasy land.”

On the Roark endgame, ADW’s public take-private offer at $18, when the stock was $12, frames intrinsic value, and Wyden calls the leverage-target rationale for not buying back stock “ridiculous” after “all the money you blew on car wash and the accounting misstatement.” Walker’s conclusion: Driven “belongs in private equity hands,” where someone will finally take “an axe to the corporate cost.”

🔗 Original source & video: Adam Wyden: buying someone else’s pain in Stagwell $STGW and Driven Brands $DRVN | ADW Capital