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Larry Miller

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2021-02-21

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2021-02-21

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1. “So Charlie Munger is known for reading hundreds of biographies. He calls it becoming friends with the eminent dead. And I think one of the benefits of that is the constant reminder that we're all temporary and to not waste the most precious resource and asset we have, which is our time. Larry goes to great length in his autobiography to bring to our attention, to make sure we're asking ourselves the questions, are we spending the time, how we actually really want to? Are we going to regret what we're spending time on? So when I got to this part of the book, it made me think of one of the most important quotes I've ever come across. It's in”

   2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “I was so busy working I would have enjoyed things more along the way. Gail doesn't believe me. She thinks if I could do it all over again, I'd do it the same way. Maybe she is right. Now he's going to talk about what was happening in the hospital. I mean, he just, it's just terrible. First, they start amputating three toes. Then they're eventually going to amputate both his legs. He has a heart attack. I mean, just all, oh. Says, then the skin on my legs started to turn black, and the ends of his legs, I'm sorry, this is not him writing. This is the author writing. Then the co-author. Then the skin on his legs started to turn black. And the ends of his legs were so painful that even to put the dressings over them were excruciating. So this is after they took the toes. Then they took both legs below the knee.”

   2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “23 years. I made things worse by eating erratically. For years, I didn't even tell Gail that I had diabetes. I didn't want to admit that I had a problem. So I resisted doing anything about it. I was putting substantial stress on my whole system. The lesson, of course, is to take care of yourself, to make time to eat and sleep and exercise. I learned that too late. Yes, I would do some things differently. Aside from regrets about not spending more time with family, I would enjoy life more. I would spend more time doing the things I love to do. See, we continue this theme, this cautionary tale. Yes, he's very successful. Yes, he built a multi billion dollar business. Yes, he had all the material things that you think would buy happiness. It was clear at this point in the story, it's very clear that he did not get that.”

   2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Gail called my doctor and reported my blood pressure readings. He told her to call an ambulance. This was the start of a fifty nine days stay in a hospital, during which one problem after another manifested itself. It was as if all those years of neglect and abuse on my body had caught up with me at once. After about three weeks of hospital life I told Gail I couldn't do it anymore. I began to suffer severe gastrointestinal bleeding. The doctor almost lost me twice that night. This was my fourth time that I had a near death experience. The truth is my health had been declining for years and I was paying for it. Looking back now I realized that when I quit playing softball I didn't replace it with anything except more work and that is the biggest reason I got myself into health problems. I did not exercise and it put me on a gradual downhill slide for”

   2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Okay, so that's a regret for his family. This is another regret. He did not take care of his health. You can see pictures of him. Didn't exercise ate terribly, had diabetes, was stressed. And he just went through some horrific health consequences. So this section is really called the long goodbye. He says I was out for one of my walks when I suddenly became overcome by extreme fatigue. I returned to the house and told Gail, I don't feel good. Something is wrong with me. This is different from anything I've experienced. In retrospect, it was a sign of trouble, but I ignored it the same way I ignored my health for years and the note I love myself in all calfs is avoid this.”

   2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “I've never forgotten. He says, childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered. Now we're seeing Larry Miller say the exact same thing. I didn't see it until after my kids were grown and gone. It is too late. This is not a mistake you can rectify. Be able to sit back and enjoy my grandkids more than I did my own kids. I try to pass these painful lessons to others who might be attempted by all the allure of professional success. Mine is a cautionary tale. I missed all those years with my family, and I can't have them back. In some ways it's so simple. All you've got to do is be there.”

   2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “I'm often asked these questions. Would I do it differently if I had to do it all over again? I would have been there for the Lily games and scrape knees and the back to school nights. Instead of working ninety hours a week and missing all that stuff, I'd work a more balanced schedule, fifty five or sixty hours. If I had to choose between working long hours and being closer to family, I would choose family. That has come to mean more to me now, but unfortunately I didn't see it until after my kids were grown and gone. Let me interrupt here again Ingvar Camprat, the founder of IKEA, starts Ikea at seventeen, works on it till he dies.”

