YouSaid · the spoken record

John Mackey

lines on the record: 163
first: 2024-10-29
most recent: 2024-10-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Larger a lot of ways I enjoyed it less because it's the creative part that's fun and that's when I'm doing again with Love Life putting deals together thinking about this this whole health Very fun, but when you're beginning to manage a really big corporation Ah, it's more about I didn't get to be as creative any longer. My entrepreneurial spirit was sort of not nearly as engaged as it was. And that was only about the last 10 years or so. Remember, 44 years of a long time. So there was a nice, long, creative run. And it didn't like change overnight. It just slowly, as the bureaucracy got bigger, as I was dealing more with problems rather than opportunities, my enjoyment of the business began to shift.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is really, it's something that as a business grows that you have to be even more vigilant about it because it's so many things are happening that you can't even see them anymore. Your company's gotten, it's grown beyond your ability to actually understand everything that's going on in it. And so you have to, you delegated that out and you have to trust those leaders. And that's why companies end up getting managed a lot by their budgets. And you're determining where you're going to give resources to and where you're going to take resources away from. They all would make cases for why they need more resources, but your function as the leader is to make the difficult decisions that, well, actually, we're going to stop funding that or we'll let that run one more year, but you'll need to hit these objectives or we're going to pull the plug on it. So, you know, I got to say, because I identify as an entrepreneur as Whole Foods got to be larger.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably we should have kept doing that. We stopped doing it and eventually they said we don't need to do this anymore. And because it was such a painful day for me, because I ended up having to be the asshole, I guess every company needs somebody that's really watching the cost. Sometimes that's a chief financial officer. But in general, it needs to be kind of a cultural thing. Whole foods was not as good at that if we were at other things. And I wasn't as good at that as I should have been.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can't easily evaluate whether what they're proposing is going to be successful or not. And generally when something is failing, the people that are responsible for don't want to admit it's failing. And what they do is that we need more resources. I can make this, but you need to give more resources. So at some point, you'll have to say no. It's better to say no early on. Or if you just want to you just have to set very limited budgets for it and then not let those budgets increase. Well, we're going to have a 7% increase in that budget. And it's like, well, is that worth it? I remember we did this for years and it was my least favorite day of the year. We would bring the leaders in to talk about their budgets. And I hated that day because I was always the Grinch. I was always the one saying no, or we're going to eliminate that.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not going to do that, no, and because there's always things that are nice to do. And when you're profitable and you have the resources to do it, you start to add things on, but you don't do a good job of sunsetting them or getting rid of them or just evaluating their cost effectiveness. I think the most successful businesses and the most successful entrepreneurs spend a lot of time worrying about their cost. And even when they're successful, one of my mistakes, I think, in looking back was as we got more and more successful, I tended to just not say no enough. I'd still do it more than anybody else, but it was easy to just say yes and figure you can grow your way out of it.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You hire people to try to do something you're unable to do. Or you're just like, we need to hire somebody to work on that. And then, of course, they can't do it by themselves, so they have to build a team. And what's not happening is sort of like the federal government. They add new government departments on them. They don't sunset them. They don't get rid of them. They just add new ones on. Well, corporations have more of a profit. They just can't operate indefinitely building up a deficit the way the federal government can do. So there is the shareholder push to keep control of the cost, to be sure. But it's hard to do it surgically. You end up doing it. You take these, everybody figure out how to cut your DWARP in 5% or 10% or whatever. That also kills morale when you start doing layoffs. So the better way is not to build it up in the first place. And that just means being skilled at saying no.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sclerotic and entrepreneurs come in and create these very new businesses that are very nimble, that are young, that haven't built up a bureaucracy yet. I'm having this time as building love life now, and I'm determined, you know, as long as I'm still running the company that we're not going to build up a big bureaucracy. Because, I mean, you just have to hold it in check. I don't think I did as good a job at Whole Foods of checking that bureaucracy once it got. That was the professionalism got in there. I had trouble controlling it. I'm going to make sure it doesn't get a good fithold into love life.