모두를 침묵하게 만든 워렌버핏 l 골드만삭스 연설

 

모두를 침묵하게 만든 워렌버핏 l 골드만삭스 연설
eight years ago i just turned 80.
i got invited to go to laguardia to the laguardia community college and and i met a truly remarkable group you know whether it was male female hispanic africanmerican

Whatever it might be 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 so 

i would like to just tell you a couple of short stories 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 was 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 and as she put it she felt like a dummy she couldn't pick up the language she couldn't learn a word and then as her oldest daughter went to school she would come on 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 who had never gone to school one day in her life with twenty five hundred dollars 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 this woman rose blumkin well she she worked for me until she was 103. said then she retired and she died the next year which is a lesson to all the berkshires managers of premature retirement you know nothing you can't tell what's going to happen but mrs b with her 2500 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 that she cared about her customers she worked at very low gross margins but she built this incredible business 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. he was a we'll call him jack lived in the midwest he was a pretty good athlete didn't like school much the company he built hires more college graduates each year than any other company in the united states jack went to college for a year and then dropped out he really wasn't interested in school and when the country became the united states became under attack he went over to the navy and again volunteered and they took him they put him on an aircraft carrier he he flew uh small flight airplanes 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 the at a cadillac dealership in st louis missouri and at age 35 having moved up in the organization the sales organization he said to his uh boss uh could i go in the car leasing business with you the bus said well if you'll cut your salary in half and you'll come up with it was 25 000 which he borrowed uh we can become partners in a car leasing company so uh my friend jack uh started at age 35 in the car leasing business and he had seven cars uh 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 gonna get all day so 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 in the rental rent-a-car uh 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 can offer a different car but he can offer him friendlier service than they've ever seen and so he started a company he named it after the battleship that he'd flown from in the pacific which was the uss enterprise and he died about a year a 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 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 of delighting his customers and working with people and establishing the 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 uh possibility but he he learned how to project himself 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 uh business from virtually nothing and it illustrates several points one is you don't necessarily get it right for 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 and it's very hard to delight a customer when you just give them the card 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 he found the golden key and he he took a very ordinary business and turned it into an absolutely extraordinary uh he didn't he didn't worry about the things he couldn't change but he didn't worry he did focus on the one thing he couldn't change and that was the customer's experience henry ford as you may know failed twice before he started the ford motor company in 1903 i mean the 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 a genuine a genuine desire day in day out to delight the customer i've never i've never seen a business i've seen a lot of businesses but i've never seen one that delights the customer that 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 have no idea but why that 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 uh with the purchase experience and you'll have a hard time finding a person that's had a wonderful experience a delighted experience in purchasing anything that isn't going to come back and similarly uh 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 protect that interest in people's well-being in dividing them yourself but you have to do it through other people and you won't be able to do it through people who themselves uh do not feel they're being fairly treated that their views aren't are appropriately considered so you really do have to learn to multiply yourself through other people and i advise the key is to is to certainly in terms of your personal life the most important decision you may will make is is the spouse that most of you will likely have and it's very important to surround your people yourself with people that are the better than you are you are going to move in the direction of the people you associate with us i've been enormously lucky in that respect i mean i've i've just had teachers and friends and a spouse that had enough sense to learn from these people that that life went better if you behave better yourself and 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 uh 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 they will take you so far in life that 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 instantly 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 that the business built on itself so 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 i'm looking 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