   2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “She said, I did. You weren't listening. She tried so many times to get me to slow down or be home more, but after a while she decided two things. It made no difference, and it was actually easier not to have me home. I was so wound up all the time that I was difficult to be around. I didn't know how to be a father. As I achieved success in my career, I felt safe and confident in that environment. I knew what I was doing. As a husband and father, I viewed myself much more as a breadwinner than as an emotional leader. As long as I provided for my family financially, I filled my role. Or so I thought. I didn't realize until my late forties that not only did my kids and wife have an emotional need for a father and husband, but it was my responsibility.”

   2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Most of them were strong willed and angry, and some caused trouble and did poorly in school. Four of our five children did not graduate in the traditional way. I look at it now and wonder what was I thinking After one of these belated realizations I ask Gail, why didn't you tell me?”

   2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “And then now he's going to go into the effect. Now, okay, so that's his kids. What about his marriage? He was married for 40 years, something like that. It says, when we dated, we were inseparable. Once we married, we hardly saw each other. I came home at night, I would soak in the Tubtown wine and she would sit on the floor in the bathroom and listen to me talk and talk and talk. Or we'd go on a late night walk, which is another way for me to unwind and be with her. I would have Gail walk me to the car in the morning to see me off to work. These were our dates The great irony of my life is that I originally began working those long hours to benefit my wife and kids, but I wound up hurting them. The children suffered without a father figure in the home.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “I missed most of my children's youth. I miss ball games and science fairs and backed school nights. I miss the first day of kindergarten and playing catch in the yard. I miss dinner at home with my wife and kids. I didn't take any time off. I worked all the time. I work six days a week, and on Sunday I played softball. As Gail likes to say, I didn't go to my kids' ball games, they came to mine. And even when I was at home, I wasn't really there. Greg, our oldest child, says he learned that when the door to my home office was shut, you didn't open it. And if it was a jar, you entered at your own peril. Gail says that if there was a family problem, I would get really angry and make it worse. So she just didn't tell me about it.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “How long are you going to keep playing for table stakes? You put more than your net worth on the line when you bought the first half, then you put way more than your net worth on the line for the second half. And now you building an arena by yourself and putting it all on the line again. And so this is Larry telling us I never had to do it again. Okay, so even as interesting in all that is, I think now we've finally reached, what to me is really the most important part of the book. And so he's going to talk about the decisions he made during his life and what he would do differently. And this is on working every hour of the day. It made me successful. It made me a failure too.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “You can speed them up, and the example in this book of Larry Miller speeding up the construction of the Delta Center is an example of that. So after this, this is the last time he has to go all in and he says, I marvel at the chain of events that change my life so dramatically. I was a career car parts manager and general manager. I was steeped in the car business and thought that's where I would spend the rest of my professional life. Yet within six years almost the day after I bought my first car dealership, I owned half an NBA franchise. A year later, I owned it all. Even then, even when I wasn't certain how I was going to accomplish something, such as pay off all the debt, I had developed enough confidence in my abilities to know that I would find a way. When David Stern, this was the Commission of NBA at the time, when David Stern came to town for the arena topping off party, he asked me.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Level floor in one corner of the building, the other corner is being excavated. An hour before the concrete is poor changes are being made. That just makes me nervous reading that. The crews worked around the clock during much of the project. They would build forms at night so they could pour concrete during the day. It got so cold that winter that we were unable to pour concrete and had to shut down for two weeks. But other than that, it was full speed ahead. We expected it would take twelve weeks to do the roof system. We did it in twenty nine days. The delta center was completed on october fourth, nineteen ninety one. We built the arena in fifteen months and twenty four days, by far the fastest construction of a major arena in the United States, and that included the two weeks shutdown for cold weather. It took longer to finance the building than it took to build it.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “We had sixteen months to get this thing done, which I learned is nearly impossible for the construction of a twenty thousand seat arena. I had assumed that once we had the go ahead, that once we gave the go-ahead to the architects to begin designing the arena, the plans would be finished in six to eight weeks and we could start building. But it quickly became clear to me that such expectations were unrealistic. So I asked the architect, if I locked you in a room and said, don't come out until the plans are done. Where when would I see you? And he said fourteen to fifteen months. Well, we've got to build when we're designing then, I said. I didn't even know this was possible. This is known as fast tracking. In other words, the owner's conception of the building, the architect's design, the engineer's designs and calculations, and the construction of the building all occur at the same time. You build while you plan. With the planning and design staying just one step ahead of construction. For instance, when you pour the first”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “I was more than a little offended, so I said, when these high budget guys get in their limos and fly home, and you've still got this store to sell me, call me. He responded, Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Three weeks later I get a call from this guy, and he acted like we were long lost buddies. He asked if I was still willing to make the same offer, and I said yes. This transaction taught me a principle that I've employed many times since then. Establish what something is worth to you, whether you're buying a hubcap or a large dealership, and then stick with it. If you get in a bidding situation, you can let a motion carry you way past your limits of good sense. I made what I thought was a fair offer for both the buyer and the seller, and I didn't let this guy pressure me into inflating what value I put on it.