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one reason most companies don't last that long. You start to build, as professionalism builds, it begins to hire more professionals. And your bureaucracy begins to expand as well. You get bigger and bigger legal department, a bigger and bigger HR department. They have their own sort of professional ethics, their own professional goals they want to accomplish. But it's hard to manage the cost now because the professionals are running their own little fiefdoms. And you either say you have to do sort of what Amazon's done from time to time is like everybody has to do a 10% cut. Well, that's kind of arbitrary. That hurts morale. But how else do you check your growing bureaucracy? The way capitalism deals with it is that these big corporations eventually just get sort of”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a stepping stone, thank you. That's exactly correct. And I think one of the things that Whole Futide for so long is we did most of our promotions from within. And so we built this very loyal, committed, mission-driven business that was very unlike most of the other businesses I saw. And when we brought professionals in, we've spent a lot of time making sure they were good cultural fits, at least in the early days. And later on, as we got bigger and more famous, we began to attract people who really were looking in it as more of a career move. And we never could get them to buy in to the mission. And I think what happens after the founders leave and retire, that it's very difficult for a company to be anything but professionally led at that point going after that.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're not I'm not saying they couldn't be, but in my experience they're not usually mission driven. They've gotten their MBA from Harvard or Wharton or Stanford. They're very intelligent. They work hard, but they're Working at Whole Foods or Amazon, it's just part of their career path. They want to put it on their resume and then they want to use that to leverage to get the next promotion maybe in another company.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A huge difference. Nobody ever loves their business as much as a founder does. And I mean, I let Whole Foods for 44 years. I will always, it's like if your parent, your child grows up, I raise that child as best I can. It's on its own now. I can't tell Whole Foods what to do anymore. And you just hope you put inculcated good values and that they have a happy life. I will always love Whole Foods. I will always wish the very best for Whole Foods, even though I'm not in it any longer. In fact, I deliberately try to stay out of the loop because it bothers me when I hear things. So I just try to leave it alone and do other things. But professional managers.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I think it was A lot of them just didn't have the they were like my friend Mark. They liked being my co-founder Mark. They just wanted to be a big wheel and there Mark just would be happy just to be a big wheel with that one store. And I think that's true of the other people. They were just happy to get the money and they got local notoriety and whatnot. They didn't have the vision or desire really to build a chain. I just think I did. I had that kind of drive. I wanted to me it was like this game's getting more and more fun. Let's just keep growing it and building it. And that's just the way I was wired. And I think the other people were wired a little bit differently.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the best way to understand it was that we really did all feel like we were part of this movement that was going to change the way America ate. We were all very idealistic. The original founders were. Later on, you get the venture capitals coming in seeing this as a good opportunity. But in the early days, we were all young and idealistic and really thought the world would change the way it ate. And to a large extent it did. I mean, the world's very different now, the natural foods organic movement came out. It's not the same as it was. And whole foods had a big, I think, over time, it changed the world.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All those entrepreneurs ultimately sold out to us, so naturally its network ended up being this great vehicle of relationship building that allowed those entrepreneurs to all cash out and become millionaires and make a lot of money and gave Whole Foods what we needed, which was these various geographical platforms that we could use to expand and grow off of.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but people don't realize that when we invented the natural food supermarkets, there was co-invented by a few different people in different parts of the country. There hadn't been, there were small natural food stores, but there hadn't been the supermarkets, one-stop shops. And the ones of us that were doing it, we connected with each other and we developed friendships. We get together three times a year. A different operator would host. And that's how I got to be friends with the people running Mrs. Gooches, the people running Bread and Circus, the people running alfalfas in Colorado and Unicorn Village in Florida. We were all meeting together. We were all in this common mission. We wanted to sell natural and organic foods. We were spreading it. And we were helping each other out, sharing financial information. We really bonded well. It was a wonderful time because I felt like I was part of this larger movement. And eventually, Whole Feeds ended up.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the secrets to success in life and business, you have to seize the opportunities when they're there. If you don't, these great opportunities only come or they don't come around every day. And he who hesitates lost, if you're not willing to seize that opportunity, somebody else will. You have to know when to go all in. It's, you know, when to make the bets. I knew they were very profitable. They had a great brand, very successful, did not want to lose those guys. And plus, if we didn't get them, somebody else would and they would end up being this great competitor for us down the road. We just had to make that deal. We paid a really rich price for it too.