YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Coulombe

lines on the record: 66
first: 2021-06-28
most recent: 2021-06-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Go into partnership with a gas company and produce all the plastic that he needed for Tuppware. This is a fantastic sentence. What was vertical integration for Tupperware was going to be horizontal disintegration for the Al drug company in Pronto. And this leads us to why am I telling you this whole point, this one sentence? I either had to buy Pronto or find a new job. But that's a big problem. And he says, and this is what I love, I almost feel this is a blasphemous what I'm about to say, that entrepreneurs write better books than writers do. If I have the choice between, let's say there's a hypothetical entrepreneur, right? And you can read their autobiography or a biography of them, I would always go with autobiography first. That doesn't mean you only read one book. I mean, if you're interested in somebody, you know, read a bunch. You've seen me do that over and over again and I will continue doing that just ordered another book on David Ogilvy. How many books can I read on this guy? I will read every single one.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company Tupperware, right? And the reason I found this fascinating is because he did this against the unanimous, his board of directors said unanimously don't do this. So he says, Justin Dart brought Tupperware against the unanimous vote of his board of directors. There's a quote from one of his directors. Tupperware is nothing but a goddamn party formula. Now here's why Justin was right to listen to and follow his own instincts, right? Within a year, Tupperware was generating a third of Rexhall's profits. So Rexhall's like, all right, excuse me, Dart's like, okay, well, that means I'm going to get out of this crappy business where our stores are closing and not as profitable. I'm going to focus on the part of the business that's generating one-third of all of our profits. Dart gave the order to liquidate all 1,100 drugstores he owned. And this is why he did it, which is really fascinating to raise cash so he could.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idea for the Everything Store. So, in the meantime, Joe is going to actually quit. He goes to work for Hughes Aircraft, and Bud winds up recruiting him back 18 months with the opportunity to become an owner. So he says 18 months after I quit, Bud called me, he persuaded me. He persuaded Rexaw, which is the parent company, to hire me back to clone 7-Eleven. And that's how at age 27, I became president of Pronto Markets. So he's 27 president of Pronto. He starts the book. He's 35, still running Pronto, and had greatly expanded it. So that's what he was doing from the age of 27 to the age of 35. Now, how did he wind up buying Pronto? That was very fascinating. So there's this guy. He says he's famous. I've never heard of him before. Guess he went on to be part of the government, but his name is Justin Dart. So Justin Dart was the famous president of Rexel, and this is really fascinating. And so, you know, they own a bunch of drug and convenience stores and everything else. Justin gets this idea. He's like, I'm going to buy the...”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because one of their competitors is experimenting and innovating in what they're calling self-service retailing. It's a company called Save On. And Save On's destroying the company that Bud is running. So it says every time one Save On opened, three AL drugstores closed Bud hired me to find out why this was happening. And so this is very important that he got this job because he starts to do research. He says, in the course of my research on alternatives for Al, we discovered 7-11 stores in Texas. There were none in California. Grocery stores intrigued me, and that's obviously very important because he's going to start Pronto as a copy for 7-Eleven. Pronto is going to morph in a Trader Joe's. Okay, so that's extremely important. This is going to echo where David Shaw hires Jeff Bezos to do research about what kind of business makes sense in context of all this extremely fast growth on the internet. And that's where they come up with the idea.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I was laughing at the part. I think he's being serious though. The idea that handedness is the most important thing one can know about a person because he does think that if you are left-handed, you know this, that you do approach a lot of the things in life are designed for right-handed people. I think it's like a 90-10 split, something like that. So he's saying, listen, we're forced to see the world differently, sometimes profitably. That kind of echoes what we learned a few weeks ago from Paul or Falla, the founder of Kinko's, which he was convinced because everybody told him he was stupid. They couldn't read. He couldn't write. And he thought that forced him to look at the world differently. And that's where he discovered what was obvious to him, but not obvious to others, the actual opportunity for Kinko's. I think the book is called Copy This, and it's a few episodes back if you haven't got a chance to listen or read the book yet. So Bud's going to hire him. There's these giant companies. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but they own a lot of drugstores and small grocery stores and convenience stores. And they're having issues.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was forged until I realized it was simple. This made me laugh. I laughed out loud. I don't even think he was joking. We were both left-handed. I think that handedness is the most important thing one can know about a person. Dyslexia lurks in the brain of every left hander, which means we see the world differently, sometimes profitably. At one point I was accused, and so he would say in his interviews, he would convince people he would on the sly try to get them to, he wanted to see them right in front of him so he could slyly see what hand they were. And so he would be heavily, heavily, it's so ridiculous, right? It would be heavily biased to hire left handards. And I think it's funny because I'm left-handed. So he says, that's why when I interview people, I try to get them to write something. And this is the part that made me laugh. At one point, I was accused of running a cabal of left-handers at Trader Joe's.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He goes back in time. So we're going to go into the prehistory of Trader Joe's. He's one of the first people. I think he says he got his MBA from Stanford. And I think at the time, I forgot the exact number, but there was like just a couple hundred people in the entire school. So it was not very common to get an NBA at this time. And he gets hired. And we've seen this example over and over again. There's usually someone older, wiser that becomes a mentor of sorts. And he's going to introduce us to a very important character and somebody that led him to founding Pronto, which obviously is how he becomes the Trader Joe. So he says, I was very lucky to get hired for $325 a month. I was even luckier in the man who hired me, who put up with me, who encouraged me, and who taught me everything I know about being a CEO. Wayne Bud Fisher, Jr. For a while, I wondered how this association, which lasted almost forty years until his death in nineteen ninety.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought that was really interesting. So he says there was no 7-Elevens in California at the time. What Merritt was telling me was that A, my source of financing, was cut off, and B, a competitor a thousand times greater in wealth was coming to town, and C, they had found a way to avoid California's high labor costs. And this is what I mean about problems or just opportunities and work clothes. I knew that we would be crushed by this monster. The convenience store business is 90% real estate and 10% everything else. In real estate, it's the tenant's balance sheet that counts. Between Southland, this giant company with all these assets, and Pronto, that has no assets in his tiny, it would be no contest. Suddenly stoned sober, I drove home. I got my wife and the kids, and I hold up for two days in a cabin at Lake Arrowhead in California, where I tried to figure out what the hell to do. And that is how Trader Joe's got started. Okay, so at this point in the story,”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work close. He does not see that at the time, though. He's freaking out. After drinking the fourth one, he finally got the story out. Painfully, he confessed. Joe, I've sold Rhonda and I've sold it to Southland Corporation. Southland, for the uninitiated, is the owner of 7-Eleven markets. Now, this is a wild fact. He says I had started Tronto in nineteen fifty eight as a copy of seven eleven because there were no seven elevens in California. So Pronto is going to change into Trader Joe's. So we could think about the prehistory of Trader Joe's fact.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1960s, grocery stores made a lot of their profit on milk. And because there were such large profits, there was a large amount of corruptions in the business. So he tells insane stories in the book about how milk companies would hire prostitutes for their customers and then set up cameras, hidden cameras, so they would set their own customers up. They'd hire prostitutes, give them a hotel room, film them, having sex with the prostitutes. Then they would keep that footage secret. So if they ever, if their customers ever went and said, hey, we're switching business to this other milk company. They'd be like, oh, yeah, no, you're not, because here I have this video of you with this prostitute. So they're blackmailing their own customers just so they could sell them more milk. I mean, this is absolutely crazy. Let's go back to this meeting at this bar because this is going to be the birth of Trader Joe's or will eventually turn into Trader Joe's. And it's really just a reminder that problems are just opportunities.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Merritt wasn't much older than I, but he'd been thrust into the presidency of Rhonda Milk Farms ten years earlier when his father had suddenly died. Merritt and I were having our monthly business luncheon because Pronto, as small as it was, had become his largest customer for milk and ice cream. Our business wasn't enough, however, and Rhonda was slowly sinking because Merritt was a rare, ethical player in the now wholly corrupt California milk business. So there is all kinds of the way to think about Job is he's definitely a pirate. He's definitely a misfit. He's definitely a rebel. Even the way he, so this applies not only how he ran his business, but how he writes. This book is insane. All the crazy, it's a very interesting read, but he approaches the construction of the book to make sure that it's wildly fascinating for the reader. That's why I had a hard time putting it down. But this idea, he goes into detail about how corrupt, and I didn't know this, that at the time in the...”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“had just finished drinking his normal ration of three Gibsons when he ordered a fourth I knew something was up. I was thirty five years old, president and controlling stockholder of Pronto Markets, a sixteen store chain of convenience markets in Los Angeles. Just three years earlier we had hovered on the edge of bankruptcy with the six stores I had bought from the giant Rexile Drug Company, under whose Aegis I had founded Pronto in nineteen fifty eight. After I bought Pronto using extreme leverage, I had no money, and Merritt had provided much of the capital, which had helped me fuel our expansion to sixteen stores and in recovery to lots of black ink.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did it end of entrepreneurial spirit in action? Joe shows readers of all types how moving from an analytical approach to a more creative problem-solving approach can drive innovation, how finding an influent niche. These are the reason I'm reading this too is because I think what the lessons he learned applies to any domain, not just selling food to people or selling groceries to people, how finding an affluent niche of passionate customers can be a better strategy than competing on price and volume. How quit, and this is probably the single most important lesson in the entire book and something we've seen over and over again in the lives of these biographies that we're reading, how questioning all aspects of the way you do business leads to powerful results. Okay, so I want to start at the birth of Trader Joe's. And he says, Trader Joe's got its start in a bar in Los Angeles where a crisis broke out over my head on a Friday afternoon in October 1965. My host, Merritt Addison Jr.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Along the way in this book you'll find the angst of a strung entrepreneur, and the slings and arrows of outrageous good and bad fortune. So here we go to an autumn afternoon in nineteen sixty five, in a bar where Trader Joe's was not so much born as extruded.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only current liabilities. We went from leverage to the gills in the early days to zero leverage by nineteen seventy five. Furthermore, we never lost money in a year, and each year was more profitable than the preceding year despite wild swings in income tax rates. Still, judgment can be rendered that I failed, that I fell short of what I should have achieved. We will examine this late in the book, but I hope you'll consider the following my favorite from my favorite book on management. The book is called The Winning Performance and the quote. The general theme in winning corporations is a view of profit and wealth creation as inevitable byproducts of doing other things well. Money is a useful yardstick for measuring quantitative performance and profit and an obligation to investors, but making money as an end in itself ranks low.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wrote this book to help entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. That's why there's a lack of miracles and a surplus of marketing details, including buying, advertising, distributing, and running stores, and lots of discussion on how we built successful business on high wages. In a nineteen fifty eight partnership with Wrexhall Drug Company, we started Pronto Markets. After growing it to six stores, I bought out Rexel shares in nineteen sixty two, and then in nineteen sixty seven, when I had reached eighteen Pronto locations, I began the transition of Pronto into Trader Joe's. I resigned at the end of nineteen eighty eight. During the same twenty six years our net worth grew at a compound rate of twenty six percent. Furthermore, during the last thirteen years of that period, we had no fixed interest bearing debt.”
2021-06-28 · Founders · #188 Joe Coulombe (Founder of Trader Joes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source