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Something to know about Larry, it's not ever explicitly mentioned in the book, but you can read between the lines. He didn't really start. I don't think he ever started any dealerships. He bought existing dealerships. And I think before at his peak, he might have owned like 40-something. But this is what he learned from negotiations to buy another dealership. I told him I didn't have several million, and I was hoping that he would release me the property for a few years and let me get my bearings. He got very indignant. So this is a guy trying to sell his dealership, right? Look, he said, this is a Toyota franchise in a sunbelt city. This store will be sold before the day is over. I've got guys coming in limos and private jets to buy this.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “What's called the delta center. I don't know what it's called now, but at the time it's called the Delta Center. Let's do it really fast. So I'll get there, but this is, again, an example of a very unusual way he worked. I thrive on work in the details. Instead of delegating, as I should have, I dived into the minutiae of every project we undertook. Even amid the great concerns about deadlines and Even the window blinds and the type of concrete block we would use. I worked for weeks to research what type of trees we should plant in front of the arena. I bought books on trees, I consulted several horticulturists, which I guess are experts on trees. I drove around town to see what various trees looked like when they were mature. I became an expert on trees. What CEO of a billion dollar company does this? I was that intense about everything.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “This is another example of the unusual way he worked. So he owns the Utah Jazz at this point. He buys 50% of the team for $8 million. Could you imagine that happening now? Winds up having to buy the rest of the team. He's highly leveraged his time. He does not have that much money when he's doing it. His family, actually, they owned the Jazz for, I don't know, a long time. They just sold it to a tech entrepreneur. I think he's in his 40s. And this is recent. maybe the last like five ten years something like that and it was sold for over a billion dollars so it just gives you an idea of like how much the uh the appreciation and value but anyways we're not there yet he's he he has to build um a new arena because if he stays in the old arena he's going to lose too much money and it goes up because of something to do with the collective bargaining agreement so he'd lose like two million the first year four million the next six million after that he's like i don't have i can't lose six million dollars like i don't have that money so he winds up having to build”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “In the way it worked. You remember that? I was discouraged because I was working very hard and had earned great responsibility for my employer, and yet I was paid like everyone else and was refused a raise. I told my grandpa that if they were going to pay me a dollar forty five an hour, then I would give them only a dollar 45 an effort. This is so smart by his grandfather. That's when he told me that no one would know the difference except me. And then he promised me that if I worked as hard as I could and learned all that I could in business, some day would pay off many times over. It was not about my employer. It was about me. Everything grandpa, everything my grandpa promised me has come to pass.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Then Larry talks about some people just really do want it more, he's in a commodity business. His product is not differentiated. So he says a bunch of people say I want to have and I want to be, but they're not willing to pay the price. The price is time and effort and being a student of what you're doing. So when I read that, I just recently reread my highlights from”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “He praises micromanagement, which again, this is some of this is going to be in conflict because he's saying, hey, other people warn you, don't be a micromanager. I think it's a big reason for my success. But then he also said, you know, to micromanager, that requires a lot more time. And then at the end of his life, he regrets giving that much time to his business and not his health and his family. So, you know, take this with, you have to we have to put all these things in context, right? So he says, I make her manage for years, and that was a great reason for my success. The hands-on style with which I worked was not about power or control. It was about doing it right. It was about my passion and intensity for whatever I was doing and the outcomes I sought with that intensity.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “This is more of his thoughts on work. It's about doing a job so meticulously and so in depth that you really do control the outcome. It's about doing your best work and discovering your own capacities. That passion and intensity drove me to work long hours. It drove me to find better time management systems. It drove me to learn everything I could, how many times he's going to repeat this. He says it's over and over again in the book. It drove me to learn everything I could about whatever I was doing, whether it was understanding movie theater design or memorizing serial numbers of automobile parts.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “I want to talk to you a little bit about why he's doing what he's doing. It's interesting that it changes, right? So his why, when you go back to his epiphany head, his first why was fear, right? And then when he applies himself and he starts achieving success, that changes to exhilaration. The insanely long hours that I work were driven by fear, as I've mentioned, but then the success became intoxicating. Clearly, my motivation to work shifted from fear-driven to success driven.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Are you serious? Yeah, we can put it together. We got in our cars and returned to the dealership and began negotiations immediately. I was 35 years old and I had worked for car dealers most of my adult professional life. And just like that, on april sixth, nineteen seventy nine, I bought a car dealership for three point five million dollars. We only had 80,000 in the bank, so that's the important part. He's like, okay, well, where did this guy get $3.5 million? He didn't. And so this is also going to be a crazy thing. There's a lot of PAS founders that are going to...”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “So, as a result of being in this industry for so long, he was friends with other people that owned dealerships. So he goes out, you know, he's depressed at this time. He goes out to his friend named Gardner. So he says, I took Gardner to lunch. And Larry asks him a question. When are you going to sell me your dealership? It was an old gag between us, a ritual we'd practiced for years. Gardner had always turned me down and we would laugh about it. This time I was stunned when Gardner replied How about today?”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Can't get that back. I realize that emotion would dead end my career. It closed off my horizons. I quickly realized that running one store was no longer enough for me. I had no, and this gets even worse. I had no plan for my next move. Of course he didn't have a plan because he didn't think he was going to make a next move. After eight years of working there, I knew it was time to move on. What happened next was a major turning point in my life. And this is the most important part of this section. Sometimes we must take a step back before we can move forward in a way we would never have imagined.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “So here's Chuck's mistake. He's like, listen, I love Larry. He's great. But my son's got to come in here. I want you to train him. I'm still going to pay you. Listen, Chuck might be thinking, this is going to be good for you. You have the same amount of pay but less work. That's not the kind of person Larry was. He wanted me to mentor some of his sons. I was blindsided by this. I thought I was going to be doing this for the rest of my career. But in reality, he had planned to give the business to his sons and never told me. I was churning inside. Think about this. At this point, he gave these people eight years of his life.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “So everything's going well for a series of years. He's finally on solid footing. And then his boss tells him that he wants to groom his sons to take over the business. So this is the horrible thing that leads, I called him Jim. His name's not Jim, that leads, I'm reading my own notes. His name's not Jim, David. This horrible thing that happens for Larry that leads Larry to entrepreneurship. He drew an organizational chart of his real estate and car businesses. He indicated that he was overseeing a real estate business himself. That brought us to the automobile side of his holdings. Chuck had eight sons, and he wanted them to follow in his footsteps on the automotive side. The bottom line was he was going to put his sons in charge of the automobile dealerships and I was being demoted to general manager of one store with no cut and pay.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Miller simply said he didn't know, but after the fifth or sixth call he finally told the man, Okay, I'll tell you I come to work every day with the sole purpose of beating you guys So again, he's not going to want his desire was not to go from 961st to second to third. He had to be the best.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “And so he does this for you. I'm skipping, I'm going through this obviously really, really fast. There's more detail in the book, but just three years later, look what happens as a result of this. Gene and Chuck came to me and said, hey, we want you to run all five of our dealerships. We're going to make you operations manager. After about a decade of wandering from one job and one employer to another uncertain about what I wanted to do or for whom I wanted to work, I had found a home now that I need to pause here. This is extremely important. He's happy. He's making good money. He's running five dealerships. He has no desire to run a business. There's no need for it. Member, go back to the river of failure. His idea he had the river of failure, right? Something is going to have to happen to change that. And if these guys never made the mistake, you and I probably wouldn't be talking about Larry Miller right now. So it's very interesting turning a negative into a positive.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Ideas to meld in my mind with my own ideas, and the combination of those two things are going to the end result or the outcome is going to be a unique idea that I can apply, that may be even better what Gene could do. So he says, I call Gene often in the beginning. But one day it occurred to me that in every situation I faced, I was always wondering how my mentor Gene would do it. I decided I couldn't worry about that anymore. I was going to do it, how Larry would do it. It was the dawn of a new era for me. So he always says, in the book over and over, he says, listen, I was a car guy. I turned myself into an entrepreneur. So he says, and this is the beginning of that, I took the entrepreneurial ideas, talking about expanding market, all the stuff he did in the parts department. I had in the parts department and ran with them without being shackled by preconceived notions of what could and could not be done.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Going to make you more money sales, usually sales apartments, right? But his results were so extreme. We're like, well, what happens if we put Larry in charge of all of this? The plan called me to me to begin following Gene around for a few days beginning January 21st to learn his job. I love what Gene does here. But on December 15th, Jean called me into his office and said, look, I've got some things to do at the Chevrolet store. If you need me, just answer my phone and open my mail and conduct sales meetings and call me if you have a problem. He never came back. It took me a long time to realize that this was by design. He decided that the best way for me to learn was simply to throw me into the job. I called it, and this is another smart realization that Larry has here. He's like, I'm learning from Gene. But I'm going to take the ideas and everything I learned from Gene, and then I'm going to allow those.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “I think before he dies, his circulation, his daily circulation at peak was like 15 million people. So what he does, he's like, okay, he starts shipping his newspaper by train to other cities in California. And therefore his circulation increases what rapidly not only is he getting more money because they're buying it, but now his advertisers can advertise to more people. It's a very, very smart move, very similar to what Larry Miller is doing here. So going back to this, Larry says, I worked tirelessly. I was driven to Excel. I was working 14 or 15 hours a day 16 days a week. And so this starts to pay off. There's two guys that own the dealership that he's working for is like, this guy just took us from 961st to first. Now we're doing $3 million a year. This is bananas. So it says Jean called me into his office and told me we're going to promote you to general manager. Larry says, I was surprised. Such promotions didn't happen to Parch managers. They happened in sales departments. So why would they do that?”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Well, I ran with it. Now, this is a really smart idea. Most parts managers are limited to their primary market, which is within ten to fifteen miles of where they work. So how the hell do you go from 961st to 28th, right? You can't do 10 or 15%. There's a commodity business. He just told us he's like, everybody's got basically the same parts. Everybody's got basically the same prices, right? He does something that's really, really smart about how he expanded his market. So he says most parse managers are limited to their primary market. So I got 10 to 15 mile radius. I can't, I'm not going to go from 960 first 961st, excuse me, to first, right? So he says, I developed a national wholesale business. So now I went from a range of 10 to 15 miles to 3,000. I also hired a good staff and solicited businesses from body shops and independent mechanics. These are people, so now he's going from inbound. Maybe they pull out the yellow pages and they just call.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “So often early. So his next boss actually does what he said he would do, and this allows Larry to stay with him for eight years and to actually develop the skill set that he's going to need to apply to his own business. So this is a very important part of his life. And he's managing the parts in a dealership. That's his specialty before he runs the entire thing. So he says, we went from $961st in the nation in part sales to first in 28 months. We set records every month. And he's got some good ideas here, which I'm going to tie to some previous entrepreneurs to. We not only became the first Toyota Parts dealership to reach $1 million in annual sales, but we reached $2 million before anyone else reached $1 million. And we became the first to reach $3 million in sales as well. When I took over the job, Gene, my boss, told me, we're going to hand you the ball.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Always do this once he has that epiphany that I talked about at the very opening, then he carries that on for 20 years. But this is the reason he says this. Listen, I'm working all these hours, and he says I was doing this so I could learn. So he's putting in more hours so he can learn faster. What was the result? Within a year, I was doing the hiring, firing, scheduling, and ordering of parts. So he's going to jump around. He's dealing with a lot of poorly rent businesses, a lot of he's being taken advantage of. Essentially, he gets cheated by five different employers before he finds one that he's going to work for for eight years. And a lot of the cheating comes to say, you know, usually has to do with pay or hours or promotions. So promises were made to him as an employee from his employer that are not kept. And so when that happens repeatedly, he'll jump. But really, the takeaways as I discovered.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “For others of life, mainly family and health. Okay, so through a series of these jobs, he just keeps getting normal basic jobs. He doesn't have a college education. He doesn't consider himself that smart yet at this point in his life. But he starts working for auto parts store, and he's where he gets the experience and eventually starts working for dealerships and he's going to be promoted up the ranks of dealership, then he's going to get demoted and then that's going to make him jump to buy his first car dealership. And that's going to lay the foundation for this gigantic private company that builds. But I just want to pull out this one, a few sentences here, because I thought this was very interesting how he framed why he was working so much. And this is before he decides, hey, I'm going to work 90 hours a week or whatever it was. So he says, I was soon working seven days a week every hour they were open for four months. So he did this previous in his life, but he didn't.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Discovered I had a knack of creating work systems that produced stunning results, and this had served me well throughout my professional career. So this section is a lot longer. I'm going to skip over and just give you the punchline. He's working at a company they have to pack records into boxes and then ship them out. So he figures out a way to 10x the amount of records they could pack per hour. And this is essentially what the main point is. As I look back now, I realized I was practicing time and motion studies, although I didn't know it at the time. It was simply a manifestation of my personality and would become the hallmark of my labor style. I was making efficient use of his time. So what he would do is if he's got a lot of jobs that are just repetitive, right? They're low paying, usually physical labor, and he realizes I'm doing the same thing every day. So he actually does something really smart. He steps back and analyzes every single section of the tasks that he has in front of him.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “That decisions like, hey, I'm going to do whatever I have to do to become extremely good at something. And even if that took few years, being a few years to manifest to other people, for other people to see, he knew it right then. Let's go. We're still not there. Let's go to what he was doing before he starts working in the auto industry. So he says, this is just a bunch of odd jobs. And really the point that I'm bringing this up to you is it's very common for people to be unsure of what to do. So after dropping out of college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And so I wandered aimlessly through a series of odd jobs that taught me what I didn't want to do. I worked in a book bindery. I framed houses. I mixed and carried concrete. I drove delivery trucks and I picked strawberries. None of these jobs held much interest for me, but a pattern began to emerge that would prove significant. So he says I just”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “And when he was in high school, and even soon thereafter, his future-in-laws did not like him. They thought he was a loser. So it says, her parents didn't like me, and I didn't blame them. I wasn't the kind of kid a father and mother wanted their daughter to marry. They considered me a neer-doel, which is just a complicated way to say a loser. It was hard to argue otherwise. They pestered Gail about me. Why don't you date someone else? This is where it turns around, though. Even after we were married, now the first maybe decade of his marriage, you know, he still took him a long time to wind up turning in or changing, maybe evolving into the person he wanted to become, right? So he says, even after we were married, my mother-in-law didn't like me much. But this is where it shifts. This is very, very interesting, which was ironic because after we became successful, she would sometimes introduce Gale”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “So he says when he had children, he wanted to give them the very best of everything. He believed his role was to provide what they needed. He didn't realize how important he was as a father and role model because he hadn't had parents who did that for him. Okay, so that's enough about the terrible family relationships. He does say, hey, I screwed up with my own kids. He wants to have like 23 grandkids, but he says, you know, I was better with my grandkids. But again, he feels that the mistakes he made when he talks later in the book about how he doesn't feel his children, he feels his children are better with their children than he was with his own. So this trend of poor family life seems to have ended. I want to go back to his early life, though, because it's really important to understand. It was not obvious at all that Larry was going to be successful. And an indication of that, he starts dating his wife. I think they start dating like high school. I think they met middle school.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “jail me or a boss who wanted to fire me. This is probably the most important sentence of this entire section. I had experienced vulnerability and I didn't like it. So not only surviving this dysfunctional environment adds to its drive, but this is also something unfortunately when you're raised, and I think this may be more common than it is not unfortunate in our species, is that there's a lot of broken parents that are unable or unwilling to fix themselves and so they pass through generations terrible habits. So you might have been raised. Some kids are raised in a terrible environment and then they have kids and they just duplicate or copy what they see. And it only takes one person to break this generational curse is the way I would see it. This is Larry's wife on Larry's relationship with his mother.”

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44. “Call the police on them My childhood ended there. I had another epiphany of sorts. I realized that while I was in detention that I did not feel compelled to regain my freedom and to return home. Although I didn't like detention, home was not much better. I wasn't overly stressed that I was there and the realization of this disturbed me. I have wondered if this now comes to what he's taking away from this experience that I think is translatable to a lot of other people. I have wondered if the things I've accomplished over the years in my typically maniacal and driven style didn't come about as a result of my not wanting ever to lose control of my own destiny again. And this is, of course, a main theme that runs through almost all of these biographies is the desire for control, for independence and control. Going back to Larry here, there have been many times in my life when I refuse to leave any deal undone so that I would never again have to be subject to the whims of others, whether it was parents who wanted to”

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45. “Inside the building, Officer Willie told me The word your parents are using about you is incorrigible You're impossible to manage I ventured a question What have I done? This question hung in the air and died. I was checked into the facility and there I stayed for three days I never went to court and no one ever told me what I had done My parents had simply called the cops and told them to haul me away this reminds me of one of my favorite entrepreneurs I discovered through this podcast is Yvonne Chenard and he has this great quote and he says if you want to understand the entrepreneur study the juvenile delinquent the delinquent is saying with his actions this sucks I'm gonna do my own thing and Larry Miller's case this is literal and if you want to more if you haven't listened to the two podcasts I've done on Yvonne their founder 18 and founders number 60 and I have another book of his”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Another just strange example or experience that Larry had throughout his life. But let me go back to this point where his mom calls the cops on him more than once. And so let me just tell you a little bit about this because this is just wild. Even before I was kicked out of the house, the police took me from my home on two different occasions. Though no one could ever tell me what crime I was supposed to have committed. One evening a police officer knocked on their door. My mother answered and then stepped aside as he entered the house. It was immediately clear that she had been expecting him. The cop, whose name was Willie, was very cordial. You're Larry Miller, he began. When I agreed, he said, I need you to come with me. I was confused. I followed him as we walked to his car, which is parked in another street. He drove me to the juvenile detention center, which is another name for prison.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “I felt empty and displaced, but I did not have longings to return home, probably because of the tension that existed there. As Christmas approached, I finally began to experience some of those longings, so I called my mother and told her simply I think it's time to come home. Her response was cool. You have to talk to your dad, she said. Two days before Christmas I moved back home. It was nineteen sixty three. In the years since then, Gail, that's his wife, has interviewed my mother twice with a tape recorder to learn more about my family history. Both times she asked my mother while I was kicked out of my house. She could never adequately answer the question to my satisfaction. It's still an issue for me today. I think about it more than I should. I look for answers and there are none. Dad is gone and mom is unapproachable about it. So even before.”

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48. “I walked up to the stairs and onto the porch and peeked into the sacks, and I was stunned by what I saw. They were filled with my clothes. I was confused, what's going on? I tried the front door, it was locked. I walked around to the side of the house, to the basement door, it was locked. The house was dark, but I knew my family was in there. Slowly the realization of what had happened washed over me. I had been kicked out of my house. But why? And this story is going to get even crazier here, so he has to go live with his neighbor, and we see Larry obviously came from a very broken family. So he's talking about the neighbor that he's crashing at his house. He says he came off as a gruff man, but he really had a harder gold. He made me feel welcome in his home. And I wound up living there for six months. During all that time, I never had any contact with my family, even though they lived just three blocks away.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Calling it all started from failure. So let me read this section to you. I thought it was very interesting. I never saw myself doing any of these things. I was a 41-year-old car dealer when I took my first step outside of the car business with the purchase of the Utah Jazz. It's funny how life is like a river sometimes. And if you do things a certain way, that river will just take you a certain direction, and you ride it out and you see where it takes you. People ask if I set out with a plan. No way. The chain of events that began my entrepreneurial career were sparked by three failures. I dropped out of college, I got laid off, and I got demoted. We're not there yet. We'll get there. Let's go back to when he was a teenager, and he's getting kicked out of his house. He says one night during the summer of my 16th year, I returned home to find my world turned upside down. As I approached our house, I saw three sacks on the porch and wondered what they contained.”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “I became a student of everything, ordering systems, delivery systems, hiring practices, training practices, retention practices. I decided I had to be incredible in all facets so that I could control the outcome. I needed to become the best. I begin my story this way because it is a useful backdrop for any discussion of my life. It colors so much of what I did and so much of what happened to me. It was central to everything, whether it was working as a delivery man or building a private business or growing into an entrepreneur or buying the Utah jazz or as I'm sorry to say, neglecting my family to do all of the above. I worked and worked and worked day after day, night after night, dawn to bedtime. I was driven to succeed”

    2021-02-21 · Founders · #168 Larry Miller (Driven: An Autobiography) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source