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we were public, and so we did have our currency. When my dad was objecting to that merger, he was saying, John, you have your hands full with bread and circus, which was still less than a year old. You don't have the capacity to take on it on the opposite coast. You can't handle it. You're going to dilute your talent down. And he was right. But as I kept pointing out, it's like, you're right, but this opportunity is not going to come again. This is the crown jewel natural food store chain on the west coast. If we don't take them, somebody else is. We'll have to figure out how to do it. And we did. And we did acquire them, and we did figure out how to do it, mostly by leaving them alone. We didn't have to integrate them. They were Mrs. Gooches. They already had great management. We pretty much just left them alone for the first few years and didn't try to integrate them into our company or culture. Just let them operate.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good, but the thing about it is we were always, all the other acquisitions were retail stores, and if they had problems, the team could know how to fix them. But we had nobody in our team that knew how to fix a mail order catalog that was slowly dying. So I couldn't send my best guy, go fix that. They didn't know what to do. But if I sent my best guy to fix some stores we acquired in Detroit, they could go fix them. So I learned stick to your knitting, stick to what you know. Stick what you know how to do and also if there are problems you know how to fix them.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it was not because it was not retail stores. That was Amreon. It was a mail order supplement company that we thought we could use that to springboard into the dot-com boom back in the late 90s. And the problem was the people that bought supplements with a catalog, they were slow adopters to the internet because they were mostly in their 60s, 70s. So they didn't really make the adoption. So that was a mistake on our part. That one failed.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One reason you got to, and another thing is if you keep focused on growth, then people are busy not infighting because they've got enough work to do that they don't look around for something to occupy their time.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's another downside if you're not growing fast enough, then people will want to stick with your company because they don't feel like they have very many opportunities. I can't get advanced. My leader ahead of me is the same age as me and she's not going anywhere. But if you're opening up new stores, then you're opening up new opportunities. And that really gets people excited because their own dreams get tied into the business. So there is an optimum level of growth. And it's not too little that you'll lose people and not so high that your culture gets diluted down and changes negatively. So at Whole Foods, that sweet spot for us was between about fifteen and twenty five percent. But I see other businesses, particularly digital businesses, that can scale at enormous rates without cultural problems because they're doing it with so few people.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for the listeners, the rule 72 is if you take your growth rate and divide it into 72, that's how quickly you will double. So let's say you're growing your sales at 24% a year, then 24 into 72 is three. So in three years, you'll actually double your sales. Or if you're growing at 18%, 18 into 72 is 4%. So every four years you double your sales. So we found that when we began to grow faster than 24 to 25 percent, that our culture began to get diluted. And we couldn't, the culture can incorporate a certain level of growth before the culture itself begins to fray too many new people are coming in. They're not getting indoctrinated or inculturated. And our business would suffer when we agreed that fast. But if you don't grow fast enough,”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“M. I think there is, but it could vary from business to business. If you're a business like Whole Foods was, which was a A retail business where culture is very important I found that once our growth got above twenty four percent, do you know what you know the rule of seventy two?”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So venture capitalists, there can be important in a business, and it's just, I always tell young entrepreneurs a couple things. One is they're going to tell you to try to, don't worry about your burn rate, just grow, grow, grow. And I said, that's not in your best interest. They say that because they're the ones supplying the money. And eventually, if they need to, they'll do a cram down round in basically do it at a much lower price. And you'll have an opportunity to invest, but you've long exhausted your own funds to invest, and you'll lose control of your business. I've seen happen many, many, many times. So I always just say, know what you're, when you're an entrepreneur and you need capital, you oftentimes aren't really thinking about the consequences of it. So I always try to warn other entrepreneurs, look, when you take the VCs in, just know what you're doing. They're getting in your car. They're not there for the long ride with you. They're there for their own agenda.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did several, particularly when we made acquisitions, we needed to cash out the investors in those businesses sometimes, like with fresh fields, we needed to do another public offering in order to just cash out their venture capitalist as well.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't want those guys to get control of the business. First of all, the first thing we're going to do is replace me and put in a professional manager, which they were trying to do already. And it's in the book, The Guy that was supposed to start working as president, died on the day he was supposed to start work. And it was like, if that's not a sign of the universe, I don't know what is, but we didn't actually hire that person from the supermarket industry. And we got the VCs to good exit. They made a lot of money on Whole Foods. They only were in the car for three years from 1989 to 1992. And so they got out of the car. And now we had our own currency. Once you do a public offering, you can go back to the public markets. We did several rounds of financing over the years to raise additional money from public. So that's why it's an IPO that's the initial public offering. Corporations do other public offerings after that.