YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Jacobs

lines on the record: 174
first: 2025-10-28
most recent: 2025-10-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, the waste management business contrasted to the oil business. The oil business was a lot more complex. We were negotiating complicated long-term contracts and chartering vessels and negotiating processing agreements with big major oil companies and hedging. I mean, it's a very, very complicated, complex business. When I read that about the garbage business, I said that that is so much easier picking up. That's a simple business. It moves some garbage and send out an invoice. I definitely think I can do that. And it seems like they make a lot of money. And the trend seemed in the right direction. So yeah, you want to.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like they're picking up trash from one spot and bringing it to another. I need to learn about this industry. But that's my point. people like Fred, people like you, I think there's a ton of people to have the same thing where it's like they're the whole world is like a classroom if you're actually paying attention. Like you can pick up ideas all over the place.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you're also like a lot, the way to describe it is like you're also alive and paying attention. Like the story in your book where you're reading a magazine in bed on a Sunday morning and you read about these waste management companies making like $500 million in profit. You're like, whoa, what?”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like that. Yeah. Going back to what I was saying before, you don't want to be rigid in your thinking. You want to be open-minded, you want to be flexible. You want to be scientific about it, that if new evidence comes along that disproves your theory, then modify your theory. Go by the evidence. Go by the facts. You want to interact with people who you respect and you want to be picking their brain all the time.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think people understand how much that goes. I'm glad you just said that because, yeah, you can see it in the books. You hear stories like that. You endorsed my book. Exactly. You hear stories like that all the time in private. And for you to say that, I think it's really important. There's a few things that pulled out from his biography that just remind me of you. And I'm curious if you agree with some of these things.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea, like think about Sam Walton, right? He wrote his autobiography. His cancer was all over his body. He was in pain. He knows his time is towards the end. And what does he do? He spends a big chunk of the last time he had left saying this is what I learned in my six decade-long career. That is a gift to future generations. And then in the book, they're like, I love this part because in the book, they're like, people ask me all the time, could another Walmart story happen? He's like, yeah, it's probably happening right now. And it was Jeff Bezos going around with his copy of the book writing it, annotating it, giving it to the executives, the early executives of Amazon. It's such a beautiful thing that Fred would do that. It's a beautiful thing you did for your book.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe This is what is so special. I know it's part of humanity in general, but entrepreneurship in particular is just like you see this over and over again, just how generous. These people are with that because they know how fucking hard it is. They just went through all this, and now we might be 15, 20, 30 years different in age, but it's like, just like Ludwig Juston did when you were 23. And in many cases, like what you did with the book.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, maybe. But I was a direct competitor of him in transportation and logistics and not in package because we didn't do package, but pretty much all the other lines of business we competed against him. He was generous. He was charitable. He would always take a meeting with me. He used to come to my house. We'd spend hours and hours and hours talking about everything.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Goes to Vegas. Yes. And then they're like, he thought. He's just like a guy No, I all recognize that in him. So throwing someone out the window.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I go to every business council meeting I possibly can to meet other CEOs and to hear what other people are thinking. It was just a generous guy. This was a guy who had vision, he had passion. Talk about grit. I mean, maybe he was flying around all the time everywhere. Vietnam. He was flying helicopters with people shooting bullets at him to go get Marines who had been, he was a Marine. Marines who had been killed, but you don't leave any Marine behind. He'd go in there. He's risking his life with bullets like Shy shooting at him to go get the remains of a Ted Marine, putting his own life online. He got a purple heart. He got silvery. He got serious, serious, serious, courageous, high integrity guy. And everybody... Everybody loved Fred. Everybody loved Fred.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really like watching that guy work. He said, the years coming into this industry with courage and buying things left and right and has big goals and big ambitions. And I'm going to keep an eye on that guy. And I cried. I said, wow, Fred Smith likes saying crazy stuff. So I went up to him afterwards after his speech was over. And I said, Mr. Smith, Brad Jacobs, I really appreciate what you said. He said, well, first of all, I'm Fred. And that was the beginning of a great, great friendship. And we got together many, many times. Of course, he was on the business council. He was the longest serving member of the business council over a quarter of a century.