YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim Casey

lines on the record: 18
first: 2021-07-19
most recent: 2021-07-19
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

“Again, as the years went by, Jim rephrased the phrase to his own purpose, determined men working together can do anything. And so this is where he has to come up with another way. I don't have money, but I can trade stock. And so this is where he was very intent on UPS being owned by the employees. They would buy, what essentially they're doing is they're buying existing delivery businesses to expand. And sometimes they buy the businesses out of bankruptcy or receivership. Or sometimes they buy the business because the owner wanted to retire. But it says rather than paying up front with cash, they funded these acquisitions by pledging shares of UPS stock. UPS was to use this strategy numerous times in the coming years.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's emerging with another company, he decides, okay, I need to raise some money. If I'm going to expand, I have this idea I don't want to just deliver packages in Seattle, don't want to just deliver packages in the state. I want to deliver them throughout the nation. We're going to see why this was so difficult because a lot of these regulations he had to fight. So he tries to raise money. And the failure to raise money actually changes his approach and it reinforces his approach actually. So he talks about this guy, Mr. Carson's, says, no, I'm not giving you any money. He gave what Jim Casey remembered as the most inspiring talk on the economics of business that he ever heard. Mr. Casey's told him frankly that he would not fund their venture, but that they should not interpret his resistance as a disincentive. He finished with the words Determine men can do anything. That comment became an invocation. Jim Casey and the company would use it as a rallying cry time and time again.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so they start, there's about four partners of UPS, and Jim's the only surviving one in the not too far distant future. Jim, Claude, and Mac Casabel for a new name that would better identify their plan for the business, which involved focusing on consolidating deliveries for department stores. No more miscellaneous errands, and that's when they come up with United Parcel Service, UPS. So eventually they have so much business that they're running to another problem, they can't use motorcycles. And so this is another reminder to invest in technology. This is something we learned a long time ago from Andrew Carnegie. Invest in technology to savings compound, and it can be sometimes it can be the difference between profit and loss. The problem was that you can only stack packages so high on a bicycle or a motorcycle. The three entrepreneurs decided to borrow enough money to purchase a new 1913 Model T Ford. And after removing the passenger body, they purchased a delivery van body for”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eventually, he's going to start buying up smaller delivery companies too. This is how they start delivering things not just by bike and by foot, though. This is what I meant by the first UPS truck was a motorcycle. Jim Casey became obsessed with moving beyond this stasis. He spent many hours pondering ways to become an all-encompassing delivery service that would attract new accounts. To cover Seattle faster and more comprehensively, the founders made a key move that would establish a protocol for future expansion, partnering up. Another young man, twenty-year-old Everett Mac McCabe, was American Messenger Company's hardest working competitor. McCabe's company, the motorcycle delivery company, had a fleet of about half a dozen motorcycles serving the Seattle area, each rigged with baskets and saddle bags. The motorcycle delivery company was a husband and wife team. So Jim Talks Mac into part.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first incarnation of this business that they're set up is very similar to the Gopher work that he was doing before, where sometimes these delivering packages, sometimes delivering messages, but sometimes they're hired to babysit my kid, follow around my husband to see if he's cheating on me. Just any random thing that a person possibly could want help with. That's the way to think about that service. He doesn't like this. He's like, you can't get really good at something if you don't do it over and over again. So he wanted to narrow the focus of the business. And this is where they come up with the ideas like, why don't we just focus on delivering packages from retail stores? So it says getting fed up with the nature of some of these errands. The young team cast about for a strategy that would add substance to their business. There's a clothing store called King Brothers. They signed on with American Messenger Company allowing the store to offer customers same day delivery. So this is really interesting too. I never thought about at this point in American history, a lot of people are living in cities.