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has to be a sale or an IPO, and we didn't want to sell the business. We wanted to grow it ourselves. And so we always had the IPO. The initial public offering was in the back of our minds. But I realized that the VCs, they have a little bit of different agenda. They want to exit the car, but they don't exit the car too soon. They'd like to have the compounding occur while once the company does an IPO, most of the VCs because of the way they're structured with their own investors, they have to either distribute that within a year. They generally have to either distribute the stock or sell it on behalf of the investors. And so at Whole Foods case, we actually wanted to go public because the VCs wanted to know the round of VC financing, but that was going to give them control of the business. And talking to my dad about it, we said.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, like the classic entrepreneurial story, initially it was friends and family. And then My dad taught me, as he was my mentor, that the best capital you have, this is very different than the way people think about it today. He says, the best capital you'll ever have is the capital you make yourself. And if you don't want to lose control of your business, then make sure you're very profitable. Don't scale too quickly. Grow your business thoughtfully and painfully, patiently, keep your cost down and plow the money back in. And that's how Whole Foods operated for the first decade of our lives. We took venture capital money and we started trying to get it in 1988. So 10 years after we'd started a safer way and we got our first investment in 1989. I call the VCshikers with credit cards. But what I mean by that is that they're getting into your car. And as long as you take them where they want to get to, which is an exit, which either”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like if you're a fighter, eventually you might have to admit defeat eventually because you're going to die if you don't. But in general, you just want to keep getting up and see if you can get the next punch in. Anyway, that's how I'm sort of wired.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love games, I love play, I love to compete. To me it's really fun. And so when people would tell me that it's not going to work, it's like, I'd look at it and I would, you know, maybe are they right? No, they're not right. I'm going to prove them not right. And if I would hear about a competitor, I just feel like that's not unusual for entrepreneurs. They're constantly being told what they're doing is not going to work. And so I think you have to have resilience. And that resilience, in my case, comes from kind of my competitive spirit, which is like, it would just make me more determined. I think that's a healthy thing, by the way, because too many people quit. They hit a roadblock or they setback. An entrepreneur gets set back so many times and you get knocked down and you've got to get back up again.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I don't think I had sort of an inherent ship on my shoulder. It's just in some ways I'm a very competitive guy. And when people will tell me it won't work, you're going to fail. It's just, I just, is it a chip on my shoulder? I think a chip on his shoulder is something that you're just kind of mad at the world about. But when people would say what we were doing wasn't going to work, it just made me more determined. It's kind of like you get a competitive challenge from somebody. You could see I was talking about Erewon when we were off camera that I would love to be competing more aggressively with Erewon if I was still the CEO. But because in general, I just”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New entrepreneurial ideas. And an entrepreneur has got to have the faith and confidence to move forward even though people are constantly telling it's going to fail. In my case, all of that criticism, all those attacks, they just made me more determined I'm going to prove all these people wrong. I remember feeling that many times. You're wrong. What we're going to do, Whole Foods is going to grow. We're going to change the world. I felt that with Mark when he was telling me I was going to wreck the company. And he didn't want to keep any of his stock and he wanted all of his stock out before I wrecked the company. So yeah, that happened several times. I account four different coup attempts that occurred over the history of the company that I was able to beat back.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over the years, I mean Mark's first nickname mecky macky and through the years, I think entrepreneurs always are climbing a wall of doubt because the entrepreneur is looking ahead. They're seeing possibilities that other people don't see yet. And so it's easy to be skeptical. I just for years I was told that this was never going to work. I mean, my mother was begging me on her deathbed to give up this stupid grocery dream. I think we had about four stores back in 1987 and just go back to school and make something in my life. So in general. Just a huge amount of skepticism about.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“or Mark decided to leave the company. And he said I was going to wreck the company with your growth dreams. And he sold out his interest and opened up a pizza place. And that probably wasn't the best decision he could have made.