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 is just remarkable. So, 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 a business to Berkshire Hathaway—to me, actually—for many, many millions of dollars.
Both of them started with twenty-five hundred dollars, by coincidence with the exact same amount; it was everything they had in the world. One of them was a woman who landed in Seattle in 1917. She couldn't speak a word of English; she 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. 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. So, she and her husband decided to move to Omaha. They came to Omaha in 1919, and there she found a small colony of Russian Jews, so she started feeling more at home.
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. This woman, Rose Blumpkin, 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 saved 2,500 dollars. She went to Chicago and bought what she could—furniture. Her dream had always been to open a furniture store.
This woman, who had never gone to school one day in her life, with 2,500 dollars but with the same spirit that the people in this room had about having a dream and working to accomplish that dream, built a business which she sold to me in 1983 for 60 million dollars—approximately—in which she 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, 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 Mr.
B, with her 2,500 dollars—one further fact about her: she could not read or write, and she went into the furniture business. She didn't bring anything 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. 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 don't want you guys coming around to me asking me for hundreds of millions of dollars. I'd like to join in with you much earlier.
So, 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. He lived in the Midwest.
He was a pretty good athlete, didn’t like school much. 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.
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. When the country—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 Navy, 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. 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. He finally became a used car salesman at a Cadillac dealership in St.
Louis, Missouri. At age 35, having moved up in the organization—the sales organization—he said to his 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 dollars, 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.
Of course, the only call he was going to get all day. His first venture was okay, but it wasn't really going to go any place, 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.
Now he's taking on Hertz, Avis, National, and people like that who have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cars, while he's got 17 cars. 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 something different; he could offer them friendlier service than they'd ever seen.
So, he started the company. He named it after the battleship that he'd flown from in the Pacific, which was the USS Enterprise. 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, 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 who runs the business now. A grandchild is in the business; they'll probably be a fourth-generation alumni. So, this man in the United States didn't invent artificial intelligence; you know, he didn't do anything that just like Mr.
B selling furniture. I mean, any one of us could have entered those businesses, but he lived by the creed, basically, of delighting his customers and working with people and establishing a relationship with them so that they, in turn, would want to like the customers. He couldn’t go out there and take care of every rental car possibility, but he learned how to project himself, his attitude toward his fellow man, and his desire 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. It illustrates several points. One is you don't necessarily get it exactly right the first time.
I mean, in the car leasing business, you were basically 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. 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 Mr.
B. Rose Bumpkin did with furniture. 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 could change, and that was the customer's experience. I have seen the one that got away—Enterprise. I went down to Florida and tried to talk him into selling to Berkshire, and he was smart enough not to do it.
Probably the value of the company has quadrupled since I made that visit, but 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.
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 and day out, to delight the customer. 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 for 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 tie; actually, probably if somebody gave it to me.
But for the purposes of the speech, I will say I have no idea. But what I—or the shirt I'm wearing—others know is that 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.
You'll have a hard time finding a person who has had a wonderful, delighted experience in purchasing anything that isn't going to come back. Similarly, if the memory is of rudeness, indifference, or whatever it may be, they're never going to come back. 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.
Be able to do it through people who themselves do not feel they're being fairly treated, that their views aren't appropriately considered. So, you really do have to learn to multiply yourself through other people. I advise the young people to come to Omaha; we have a lot of classes.
The key is, certainly in terms of your personal life, the most important decision you may make is the spouse that most of you will likely have. It's very important to surround yourself with people who are better than you. You are going to move in the direction of the people you associate with.
I've been enormously lucky in that respect. I mean, I've just had teachers and friends and a spouse that really was a better person than I was, and I had enough sense to learn from these people that life went better if you behaved better yourself. It took a while, so 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 think you need to straighten out yourself.
Simple rules like that—delighting customers, working through other people, associating with people that will cause you to move in a better path than you might otherwise have—will take you so far in life that it's hard to believe. I mean, they took Rose Bumpkin, who couldn't 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. Incidentally, there's been no money put in it since the $2,500; that's been the total capital paid into the Nebraska Furniture Mart.
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 business built on itself. So, I want to tell you I admire this group enormously.
When I met Dr Mello's class on September 22nd, eight years ago, I was thrilled, and I admire people that are doing what you have done. 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 2,200 people here whom I admire.
I'm cheering for you, and I can tell you the best is yet to come. Thank you.
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