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Older friend of the Casey family agreed to lend the young man $100 to launch a new enterprise. Casey and Ryan launched American Messenger Company on August 28, 1907 from a tiny basement office beneath a bar. The company rules were hard, were few but hard. Only Jim and Claude answered the phones. Messengers required to be courteous and quick. Only if the destination was too far or unreachable by Trolley could the boys use the bikes. The company offered best service and lowest rates around the clock, including evenings, Sundays, and holidays. So, how do you offer around the clock service? Claude and Jim often slept on the desk, awaiting infrequent middle of the night phone calls.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at this point, Jim is now 19. He's back in Seattle. And this guy named Ryan that he knows decides, hey, this is the time we should just do a delivery business here. And so he says, Ryan said, no one in town runs a decent delivery business. And there's one needed. You and I have the experience. Let's go set up our own office and go into business. This is what's going to wind up being UPS. UPS starts with $100 and a 42 square foot office underneath a bar.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gyms began to take shape. At the end of the nineteenth century the number of American children on their workforce reached staggering proportions. Over two million children worked in mines, factory, and sweatshops, many in appalling conditions. For the cases there was no alternative, it was critical. With two younger brothers to protect and a mother and an ailing father to support, eleven year old Jim Casey had developed a maturity that bellied his age. His family was in a precarious straits, and it was up to him to solve the problem. And so this is where he's going to discover messaging and delivering business. More than one person suggested that Messenger and Delivery Boy positions were possible for someone so young. Jim Casey asks the personnel manager if the store had any work he might do. The manager said, our driver could use a helper. It's $2.50 a week. Report tomorrow at 7.45 a.m. sharp. The manager led young”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up prospecting for silver didn't even work out. A financial panic was eroding jobs and confidence. Henry, this is Jim's dad, went from job to job barely making ends meet, coughing all the while. Henry continued to set out each morning with determination. Desperation dogged their father. Jim was this is where it hit you. Imagine being an eleven-year-old kid going through this and this is in the early 1900s. Jim was by then old enough to apprehend his parents mounting anxiety to understand that his father was not healthy by comparison and he started to understand that his father was not healthy by comparison with other men. The worried atmosphere undoubtedly had effect. And this is where we get to this page where my notes, this is unbelievable. When your back is against the wall, there's only one way to go and that's forward. Soon Henry was unable to work at all. As his dreams ended,”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it talks about his dad was trying to mine for silver at the time. That is going to lead to his early death. Her husband, not from perspective, obviously his mother, her husband was working long hours in dreadful conditions, and he contracted the miners lung disease. So this is a form of tuberculosis and began his slow decline. The Casey's circumstances were grim.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Astonishing growth and influence under his 76 year watch. He worked on UPS for 76 years of his life. That's insane. Jim Casey, the man, was subsumed by something greater than himself. So I'm going to go more detail. I thought I got to the section. I was wrong. I thought this was going to go into detail about what happened in his early life. I'm going to get there because I wouldn't say it's, it might be the most important part of this entire, of his entire story of what he had to survive. And the fact that if you are put into an environment like he was and you're able to develop skills to survive in that environment, and then you apply those same skills to building a business, no one's going to be able to stop you. Jim Casey was neat as a penny. He expected the same of everyone who worked at UPS. He had an obsession for tidiness that extended to the package and cars. Seeing mud on the wheels enraged him, which sparked his tightly controlled Irish temper. He encouraged his staff to look at themselves through the eyes.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was 30 years later after it happened. So again, you carry the scars of poverty forever. We're going to see that with Jim Casey, the eldest of four children. Jim was considered the family patriarch. He was not warm and cuddly uncle, but a gentle, polite, and considerate person. Remarkably little is known about the founder about this founder of a Fortune 500 company. Even people who work with Jim Casey for decades knew little or nothing about his private life. He really didn't have much of a life outside of UPS. It was almost as if Jim Casey had no private life beyond his lifelong commitment to UPS. It wasn't that Casey had no feelings. Anyone who knew him would tell you that he was caring at his core. He'd stop. He'd listen. He'd inquire. It was only that, unlike the rest of us with normal attachments to friend and family, the context of Jim's caring always had UPS's bookends. And that explains the company's”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to tie this into a couple other founders that we said in the past. When traveling between meetings, Casey would frequently tell his driver to stop when he saw UPS delivering progress without identifying himself, Casey would ask UPS drivers what they thought of their job. He listened carefully and considered their answers seriously. These informal man-on-the-street interviews became an invaluable way for him to assess the efficiency of UPS delivery operations in a way that a UPS manager's filtered version could not. We saw this before. Every single book I've read, I don't even know how many on Jeff Bezos by now. There's what, four or five different episodes on Jeff Bezos in the archive.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“all on his own, gesturing down at a stack of packages. It was evident that hotel employees had prepared them for the post office. Say, what do you suppose these packages are here for? he asked me. I think we should be delivering these packages, meaning UPS and not the US Postal Service. I don't know, I told him, but I'll find out. I knew I had to do something. While he slowly walked back to the meeting, by then he was eighty years old, I wasted no time in notifying our top customer service people who put the wheels in motion. The next day I told him Jim, I'm told UPS will be delivering hotel packages from now on. What a businessman I thought. How many of us, top management included, walked past those packages without even noticing them? On Otto Didak, he never tired of learning. To keep up on the trends he read, he listened to the radio, he asked questions. Inquisitive and alert he didn't hesitate to put himself in situations from which he could learn. Now this is fantastic too.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jim Casey was a shy man. Anything but flashy. A stranger observing him might have thought this is not a man to be watched. Rather, this is a man who is always watching, and so the note out of myself is very simple on this page, always pay attention, and you will see that he's doing that. This is a great little anecdote because he's 80 years old in this story. This is fantastic. Jim Casey watched the streets carefully. He watched movement. He watched what people sold and what people bought. He was an internal puzzle solver. His mind constantly preoccupied by every sensory detail involving his core business, packages. He gravitated to them, mesmerized by how they were wrapped and how they were delivered. At the 1972 UPS National Conference, it was held at a resort hotel, gives a sense of his singular obsession. During one of my walks between the dining room, remember, he starts UPS or what comes to be UPS in 1907. This is 1972. During one of my walks between the dining room and conference meetings, I heard someone call out to me. There, half hidden in the bushes.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The American Messenger Company, which eventually became UPS. I drove for UPS for five years and two weeks, and then in nineteen sixty six I entered management. All the stories I heard about the company's origins and history took on a new clarity as I met and got closer to the great men who were leading UPS. Great men, including Jim Casey, though retired he was still a presence. I was fortunate enough to meet him on numerous occasions. His unwavering insistence on strong values kept UPS and its employees on course. Much later when I was finishing my career at UPS in the nineteen nineties, books about big American companies and legendary American entrepreneurs were coming out in droves. Big Brown was by then well known and yet”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why don't you go down to United Parcel? They always need guys to load and unload in the afternoons. So in June, I became a UPSer, even though I wouldn't be eighteen until July. Close enough, they said, and I was assigned to load a trailer in downtown Los Angeles, starting at a dollar sixty two an hour. In August, the company gave us free cake and pamphlets commemorating the company's fiftieth anniversary. In December, we moved into a new state of the art facility next door where men in suits were always around checking things out. Another UPSer gave me the heads up that one of them was company founder Jim Casey. From the very beginning I had heard stories about the company's tireless founder. He was a living legend. Jim Casey, the son of Irish immigrants, working from the age of eleven to support a family of five. In nineteen oh seven, in a basement beneath a bar, he conceived”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“UPS was half a century old in 1957. In June of that year, I was a 17-year-old Californian right out of high school and had already secured morning employment. Still, I complained to a neighbor who always wore a brown uniform that I needed an afternoon job too.”
2021-07-19 · Founders · #192 Jim Casey (Founder of UPS) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source