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were able to pull in from a much wider geographical area, which is one reason that store was so successful. We opened a second store, well, we had to go out in the suburbs. It wasn't hippies anymore. It wasn't a counterculture market. And it started slower. Now it grew really well, but it took a few years before it became profitable. And that proved to be the case anytime Whole Foods went into a new market for the first ten to fifteen years we existed, it was a slow growth because people just had never heard of us before. What are you that stores weird? And you guys all dress weird. You don't look like a regular supermarket. But once our brand got well known, then our stores started to take off. But in the day for Mark, when he remembers, I mean, he was there, the news stores were slow and they diluted down the first very successful store. And he blamed it on me. He got angry and angry at angrier at me. And that ultimately led to”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one of my co-founders, Mark Skyles, after we had the really successful store, he really didn't want us to grow because he said, John, we have a gold mine here. Let's just not screw it up. We can be rich. We don't have to do anything else. We can just live off this thing for the next 25 years and just, you know, have a wonderful lifestyle. And I said, John, I don't want to do that. I'm going to grow the business. I want to have more stores. And he was willing to go along with that until the next couple of stores we opened up were slow. They didn't take off right at the, right off at the go point. Now, remember that very first Whole Foods market took two small stores because we merged with this other natural food store. We took them together and we had their customer basis from both stores as a foundation. And then we were unlike any other store.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we became profitable. Safer way was the struggle. And that's also an interesting story. Here we were struggling with Safer Way. We relocated to a better location, make it bigger, expand our product mix. And we went from a struggling business to hugely successful. And then I thought, wow, we got a tiger by the daily or let's grow this thing. And we just had a flood. So we had to grow it just so we'd have all of our eggs in one basket that might float down the river.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because that sets the tone for the whole store. People oftentimes pick their store by how good the produce is. And it's not easy to do it well. It takes a lot of skill to be able to manage your produce so that you keep your in-stock position while you keep freshness. It's part science and part art. And I mean, I just think produce, it's also the healthiest part of the store. Produce is the most important foods that we eat. Fruits and vegetables are the healthiest foods we can eat. And if you want to have a strong immune system and you want to have high longevity, you're going to have to learn to eat like vegetables and fruits.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, particularly in food retailing. People choose their supermarkets based usually. Seafood's fishy. I mean, they're going to go someplace else. Whole Foods is competitive advantage has always been, I just thought we did a better job than just about anybody else out there in overall produce perishable quality. And that gave us competitive edge.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose what I like about business in general is that you never quite figure it all out. You're continually learning the world's continually evolving and changing. Like, let's say... Look at what happened to the grocery business when COVID came in. All of a sudden, you know, people want to stuff delivered at home. And fortunately for us, we were teamed up with Amazon at that time, and Amazon was able to step up and invest literally hundreds of millions of dollars in delivery in order to enable Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh to be able to deliver when the demand went from virtually zero to a huge percentage of your business. So I don't know. I can keep going on this, but you may want to have different questions.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“to be able to keep your food fresh and in stock, but turn it over fast enough. But if so there's that relationship where you want it fresh, but you also don't want it to be out of stock. And sometimes those are in tension with each other. There are so many other things I could tell you about. It's just three-tail businesses, how do you price stuff? Like, okay, if somebody's underpricing, do you match that? What do you match? What do you go lower on? There's a whole pricing strategy that you have to do that can be complex because you have a variety of different competitors competing with you if you're competing with Erwan in LA, you're not worried about price, but they may be having higher quality, higher, more high-end product that you have to compete against. And do you choose to compete against it?”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was what we call conscious capitalism. At the end of the day, it's being very conscious about how you have these responsibilities to all these stakeholders and you're trying to create value for all of them. And that's very difficult to do. That's awesome, I think I learned. That's hard to do all of that. There are little trade-offs that end up being made. But how do you minimize the trade-offs and maximize the synergies? And I also learn the adage goes retail is detail. There's a thousand little details. I mean, typical stores got tens of thousands of products. And what's more irritating that if you go to the store and you have a recipe that needs broccoli in it and they just don't happen to have any broccoli, well, you're really pissed off. First of all, you have to go to another store. It's like, how can you run out of broccoli? But then again, if you stock too much broccoli, it's going to rot on the shelf. So you have to develop the skills, particularly in the grocery business where you have all these perishables.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you meet because happy team members lead to happy customers. Happy customers lead to a prosperous business. That makes happy investors. So I learned then about sort of the interdependency of all these stakeholders that are connected together and that in a sense of business is this ecosystem of stakeholders, an ecosystem of customers, employees, suppliers, investors, and the communities that we're all part of. And that once you see that, then you see that there are a system and that you can create these synergies between the different constituencies, between the different stakeholders to help this business to optimize itself at higher level.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Customers better. That's the single most important lesson I learned in business, period. But certainly it's true in the retail business. We don't have any patents. We don't have any monopolies. Everything we're doing is wide open for people to see, copy. I mean, people used to come in and take pictures of our prices and they'd be looking on our products. And they're showing up in the supermarkets. Everybody was studying us and no way to stop that. So that's one thing I learned. Secondly, I learned that Yeah, you got to take care of your customers. Well, who takes care of them? Employees do. Your team members do. And if they're unhappy, they're not going to take care of all of your customers well. So if you really want good service to your customers, make sure your team members are a well trained, well motivated, and that they are rewarded for serving the customers well, that you have a high standard.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Customers always have choices. If you don't serve, if they don't like your prices, your service, your quality, if you're not convenient, if they can't get in and out fast, that you don't have a business. So I learned that the most important stakeholder is and always will be the customer. That's number one stakeholder. And if a business doesn't realize that or forgets it, their business probably is going to suffer in the long run because people do Your competitors are constantly innovating. They're constantly studying what you're doing, copying your best ideas, and then iterating on them. And this is how the human race makes progress, to be honest, is that people have choices and you have to compete to serve your customers. Does that mean some people do a poor job? Of course they do. I mean, that happens. But there is this competitive drive to serve your customers.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, there's literally thousands and thousands of things. I mean, I can just give you. So, and the most important things you realize is that, hey, nobody has to shop with you. I thought it was so funny later on when the Federal Trade Commission said Whole Foods was a monopoly. And it's like, you got to be kidding. We got less than 1% of the grocery business, and they sort of made up this category that we were a monopoly of premium natural and organic food supermarkets. But my point is, of course, we weren't a monopoly of anything. What I learned early on is that...”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, that's a very good commenting question. And I think the answer to that, honestly, is that I thought maybe Renee and I were going to, that the universe decided we weren't going to do this. I was going to do something else in life, but I had a lot of friends and family that invested money. I felt like I can't let these people down. We've got to find a way to get back open again. And in the book, I talk about when Whole Foods does its IPO in 1992, so 11 years later, it was one of the happiest days of my life because finally all the investors that had believed in me and believed in our vision and believed in Renee, they could leave now. They could cash out. And so that really took a load off of my chest, so to speak.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was only in retrospect later that I realized we were onto something that I could see the patterns because I didn't, I hadn't really been exposed to any kind of stakeholder thinking before. But then later when I got exposed to it, I realized, yeah, they were stakeholders. They were our customers and neighbors. They cared about us. It also says something about that this we're talking about now May of 1981, literally 43. And the world's different back then than it is today. I really wonder whether people would come in and help clean up. Maybe they would. But Austin back then was a much smaller city than it is today. It was a much more neighborhood-based, much more, and it was just a different consciousness back then. As you make progress, you also lose certain things.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, what do you personally guarantee? I don't know why the hell would he do that? And he said, he did it because he said he really believed in you and he believed in Whole Foods and he knew you'd pay him back, even if it took you the rest of your life. And so he took the chance on you. And I said, that's incredible. I need to thank him. That's, well, you're too late. He passed away about five years ago. So that's a good story. But that's when people ask me about stakeholders, that's what stakeholders are. They're people that are invested in your business, care about your business, and then you have certain responsibilities too.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Story that I found about the flood, I didn't actually find out about until about 10 years ago when Ah, I met this conference, and this guy coming up to me, and he says, you know, John, you won't remember me. But I used to work for City National Bank back in the day. You know, a terrible thing, that flood happened to you. And I said, yeah, yeah, you work for Citibank. You must have known our banker, Mark Monroe. And he said, yes, Mark and I are really good friends. And that was quite a thing he did for you. And I said, well, yeah, sure was. I don't know if we could have reopened without that $100,000 loan the bank gave us. I said, it always puzzled me, though, because I was surprised the bank would give us the loan because, you know, it was just my signature guaranteeing, and my signature was kind of worthless. And he looks at me and he says, you don't know what happened. And I said, well, yeah, I do. The bank gave us money. And he says, no, John, the bank did not give you that money. I said, yes, they did. We got a check from the bank. He said, John, the bank turned the loan down. The only reason you got that money was Mark Monroe personally guaranteed that loan.”
2024-10-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · John Mackey: Building Whole Foods · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT