these people had one thing in common you
know they knew
they had it in themselves
they knew they could be something beyond
where they were
they were willing to put their time
their energies
to better themselves
what you really could do with more
skills
it's just remarkable so i i would like
to just tell you a couple of short
stories
and we'll draw maybe a couple of lessons
from them i would like to tell you of
two women that
each sold the business
to berkshire hathaway
uh to me actually for many many many
millions of dollars both of them started
with twenty five hundred dollars by a
coincidence with the exact same amount
it was everything they had in the world
and one of them was a woman
who landed in seattle in 1917
couldn't speak a word of english had a
tag around her neck the tag said fort
dodge iowa the red cross
got her to fort dodge where she was
reunited with her husband who had come
to the country a couple of years earlier
and she lived in fort dodge for two
years
and as she put it she felt like a dummy
she couldn't pick up the language she
couldn't learn a word
and so she decided she and her husband
decided to move to omaha
so they came to omaha
in 1919
and there she found a
small colony of russian jews so she
started feeling more at home
and then as her oldest daughter went to
school she would come home this daughter
francis
and she would teach her mother the words
she learned in school that day
and this woman rose bumpkin spent 20
years
saving money
bringing first her siblings over her
mother and father fifty dollars at a
time she sold used clothing to do it
she had four children during this period
and by 1937 after 20 years
she'd save 2 500
she went to chicago
and she bought what she could have
furniture her dream had always been to
open
a furniture store and this woman without
who had never gone to school one day in
her life
with 2 500
but with the same spirit that the people
in this room had
about having a dream
and working to accomplish that dream
she built a business
which she sold to me in 1983 for
60 million dollars approximately in
which
which did a billion and a half dollars
worth of business last year
[Music]
the fourth generation is working in that
business
this woman rose blumpkin she worked for
me until she was 103. and
then i'm not saying then she retired and
she died the next year which is a lesson
to all of berkshire's managers that
premature retirement you know nothing
you can't tell what's going to happen
but mrs b
with her 2 500
one further fact about her
she could not read or write
and she went into a furniture business
and she didn't bring anything in unique
in furniture but she brought a
determination to succeed
she knew she could outwork anyone else
she knew she cared about her customers
she worked at very low gross margins but
she built this incredible business
and i saw one other woman
who did a similar thing with twenty five
hundred dollars i paid her hundreds of
millions of dollars for her business so
i decided to go to the source and get
these people before
you know why
i i don't want you guys coming around to
me
asking me hundreds of millions of
dollars i'd like to join in with you um
much earlier so i i followed this group
and today i'd like to tell you about
one other small business person this
person i went to buy his business from
him
and he turned me down which was very
wise
but this was a fellow who was born about
eight years before i was he was born in
1922.
we'll call him jack lived in the midwest
he
was a pretty good athlete didn't like
school much
and i'm going to tell you one thing
early in the story maybe you can figure
out who the guy was
the company he built
hires more college graduates
each year than any other company
in the united states
and this fellow
who was destined for this but did not
know it jack
went to college for a year
and then dropped out he really wasn't
that interested in school
and the year he dropped out was 1941
and
when the
country became the united states became
under attack
he went down to the army air force
recruiting station volunteered
and they turned him down because he had
hay fever
so he went over to the navy
and
again volunteered and they took him they
put him on an aircraft carrier he
flew
small flight airplanes
during world war ii got two
distinguished flying crosses from the uh
navy
uh and then he came back to the midwest
so now we've got a young guy
probably by this time he would be
23 or 24 years old
and the interesting thing is
he got back to the midwest
and he actually kind of
went from one job
to another for a short period or not
such a short period of time
and he finally became a used car
salesman at a cadillac dealership
uh in st louis missouri
and at age
35 having moved up in the organization
the sales organization
he said to his uh boss could i go in the
car leasing business with you
the boss said well if you'll cut your
salary in half
and you'll come up with
it was 25 000 which he borrowed we can
become partners in a car leasing company
so
my friend jack
started at age 35 in the car leasing
business
and he had seven cars
it was pretty slow
in fact one of the things he did was
whenever the phone rang
he let it ring three or four times so
people would think that he was very busy
answering other phones and of course the
only call he was going to get all day
so his first venture was okay
but it wasn't really going to go
anyplace and there's a lesson in this
for all of us
at age 40 he decided
with 17 vehicles 17 cars
he was going
to go into competition in the rental car
business so now he's taking on hertz
and avis
and national and people like that who
have hundreds and hundreds of thousands
of cars
and he's got 17 cars
and his cars aren't any different than
theirs i mean he's buying them from
general motors or florida chrysler
and
he can't get the airport locations those
companies have them all sold up
but he was determined that he would
basically
offer the customer
get all from a different car
but he can offer him
friendlier service than they've ever
seen
and so he started the company
he named it after
the battleship
that he'd flown from in the pacific
which was the uss enterprise
and uh he died about a year year and a
half ago
but when he died
his rent-a-car company
starting with those 17 cars
was worth more than hertz and avis and
all the rest of the rental cars
put together
the man's name was jack taylor
and his son
andy taylor is a good friend of mine
runs the business now
a grandchild is in the business
they'll probably be a fourth generation
alumni so this this man
in the united states
he didn't invent artificial intelligence
you know he didn't do anything that
just like mrs b selling furniture i mean
that any one of us could have entered
those businesses
but he lived by the
by the creed basically of
delighting his customers
and
working with people
and establishing
the relationship with them so that they
in turn would wanted to like the
customers he he couldn't go out there
and take care of every rental car uh
possibility but he
he learned how to project himself
uh and his attitude toward his fellow
man
and his desire
you know to make a friend out of every
customer
he managed to take very ordinary cars
and turn them into this extraordinary
business from virtually nothing
and it illustrates
several points
one is you don't necessarily
get it right the first exactly right the
first time i mean the car leasing
business
you know basically you were competing on
the cost of money to finance cars and
it's very hard to delight a customer
when you just give them the car and tell
them to send you a monthly check for
five years and you'll be back at that
time so
his talents were being wasted basically
in that business
but at the age of 40
with all of that experience behind him
he found the golden key
he took a very ordinary business
and turned it into an absolutely
extraordinary operation just like mrs b
rose bumpkin did with furniture
and
he didn't worry
about whether the federal reserve
was going to
tighten or ease
he didn't worry about whether the stock
market was up or down yesterday
he didn't worry about the things he
couldn't change
but he did worry he did focus
on the one thing he couldn't change
and that was the customer's experience
and i have seen
the one i didn't the one that got away
enterprise i went down to florida and
tried to talk him into selling the
berkshire and he was smart enough not to
do it
probably the value of the company is
quadrupled since i made that visit uh
but he
he was smart enough to see
that he would find that business henry
ford as you may know
failed twice before he started the
ford motor company in 1903 i mean the
test
isn't whether you get the greatest
business idea in the world the first
time out the test is whether you keep
learning as you go along
what your strengths are and what you can
do for your customers what you can bring
especially to the party
and to do that
you need
the education
that i know you've received through ten
thousand small businesses but
you need a genuine desire day in
day out
to
delight the customer
i've never i've never seen a business
and i've seen
a lot of businesses but i've never seen
one that
delights the customer
that doesn't succeed i mean what you
want is that customer the next day when
they think do i want to rent a car
or do i want to buy some furniture
what goes through their mind
you know it's the place where they've
had a great experience i don't know what
i paid for this
type actually probably if somebody gave
it to me but for the purposes of the
speech i will say i i have no idea but
what i or the shirt i'm wearing others
but i do know i will remember
how i was treated
when i bought it i mean you long forget
about
the price
but you never forget
whether you had a good experience or a
poor experience
with the purchase experience
and
you'll have a hard time finding
a person has had a wonderful experience
a delighted experience
in purchasing anything
that isn't going to come back
and similarly
if the memory is
of rudeness
indifference
and whatever it may be
they're never going to come back and
as a small business owner and as you
grow
you have to not only
be able to project that
interest in people's well-being and
delighting them yourself
but you have to do it through other
people
and
you won't be able to do it
through people who themselves
do not feel they're being
fairly treated
that their views aren't aren't
appropriately considered
so you really do have to learn to
multiply yourself
through other people and i advise the
young people to come
to omaha
we have a lot of a number of classes
the key is to
certainly
in terms of your personal life the most
important decision you may make you'll
make
is is the spouse
that most of you will likely have
and it's very important to surround your
people yourself with people who are the
better than you are you are going to
move in the direction
of the people you associate with so
if you
constantly i've been enormously lucky in
that respect i mean i've
i've just had teachers and
and friends and a spouse
that really was a better person i was
and i had enough sense
to learn from these people that that
life went better if you behaved
better yourself
it took a while
so i
i advise you
to seek out
as your partner in business your partner
in life whatever it may be
look for the people
that actually
are examples to you
rather than somebody that you need you
think you need to straighten out
yourself
and simple rules like that delighting
customers working through other people
associating with people that will
will cause you to move in a better path
than you might otherwise have
they will take you so far in life that
uh it's hard to believe i mean they
they took rose bumpkin without being
able to speak a word of english
couldn't read or write
and they took her to what is now
a billion and a half dollar business and
incidentally there's been no money put
in it since the 2500
that's been the total capital paid into
the nebraska furniture market
and
i think if you looked at enterprise i
don't know their books the same way but
my guess is that
very little equity capital has been
added to enterprise over the years the
the business built on itself
so
i want to tell you i admire
this group enormously when i
when i met dr mello's class
on september 22nd uh
eight years ago i i was thrilled and i i
admire people
that are doing what
you have done you've
you know working
hard at your job at the same time
you took on an added
really a lot of hard work
to further your skills
99
graduate i mean
it's a mind-blowing statistic
and i'm looking at
i'm looking at 2200 people here who i
admire
i'm cheering for you and i can tell you
the best is yet to come thank you