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this is a very special. You meet people of life that are just special, that are certain integrity. So I met Fred for the first time in 2013. And I was doing a bunch. I came out of nowhere from this industry. I got into 2011, but I really started doing a bunch of acquisitions out of nowhere. And suddenly like I was on the front pages of the trade journals. And I was in Atlanta at the National Association of Manufacturers, NAM conference. And Fred was the keynote. So I was in the audience watching him. And somebody said, what do you think of Brad Jacobs? I go, oh my God, my host charge vehicle. Oh my God, Fred Smith's about to like destroy me. My brand is going to be completely crushed. The icon of the industry is going to say, oh, yeah, I don't believe that. And he said.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was very touched he did that. He was a competitor literally competitor. She endorsed my book. So Fred was an amazing guy.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read his biography probably like four or five years ago. And tell me if I'm wrong, you know more about the syndicate than I do. It seems like FedEx had to be one of the most difficult operational companies to ever invent like an unbelievable. You're talking about somebody who wanted pressure. Yeah, the complexity. You wrote on LinkedIn, you never miss an opportunity to spend time with them and you admired them. Could you just tell why?”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I love about this is it's in your book. You constantly talk about the other people, the other entrepreneurs, other investors, other CEOs that you learn from, then acknowledgements, all these maxims from all these other brilliant people. You talk about, obviously, Ludwig Justelson. I do want to talk about, I read something on LinkedIn about other, I want to talk about the other people that you've learned from, the other founders, CEOs, executives that you admire. I want to start with Fred Smith since he passed away.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wanted the stress. He's like, I want to be in the game. Yes. This is, he was an attorney. He deserves company. It was his first company. He was an attorney who was 35 years old. And then decides, hey, I'm going to try to do an interstate or intrastate airline. And like, then it was like four years of legal fights before he could even take his first flight. He's just like, I love this shit. This is what I want. I want the pressure.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His company was profitable for 40 straight years, just nuts, and he's like a nut job, he's drinking a fifth of bourbon every day. He's chain-smoking cigarettes. No, no, no. I don't advocate that. No, he wouldn't sleep. He's like, he's just hilarious stories in his life. And I thought he was like, he just lived on the edge and completely all in. It was a great story about this where they tried to get him, you know, he chainsmoke and then drink a fifth of bourbon every day. And they're like, but then he had like prostate cancer or something like that. Like, you should stop smoking. He's like, I don't smoke with my prostate. But that's not the thing that I remember. The thing that I loved in an interview one time, they're like, you have, like, you deal with a ton of stress. Like, how do you handle it? He goes, I don't handle it. I like it.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the company, and I think that's so important to put that out because we were talking about the negative self-talk and just living a pretty crazy life where it's like you want to work seven days a week or you're just completely all in. And the way, again, this goes back to you can hear a sentence and just like, oh, I feel that way too. And it kind of changes the way you approach things. And I remember reading about Herb Kelleher, which is the founder of Southwest Airlines. You know, it's such a, it's such a crazy story that like.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not to forget there's diversification. Boom, I'm going all in on Brad and his team. Well, that's a lot of pressure. I like that pressure. I enjoy that pressure. That motivates me. That inspires me. That makes me feel I have something to do here that's important.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So many people give you the money, whether it's a retail individual, whether it's a high net worth family, whether it's a sovereign wealth fund, whether it's a pension plan, whether it's an endowment. All these people are long-only funds, mutual funds. All these people are giving, they're wiring money to buy your shares. This is a intense pressure. This is probably the biggest pressure I have in life, is to make sure that I do everything I possibly can to make sure I give them back more money than they gave me, make sure that they invest in the company. And like if you look at my neighbors and my friends, I don't know the exact number, but I would guess over 90% of them are invested in the company. And that's what it's been over time. Well, that's pressure, man. That's like, wow, I don't want to disappoint them. These are my relatives. These are my friends, these are people I really love. These are people come to say, look, I believe in you so much. I put two-thirds of my retirement plan in your stock, a single no.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Been doing public since 1992, and I'm non stop. And I like it. I enjoy it. I find it very helpful, very constructive. I like the pressure. I like the ability to hear what the street says and then agree with what I agree with. But to disagree with what I think is wrong, what I feel passionately and have evidence to support and they're wrong. So sometimes the street, particularly like the hedge funds, they're very focused on like this quarter, like the next 90 days. That's a terrible thing long term. You don't want to be focusing on just what's good for the quarter. You end up, you see these public companies that go out and they cut costs in the field that hurts customer service or hurts employee morale and they're understaffed, which is even worse than being overstaffed, which is bad.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you want to be a magnet for talent for drivers, for people in the branches, for people in mid level management. You want to get going back to what you said before, you always want great talent coming in. Well, if nobody knows who you are, they're a little skeptical about joining your company if you have research written about you by bunches of firms and you have press releases and a public website. And you're very well known what you're doing. It's very clear what you're doing. People say, okay, I get it. You're a known quantity and I like this. I buy into it. I like what you're doing. I want to join the company. So in order, and then you can pay them, you compensate them with stuff they can look on their iPhone every day and see the value of the compensation. If you're private, you give people these phantom shares or whatever the compensation plan is. They don't really know the value of it until they sell it someday. And it may be very different than what they thought it was all along. So from a compensation point of view, which is a big element of success in these high growth business plans, being public is fantastic.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is what are you doing with your top line? What are you doing with your priced and volume? What are you doing with your organic growth? In my business, in all my businesses, the only two things I had to do in the end in order to get great valuations and create shareholder value were grow the top line faster than the competition. On the market, be taking share, and growing the margins, increasing the profit margins. If I did those two things, everything else float, everything else flowed from that. But those are the two main things. In order to do those, accomplish those two things, you want as much input as possible. You want as many chefs in the kitchen as you possibly can. The public gets you hundreds and thousands of voices. So it's amazing data. And also being public allows you to build a brand much faster and much more voluminously.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that goes back to what we were talking about in Argo, they might have a core belief saying, I need everybody to always be like saying great stuff about me, which is never going to happen. And they may think that, gee, if I go public, when you're public, at any moment in time, you have people in favor of you and people who are naysayers. You have people who are selling and buying. People are selling think you're overvalued. People are buying get the joke and they understand you have a real, real business plan here that's going to create much more value. So you always have those two different things going. Maybe those people don't want to hear the naysayers. Maybe those people don't understand that naysayers sometimes can help you correct your own path, can tell you, gee, you know, maybe I'm cutting costs too much. People come in and say, you're cutting costs too much. I visited one of your locations. I didn't think the service was so great. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Thank you for telling me that. So now I have to invest more around the cost. You have other people who say, you know, I'm looking at your numbers here. Your margins are growing, which is great. That's only half the situation here.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think for a long time, like one big goal was starting a company and then taking a public. And now I talk to a lot of founders and even the ones that raise a lot of money and they don't want to ever go public. Do you have any? I love being public.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's good to hear all this stuff. It's good to hear what people are saying. But then you have to go within yourself and you have to make the decision. You have to be an adult. You take in tons and tons of information and opinions and beliefs and data as much as possible. Then you've got to kind of just ignore all that. Just go inside and say, this is what I want to do. You're going to make the call. That's what a CEO does. That's what the leader does is you make the call. But you have to get all that input. Otherwise, you're just a bubble chamber, echo chamber, you're just hearing your own thoughts instead of others. You want people challenging your thoughts all the time.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I don't always agree with it, but some of it, there's always some truth in it. You get free advice from the smartest people in the world, the global allocators, people who have raised billions of dollars from pensions and endowments and sovereign wealth funds. And now they're analyzing what you're doing and they're giving you advice. They're telling you this is what I like, this is what I don't like. Okay, actually mathematically can't agree with it all because a lot of times you get conflicting advice. People say you're going right. You should be going left. The other guy's saying you should go left even more.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Non stop all day long. I Did you like the. You have this great line in your book where it says Working with that horridly talented people to deliver outside returns for shareholders and public stock markets”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I ask all day long, and we have different modalities of anonymous surveys and 360 reviews. I'm interacting with the teams nonstop all day long. I'm walking on people's offices, what's going on? What do you think of this? What do you think of that?”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the different constituents in an organization need to be talking to each other, need to have feedback loops to know how they're doing. If you're not asking your customers how you're doing, you may think you're doing a lot better than your.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he's like, it was wildly effective, and he's got a great line in that book. He's like, It turns out the guy that handles the material for eight hours a day while the CO's in the office has something to teach you. Like he's going to understand something about that process because you have like a bird level view. He has a very particular job and he found it very instructive. And he's like, it was a wonderful way to learn the business. And then that led him to like, oh, now I know how to make things. And then from there to grow and grow and grow. And I just absolutely love this idea. It's like, you should have this unfiltered access, unfiltered information over and over and over again.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feedback. This is why I'm so obsessed with what I'm doing because nothing we're doing is new, like, you had all these people I ran, all these kind of experiments for centuries, and they built great companies. And just because, you know, they passed on and maybe the company's not around anymore. It's like, there's a treasure trove of data in there. So Bezos idea I love where he would publicize it. He used to publicize the very early days of Amazon. Jeff at amazon.com. Email me. And he read part of one of the reasons that he figured out he's like, oh, we can't just sell books. Like I can sell anything. People, he'd be like, he would send emails to I think like the top thousand customers like what else would you buy? And one guy he had this epiphany because they'd like, hey, I want toilet paper. I want, you know, groceries, whatever. One guy's like, I want windshield wipers. And he's like, winshield wipers. If this guy wants windshield wipers, I'm going to be able to sell everything. It is true everything store. But I was thinking about this recently because I just read this book translated from French about the Michelin family dynasty, which starts out in 1891 selling tires in France. You're selling tires. There's like 350 cars.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's this. So he's talking to customers. I'm talking to employees. But it's the same concept, unique feedback loops. You don't know how you're doing unless you have radar like sending beep beep out there and seeing how it comes back. You have to have this. Very intense feedback loop”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Todd Combs is one of Warren We were talking on a Saturday about. 10 years ago, eight nine, 10 years ago, when he was getting on the JPMorgan board, and he was kind of moving up in the world, stuff like that. I lost touch with him, but really great guy, really smart guy. He said, What are you doing? I said, I'm reading employee service. I'm reading all the employee surveys from the whole company we ask them two questions what's your single best idea to him The company and rate your job satisfaction scale of one to ten, and sometimes we add a third one what it will take to make it a 10. I just go through all these one by one because I feel like I'm talking to every employee and learning on that. He said, that's amazing. That's what's so amazing about that. I was just talking to Bez Mbezos was reading customer survey.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Show up. They even have appointment on the books. And they walk into the office, and they're like, hey, I'm here to meet Sam for 7 a.m. meeting. And his secretary is like, he hopped on because he used to fly his own plane. He left at 5 a.m. this morning and he went to this Walmart over here and he's hanging out and like greeting customers and talking to the people stocking the shelves and everything else but this constant I think there's a lot of wisdom in what you said in your book basically is what I'm saying it's like you see this over and over again they they want unfiltered access from the front lines they don't want the information to be you know massaged or presented in a manner that that seems good so”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Realizes like, oh, I need to have constant unfiltered access from the people that are delivering the service to my customers. So he would do, he's like, he would instruct his driver every time we see a brown UPS truck, you are to pull over and he would get out no matter how successful he was and he would talk to the driver. Unfiltered information, same thing. People would go and they try to meet Sam Walton in Bettonville, Arkansas, right?”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is what you were describing earlier this almost like constant iterative trial and error process and just keeping the information flowing through the company. There's an idea that I think when I thought of your ideas like, hey, we're going to buy the company. We're going to ask, like, what would you do if you were running the company? What's the stupidest thing we're doing? What's the smartest thing we're doing? As you know, I'm not interested in timeless principles, not timely, right? And when I read that in your book, what I thought of was not you building your company. I thought of Jim Casey building UPS 100 years ago. And what he learned, because a lot of these things that these ideas have survived for a long period of time, they're not dependent on the company. They really depend on human nature because history doesn't repeat human nature does, right? Human nature is kind of constant, doesn't really change. And so what Jim realized is the more successful he became, the more successful company became, his executives, their incentives were to hide the bad news and just tell him good things. Because then it's like everything's great in the company, Jim. And so, and I was the one that made that great. And so pay me more and like make sure I keep this great job I have.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night. And as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high quality decisions.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then sharing that information. I share information much more widely in my organisms, in my organizations than most companies. Most companies, they're afraid to share it. They're afraid to share the good information. They think a competitor is going to hear about it. Okay, well, they will, but let them try to copy us. They don't have all the ingredients to do that. They say, we don't want to share the bad stuff because then the market's going to hear our weaknesses. Okay, well, that's kind of true too. That's so much overshadowed by the benefit of we're learning where we have to improve. We're learning how to become better. I read”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meditate a lot. I do things that worked for me. So I think of things that have worked for me on my path, my evolution of feeling gratitude and all the happiness that comes from feeling gratitude by feeling appreciation, by problem solving, all the different things. And I try to imbibe that to other people. And then feedback loops. One of the key tenets of all my companies is we have intense voluminous feedback loops, feedback loops between the senior team, feedback loops between the senior team and mid-level management, feedback loops between senior medium and frontline management, feedback loops with customers, feedback loops with vendors, feedback loops with investors, all the constituents of the constellation that make a corporation, that make a company. We have to be communicating. We have to be communicating very intensely with each other in an honest way.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I've experimented over time. I've experimented with different things. I've read a lot. I've studied positive psychology. I've studied cognitive therapy. I've studied a lot of stuff. I read a lot of stuff.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe not as much as you think. No. Yes, there's always instinct, there's always intuition. You always going by your gut.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really wish that person great success in the company. And I can picture this company five years from now accomplishing XYZ. And I send nice vibes. I send love vibes to that person. Let's go around one by one. All silently. Nothing out loud. Just one by one by one by one. You start seeing people smile. Like always I've done it so many times. You start seeing people smile looking at people. You see looking at people in a very positive, uplifting way and appreciative way. And then I say, okay, now we've concluded the day and I declare the day a success and congratulations. Then we just clap. And we clap. Sometimes just clapping goes out for like five minutes. But it's a very, then people levitate home, go to the airport and go home.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And look at each person and say, I admire this person because, like, what are the strengths? What are the qualities? What are the traits? What are the skills? What are the things that they do that you really are impressed with? You really like that person a lot. And just go one by one, look at each person and just identify that. And then after a minute or two has gone by, I say, okay, now let's do the same thing. Look at each person and say, I really, so we've already said why I'm grateful they're on the team. So now I want to say, so this is gratitude. Gratitude's a wonderful leadership technique. And then the second thing is.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I resolve to improve the company by just go one by one and each person stands up and says, I resolved to improve the company by, and then they say what they want to say. It's a great thing. What I didn't get a chance to do Friday because we ran out of time. What I often do is then we go into another room, we get out of the boardroom, get out of the conference room, and then we stand in a circle and just silently look at each other for the first couple minutes. A couple minutes is a long time to be like looking around everybody else. A lot of people that's uncomfortable. It's not uncomfortable if you all like each other.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I say, who around this table today, in your mind, did their star go up? The star already might have been higher because everyone loves each other, but even higher. And why? What is something that somebody said today in the meeting that impressed you, that made you go, aha? It made you say, damn, that's a good insight. That's a good perception. I really like that. Who was it? And what did they say? We go around everything like that. And I have a few other questions like that. And then I bring it down to the person themselves. And I say, finish the sentence.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I think about people not in this room, but people in the organization out there in the field, who's an MVP, who's a most valuable player, who's somebody who's going above and beyond that you really respect, you really admire, you really think is amazing. Wish we had a thousand more like that person. And why? Why are they, and I sent an email to them afterwards saying, hey, I was in a meeting with the leaders of the company, and you were nominated as an MVP because XYZ. People love it. A lot of times it's really, really emotional things. Really, really nice thing. Validating the field. And then I bring it inwards.”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“didn't understand about how we're going to make money and how we're going to serve customers better and how we're going to improve employee engagement and how we're going to kill the competition. What is something you didn't know? What is something you learned and just go wrong one by one by one by one? And then I ask him,”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the end of those operating reviews, once we've gone through all the lists, now we do human interactions. That's where the fun starts. So we work really hard solving all these problems and debating all these issues. Now we put that aside. And I ask a series of questions. I modify them a little bit every month, but I have a list of a few dozen questions I pick which ones I want to ask each time. Usually one of the first ones is what is something somebody said today that you have a different opinion on? What is something that somebody said you disagree with and you didn't get a chance to talk about it? I just go around one by one to each person. That's a wonderful thing. Many management teams can't do that because everyone will get upset. Here it's like, great. And then we have a nice honest. I ask everyone, what's your single biggest takeaway from today? What is something that 10 hours ago...”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's in the music business. His point was Have I love this idea of grabbing information, which is really fascinating. There's multiple examples in your book, and I find these in other books where it's just like, it's so nuts that Especially when companies get big and older, they don't stop asking information from people from the front line. So you're like, often when we buy a company, we discover that the frontline employees, middle managers, and even some senior executors have never been asked, what would you do to improve the company? You would think owners would want to know that. And then you have this great thing that I think is actually good for. Business, but also personal relationships, you ask what is the stupidest thing we're doing, and what is the smartest thing we're doing?”
2025-10-28 · Founders · My Conversation with Brad Jacobs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT