YouSaid · the spoken record

Sol Price

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51

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2020-01-20

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2020-01-20

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1. “Writing this book has given me a unique opportunity to provide a permanent record of my father's life and contributions for the benefit of members of the family. Those who knew and worked with him, and students of business and philanthropy, and people in general who may learn about and be inspired by his story. May his life be a blessing and an inspiration. If your loved ones feel that way about you when your life is over, I think that's evidence of a life well-lived. I hope the stories on this podcast inspire you like they do me. I hope these ideas add value to your life. If you want the full story, buy the book using the link on your podcast player or at founderspodcast.com. And I'll talk to you next week.”

   2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “The greatest tribute I can give him is that he taught me so much, sometimes without even realizing a lesson was taking place. When it was time for me to step up, I was ready. What greater legacy could there be from a father to a son than leaving the gift of life skills necessary to carry on? He was a poster child for the American dream. His immigrant parents were born in a small Russian village. He was raised in the Bronx, graduated from high school in San Diego, and was the first in his family to graduate from college. He earned a law degree. He became an exceptionally successful businessman and philanthropist. He celebrated seventy years of marriage to his wife Helen. He was a good father who instilled high values in his sons, and he never walked away from responsibility. It doesn't get much better than that.”

   2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “He also taught me to be humble, to appreciate the unpredictability of life, to care for people, to remain hopeful, and always to be there for people who are in need. Working alongside my father for nearly forty five years, I came to appreciate how unique our relationship was. My father was a strong man who told me that he had to be tough to grow up in the Bronx and survive. He was very smart, opinionated, and could make his case with anyone My father was so competent, responsible, and protective that as he would drew from day to day activities I wondered whether I could ever carry on without him.”

   2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “On his life. And I just think this is probably from a personal perspective, the most important part of the entire book. As much as soul's public accomplishments represent a tremendous legacy, his more enduring legacy may be the impact he had on the lives of the people who knew him through personal or business relationships. All of us can honestly say that there is at least one person who has had a transformative impact on the course of our lives. For me, that person was my father. Whatever I have learned about business, I learned from my father everything, from how to read a financial statement to management to good judgment and fair dealings. My father taught me how to think and how to question, and not to fall into the trap of assuming rather than checking things out for myself.”

   2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “You're more likely to actually use the store. And that's exactly what happened. So not only do they get more members, but they get more sales because now they're like, hey, I want to take advantage of this thing I'm paying for. Although the price companies investors would have to wait until June 1977 before the business reported its first profitable month, the introduction of the group membership turned the business around. So now we get to the part where we realize hey, everything that made Price Club different is what makes Price Club successful.”

   2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “So now here they discover something through trial and error that was very surprising and saved their business. So their brainstorm is like, how can we figure out get customers? So their idea was like, hey, what if we pitch the government and see if we can go talk to government purchasing managers and see if they want to shop and buy memberships? And so at one of these meetings, they're like, well, we don't want to do this, but one of the people on the council was actually the head of the San Diego credit union. And he's like, hey, we're not business owners, but would you can we shop at like could could our members take advantage of the cost savings? And so, and it says we quickly contacted the San Diego City Credit Union to let them know that their members could shop at Price Club. This one thing that happens changes the trajectory of their business and saves their business. People join credit unions to save money to borrow money at low interest rates and to receive a variety of other financial benefits, including discounts at retail stores. Shopping at price club, a wholesale warehouse, was clearly”

   2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “We could not figure out what was going wrong, Kafesto. Was the membership fee? Did we have the wrong merchandise? The numbers clearly showed that if something were not done soon to change the trend line, the price club was on its way to bankruptcy.”

   2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Sometimes you can launch an idea that other people agree makes sense, but you have a hard time finding customers to actually follow through on that. They open Price Club, right? And again, he's got a little bit of money, but he's supporting himself, his family, his two sons that used to work in FedMart were fired, so he gives them a job and he has to pay them. So it's off to a slow start. This is scary, scary times, especially when you're, he'd be 60, around 61 at the time. All right, says Seoul was hoping that Price Club would be on track within a month or two to do $200,000 per week. But by the end of the first week, sales were averaging below $30,000. Price Club was off to a shaky start. Business was so bad that employees were asked to park their cars on the front parking lot. Spaces that were previously reserved for members just to make sure that people knew Price Club was open for business. And this is a terrifying part in any...”

   2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Very similar to the early days of like Costco's further iteration on Price Club. So he's going to start out with business customers. But he's going to run into some problems. So I'm going to go right there. I'm going to skip over a bunch of parts that the early days. And because you just need to focus on the fact that the idea when you describe it to somebody makes sense, right?”

   2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Then he has a lot of experience, 20 years almost running FedMart, and now he wants to take that a step further. And that's where you have Price Club, which is closest to what Costco is because they wind up merging. All right. So this is the idea. The Price Club idea was finally conceived sometime in the middle of January.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Like, why start over? I don't know. I just, the contrast is so obvious when you read this book, assuming you've studied, obviously, Jeff and Sam and Jim and everybody else. She's just like, wow, man, I wonder if, you know, he's also older at this time. He's like 60 the first time he sells FedMart to Hugo. I just wonder if he'd ever, like he never says anything about it, but I just wonder if he regrets that. Okay, so he gets fired. And now, you know, he's got to start all over. He says if you rang him dry at this point in his life, he'd have a net worth of around a million dollars. So he's like, all right, well, what are we going to do? And so this is where he comes up with the idea for the price club, which is really iterations. All these ideas are iterations. So you start with FedCo, right? He studied FedCo and he makes FedMart.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “What everything else other smart anything else that's smart that was smart and he blew right past them. He blew right past them. He tries to buy Soul's business, his second business. I'll get there in a minute. I just think there's a lesson there that like if you have a good idea, you have a business that you're passionate about, like just let it compound.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “I mean, I was going to say sometimes it was his decision, sometimes it wasn't, but no, it's his decision to sell to Hugo. So it was, in turn, his decision. Now think about all the people that took a lot of innovations and ideas from Seoul, but never quit, refused to sell and think about the success they had because what's rule number one, don't interrupt the compounding, right? Sam Wald never sold became one of the richest people in history. Jeff Bezil's never sold became one of the richest people in history. Jim Senegal never sold. Costco is one of the most successful retailers. I think it's the most successful retailer in the United States right now, if I'm not mistaken. There's just something to that. Everybody's got to make that their own decision, but I just can't help but seeing the contrast between Seoul, even though he came up with a lot of the ideas and innovation. Remember, I just said I asked you to remember what Charlie Munger was telling us. Remember, he said he never invented anything. He just copied.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “And one is like Sol has a lot of accomplishments, right? But he also started and stopped. Like he'd start a company and then sell it. You know, that's why he was able to found three companies and take them all public. So FedMart's the first one Price Club, which is essentially, is going to be merged into Costco. It's the second one. And then he starts this huge real estate investment company. It was the third one. And what I thought about is like, isn't it weird that, okay, so first of all, he's in this He's in this meeting. He's getting just like, you know, Soul's a very proud, smart, successful person. It's not easy for you to sit there and have somebody else that you're now technically working for dress you down in front of everybody, you know, there's a reason why a lot of entrepreneurs optimize for control over money. But then I also thought I was like, well, it's weird. He came up with all the ideas. But because he did this starting and stopping, sometimes they were all his decisions.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “One of them was, I don't know if Marco's the name of the store or the person. So I visited Marco. Okay, that's the store. He talked about Marco at length, in particular the passport membership concept for business customers. So what they did is they separated their business into, you could get extra discounts if you owned a business. Then he meets, that's an idea he's going to use later for the business he's going to start after FedMart. And he gets fired from FedMart. And so I'm setting up him getting fired. And he starts with this person he meets in Germany, this billionaire retailer by the name of Hugo Mann. Hugo Mann created these things called hypermarkets. Okay, so Seoul's really impressed about it. What's a hypermarket? It says hypermarkets now operating throughout the world are what Americans would think of as large discount stores such as Walmart supercenters. So before the Walmart supercenter that's everywhere targets very similar, they talk about that.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “FedMart starts to do well, but as with every business, it kind of plateaus out, and now they're having some difficulty. They have increased competition. A lot of people are competing with them now. They're copying them, right? So it says the early years of the 1970s were proving to be quite a challenge for FedMart. So we're almost 20 years after the business was started. Sol began to feel pressure and a lack of enjoyment with the chore of running an expanding company with an increasingly competitive challenges. So later commented that we were good at creating the business, but we weren't as good at running the business. So what does he do? He's trying to get out of this rut he's in, and he decides he's going to learn, he starts learning from other founders. He travels to Europe and starts studying other retailers that are innovating and maybe finding some kind of partnership, right? So there's a big section on this. I'm just going to hit a few highlights. He visited three retail chains, one in Holland and two in Germany.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody is that smart. Okay, so remember that quote and remember what Sam just said for later Okay, so.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Time of experience and learning, there's a lot of people in a rush to find their business, I understand. I envy the people I see now where they find what they want to do early in life and they just able to let that compound for many decades. But for a lot of people, including like myself, you could be confused as to why you want your life to be or the things that you want to work on. You could go into an endeavor and be like, oh, this is what I want to do. And then realize, oh, there's a lot of things I didn't know that I didn't like about it beforehand. So I think that's extremely inspiring. It's something you see very common. I mean, example of Sam Walton. He was like 44 when he founded Walmart. Okay, so now back to more of Sol's philosophy. He says, Soul made, I'll read my note in a minute. He says, Soul made his decision from the point of view of his own experience. The fact that he was an attorney and not a retailer, and that he was an entrepreneur and not a chain store executive, he was never driven by the need to have the most stores or the most money, but by the desire.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “So that's like soul's fundamental understanding of human nature, that insight he derived there. So he says, the way Soul put it, if you want to be successful in retail, just put yourself in the place of a cranky, demanding customer. In other words, see your business through the eyes of the customer. A few months after Fedmar opened its first store, Sol and his partners made a number of strategic decisions. They had a belief that there needed to be one merchandising strategy throughout the store. So some stores that would open up, you'd have this big open warehouse and part of it would be run by the person that owns the warehouse and then they'd like rent out space to like other independent operators.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Like, if you can invest that money, there's nothing wrong. I'm not saying anything wrong with advertising, of course, but you might feel that the money you're spending on advertising could be better. Like what if you could invest? Is there ways to invest that money into making your product better? Because if you make your product better, humans are social creatures. And if they come across a good product or good movie or good anything, what do we do? We tell our friends about it”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “I politely and firmly told him to get the hell out. If you want to close us down then take your best shot and we never heard from him again So I'll talk more about, he runs into more shenanigans like this when he starts to sell prescriptions for the best price around. Let me get a little bit into, we're going to see in his early days, he starts developing his business philosophy. It says, Soul described his business approach as the professional fiduciary relationship between us, the retailer, and the member, which is a customer. We felt we were representing the customer. I just wish every business did this. You had a duty to be very, very honest and fair with them. So we avoided sales and advertising. It's just like Costco. We have in effect said that the best advertising is by our members. The unsolicited testimonial of the satisfied customer. This is something that we learned from Le Chwa, learned from a lot of people. The best form of advertising is word of mouth advertising.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Those early Fedmark days were not without challenge, though. Some of the downtown merchants tried to cause problems. So now this is what I hate about businesses that don't want to compete fairly. And Seoul's going to have to deal with this constantly. They go and try to tattletail on them and try to find other ways to knock them out. Instead of competing with somebody that is providing a better service for the customer, they find crony capitalistic ways to knock out their competitors. So it says right before to open, a guy came, this is soul talking. Right before we were going to open, a guy came into the FedMark premises. He represented himself as being a betting expector for the state of California who's responsible for seeing that things like pillows and mattresses do not have any deleterious stuff in them. Here comes in this betting inspector and he has a long list of questions. And the questions had nothing to do with pillows and mattresses.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “No credit except for purchases of furniture or appliances. In addition, Fedmart refused to stock products from manufacturers who enforced fair trade laws. That's why they have that $2 membership card. From the day that FedMart opened for business in November 1954, the store was an immediate and spectacular success.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Really interesting. This is an idea. I love this idea from James Dyson. I think about it all the time in his autobiography. He says, difference for the sake of it in everything because it must be better. That's a good description of the early days of FedMart. He says FedMart broke out just about all the conventions in the 1950s retailing. Shoppers had to be military or government employees. This is the early days. He eventually changes this later on, right? But again, he's just copying FedCo. We all copy. That's just what humans do. They had to be military or government employees. They purchased a $2 lifetime paper membership card and needed to show their card in order to shop. Instead of being open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Fed marked hours were 12.30 to 9 p.m. These hours were designed for the convenience of civil servants and military families. Most products were paid at a central register area in cash or with a check.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “This is really interesting observation. So this is Saul talking. He says, I used to say afterwards that when we didn't know what we were doing, it only took $50,000 to start a business, meaning his first store. And five years later, when we were really experienced at running FedMarts, it took $5 million to open one.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Unlimited. So he goes in and he uses the experiences he had as a lawyer to negotiate leases and to change certain clauses in a lease so his downside is capped. We negotiated a lease for 10 years. We were so uncertain as to the future of this enterprise that we reserved the right to cancel the lease at the end of one year if it didn't work. So one of the most famous examples of entrepreneurs doing that is Richard Branson goes to start, I think it was Virgin Lannick, whichever one was his first airline. And he negotiates with Boeing and says, listen, I'm going to buy, you know, I'm going to buy all these planes from you, but I need it out. So after one year, if I'm not succeeding, you have to agree to buy them back from me. That caps is downside. This is just a good rule for life.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Wind up being beneficial to us. We didn't know what wouldn't work. We didn't know what we quote unquote couldn't do. We just experimented. We thought about it and we came up with ideas and then tested those ideas. That is extremely powerful because that is how you gain knowledge. That is what makes reading these biographies so valuable. Because they're going to learn things that you can only get through multiple decades of trying to do something. That learning process using trial and error, it cannot be replicated in school. All right, so it says he raised $50,000 from a handful of investors, including his own $5,000, as seed money. For most of the investors, this is important, $5,000 investment was not a lot of money. But for Seoul, $5,000 was a significant amount of money. So he's taking a big risk here. But like most of these founders, he does something that's genius. He finds a way to cap his downside. So you need to find ways to cap your downside in life, but always leave your upside.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “The membership was really just a way of outsmarting the fair trade loss. Isn't that interesting how these ideas stick around through history? Still use that today. It's very, very fascinating to me. Okay, so at this point in the story, Souls, he's like, I'm gonna open FedMart. He's gonna grabs some partners, raises some money. But he says something that's really interesting looking back at this time. And he says, fortunately, Sol later recalled, most of us had backgrounds that were alien to retailing. We didn't know what wouldn't work or what we couldn't do. Okay, so he's hitting on a very, very old idea. This is an idea that he's discovering in the 1950s. But if you go back to the podcast I've done on Henry Ford, this is something Henry Ford said in the early 1900s. And he says, that is the way with wise people. They are so wise and practical that they always know to adopt just why something cannot be done. They always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. So what Henry saying there and what Solang here is that the fact that we were ignorant”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Seoul was also really good at analyzing the business decisions and philosophies of other businesses and finding areas where he could do things differently and give him advantage. This is one example at the time in San Diego, almost all the shopping was done downtown. And he just noticed a lot of weird quirks about these businesses that he didn't think were actually optimized for all the consumers. So when I read this section, you realize that Costco, Price Club, FedMort, they do essentially the opposite of what everybody else was doing. It says downtown store hours were 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and they were closed Sunday and evenings. Personal service was common. Nicely dressed sales clerks provided friendly service, and merchandise was packaged in attractive boxes that clearly displayed the name of the store. So Costco does none of that. When I read that section, I'm also listening to this audiobook that goes through the history of the Americas focused.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Business and categories of products being sold. He sold a bunch of different stuff like clothing, appliances, cameras. Anyway, he's been at Costco knows what they sold. They were convinced that this is an important insight. They were convinced that FedCode type businesses could be successful in San Diego. As soon as they returned to San Diego, Seoul took these other two guys to see the Main Street warehouse. Everyone agreed that the building could be adapted to a retail business use. So you see how all these things had to come together? He had this big problem. He's trying to help his family. Now they got a large warehouse, a commercial property. We then don't have a tenant. He learned from the locker store. He's like, oh, that's interesting. You just built a business on a small segment of the population that have a very distinct need. And then he sees Fedco and all these ideas start processing in his mind. And the result is going to be that he's going to start FedMart.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “They decided Sol and two of his friends, one of them was this guy named Weiss, but I'm not going to try to burden you without remembering all these names. It says, decided to take a trip to see Fedco. It was a large store located in a non-traditional retail area of Los Angeles near a cow pasture. So what's Costco famous for? They are located in non-traditional retail areas, right? It says FedCo was not a for-profit company. It was a nonprofit corporation operating a membership retail store that catered to federal employees such as postal workers. The FedCo store was doing a brisk business with customers coming as far away as San Diego. In fact, 5,000 FedCo members lived in San Diego and were driving 200 miles round trip to take advantage of FedCo's bargain pricing. On the way back, the men had a spirited discussion about Fedco, the membership concept, the nonprofit nature of the”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “To buy. Okay. And it says soul's client and good friend, Mandel Weiss, not only help find a tenant, and so in doing so, he introduced Soul to his career in retailing. So Weiss tells him about this business that's called Fedco. Remember, he starts Fed Mart, okay? And this is an example of a very successful niche that's servicing government employees. And so they take this long, they live in San Diego, they decide, hey, we're going to, there's a lot of people, this is, I guess, a good indication that you have a good business too, right? Or that somebody else has good business, where there's a lot of people living in San Diego that do the drive to Los Angeles just to shop at this store because they save so much money. And so we're going to see a lot of these ideas that he notices in other businesses that he's going to apply to Fed Martin now and then Price Club later, which in turn Sam Walton, Jim Senegal, and Jeff Bezos apply to their businesses. So this is extremely interesting to me. So he said,”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Goods and services In other words, a niche. Now why is understanding like seeing an example of a successful business that focused on a niche important? Because this is where we're at in the book now is the beginning of his first business, which is going to be FedMart, which is you're going to see focuses on a niche. Now I have to tell you, he's got a really interesting story. He feels it's like almost accidental. He accidentally fell into the field that he's going to pioneer, that he's going to create a lot of innovations in, and that's retailing. And so his father-in-law dies, his mother-in-law needs help. She needs a lawyer. She's looking to do, they're selling one piece of commercial property, but they're deferring the taxes by buying another property that actually produces income. So they're investing in commercial property, okay? And so her name's Bertha. Let me just read that this part too. It says, after weeks trying to convince Bertha to agree to the trade, Seoul was faced with the challenge of finding a tenant for the Main Street property. So this is the property that his mother-in-law is going to...”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “And one of these businesses that he gets involved in is this thing called Seven C's. Check this out. This was very interesting. So it says in the 1960s, Navy regulations required that sailors depart from their ships and come back to their ships in uniform. Because sailors wanted to change into their civilian clothes once they were on shore, they needed a place to store their uniforms and to purchase clothing. In response, a few enterprising entrepreneurs opened locker clubs. So what was a locker club? A locker club was stores that not only had lockers where the sailors could store their uniforms, but offered a wide range of goods and services for sailors to purchase. The most successful the locker clubs were the Seven Seas Locker Club, and so he winds up giving legal advice and general business advice to the founders. It says Seoul took an active interest in the 7C's business. The Seven C's was another learning experience for Seoul, an opportunity to see how a large store selling a variety of goods.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “So I want to tell you a little bit about what he learned from his law practice. He says, the big thing about the practice during the war and during all those years after the war was that I was dealing with small businessmen and I was very involved not only with their legal problems but with their overall business as well. I handled bankruptcies, real estate deals, partnerships, divorce in estates. Over a period of time I really learned far more from my clients than I ever learned in law school. And because I involved myself so deeply, I think that is where I began to accumulate the knowledge and interest in business.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Four hours in a day, one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week. We just waste so much of it. There was always enough time, and so on his desk he had, he was famous for having the sign that says, do it now. You get extreme levels of impatience.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Of the day was not characteristic of his earlier years. So they're saying he had to learn this trade. He commented that he never worked very hard in school, at least not until law school. Beginning with his early career in law and then at Consolidated, Saul would continue to live his life working hard and taking full advantage of every hour of the day. In his later years, Saul frequently spoke about the importance of time. So this is his granddaughter speaking at Saul's memorial service about what she learned from her grandfather. She says, The concept of time was very important to my grandfather. I remember on a couple of occasions talking to Grandpa about how I would be able to accomplish certain goals. He explained to me that we always have more time than we think. How much sleep do you get? he would ask How long does it take you to study? How long does it take you to eat your meals? So many questions about my day. Well, you have enough time, he would say.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “So it was during this time of his life we see the complete opposite traits that his father had. Saul loved, he learned to love being productive. And then as a result of packing his days full of productivity, he also understood the importance of time. So he talks about that. And I want to tell you a little bit about that. So let me just give you some background here. He's working nights at a place that is manufacturing airplanes for the war. It's called Consolidated. Okay, so it says throughout the rest of the war, Seoul was at his law office at 8 in the morning until noon. Then he worked at Consolidated until 1115 at night. He would eat dinner, go to sleep, and the next morning do it all again. He didn't complain. He said, I enjoyed the experience. Unlike his father who had managed to find ways not to work, Saul thrived when he was busy working hard and feeling productive. His desire to work hard and get the most out of every hour.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Trying to get around dark without lights on your car, without any lights in the street, and trying to figure out where you were going and how to get there. It was a very, very difficult thing. But somehow, we still managed to keep moving, and I really can't recall clearly how we did it.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “And this is Saul. He says, I had developed a reasonably fair practice and was making a halfway decent living, but literally overnight life in San Diego changed forever. So there's these more of these traumatic experiences that undoubtedly have an influence on our future. And in this case, San Diego is known for being like a huge base for the United States Navy. And so I didn't know this. This blew my mind. So I want to share this with you. Even though I've studied a lot about the history of World War II. And so it talks about what happened to the city of San Diego is they would do these blackouts when they were in date. They thought, okay, if we just turn off all the power, the Japanese, if they want a bombings, they don't know they can't see what they're bombing. So this is how Saul remembers this. He says, all of a sudden there was a barrage balloons all around San Diego and total blackouts every night. It's hard to even recall how inconvenient it was.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “For free. So, I'm going to talk about that, and then I want to talk about his reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He says he was doing a lot of pro bono work. He says, not charging for one's legal services, especially for a young attorney, struggling to earn a living, might not have been so obvious. However, his pro bono legal work introduced him to many people in the community, some of whom eventually became his clients.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “So, I'm gonna skip ahead. At this point, he's already practicing law. His parents, it was very important for them, their kids to either be doctors or lawyers. And this is what Sol says about that experience, though. He says, over a period of time, I really learned far more from my clients than I ever learned in law school. So most of his clients were entrepreneurs. They were founders. They're running businesses. And he became completely in love with the idea of business. And he started to develop a passion for it, a passion that he didn't have with law. But that quote from him made me think of another quote from Henry Ford, where he says, true education is gained through the discipline of life. And I think that's what a lot of us are realizing, that, you know, I've learned way more on my own than I ever did in any kind of schooling. All right, so he starts to practicing law, but he also builds up his own law practice, right? And so he gets clients for his law firm by first giving away value.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “make sure that you're paying them well and you're giving them benefits. So just like Costco is well known for doing today, souls businesses would pay their employees much higher rates than they could get the equivalent like a competitor would.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Is an experience that Soul is having. He would drive across the country at the time because his family had to move from the northeast to San Diego and he went back and forth a few times and he just had a really good insight. So he says Soul would later recall. He says this was in the middle of the Depression. And I don't know that many people in the US realize how close we came to a real revolution in this country. I saw with my own eyes farmers standing with guns pointed at the sheriff keeping them from coming on the land and foreclosing. It was an extremely scary time for our country. This also I think influenced his decision where he thought of yes business you have to make a profit but very much like Henry Ford he thought the original purpose of your business is to serve. He was very big on serving your customers. But not only that, since your employees are the ones that are actually serving the customers while you're running the business, you need to”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Before I get there, let me tell you a little bit more about his early life. His dad was a lazy and most likely faking an illness so he could receive disability benefits. So he talks about this role this plays on his life. Soul was essentially the exact opposite of that. And he's dating, which is going to eventually be his wife, this woman named Helen. And her parents were very, they tried to convince her not to marry him. And here's a reason why he says, my father didn't do anything except play cards and chess. So they weren't wild about me. They didn't think I was good enough for their daughter. He grew up during the Great Depression and actually the fact that his father was on disability.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “And this motivated him to prove himself through achievement. So this is Saul talking about it. He says, when I was three or four years old, I had an infirmity in my left eye that caused a drooping eyelid. It was something that bothered me and made me self-conscious, and it almost looked like his entire, like you see pictures of him when he was older. It looked like his entire eye was closed. He says the kids teased me a lot, and consequently I was shy, and I compensated this by being an overachiever in school. So yeah, he's an overachiever, but he's also kind of like a, I guess a misfit is the way to put it. Let me tell you what that means. He says, being an overachiever meant reading at an early age, holding his own with adults and games of cards and chess and doing well in school without really trying. Soul skipped two grades, but he was also very mischievous in school. So he gets into a bit of trouble. And this is what I mean about being a bit of a misfit.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “His lessons in philosophy that business is about more than making money and that a company also has an obligation to serve society are still valuable reminders for many of us in business today. The fact that he instilled these concepts in so many who were around him is, in my mind, his greatest legacy.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “We owe our legacy to the retail concept that Saul pioneered with Fedmart and Price Club, as do all of our competitors in the industry and big box retailers in general. Sam Walton, who started Walmart in nineteen sixty two eight years after Fedmart was founded, later admitted that he had borrowed many of Saul's innovations. Perhaps Saul's greatest business legacy was the creation of the Price Club concept that as many as a dozen existing retailers and startups attempted to clone. At one point a reporter asked Saul how it felt to be the father of an industry, to which he wryly replied I should have worn a condom. He was able to be creative and he had the courage to do what was right in the face of a lot of opposition. It's not easy to stick to your guns if you are swimming against a current of traditional thought.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “I started working at FedMart in nineteen fifty four while still in college, a path that was followed by many of Costco's current executives. Saul gave us incredible opportunities to learn the business, teaching us the skills and core principles we applied throughout our business careers, and then later when we launched Costco in nineteen eighty three. Saul's teachings had a great impact on our business ethics, our core values, and of course our merchandising philosophy. He believed in developing strong operating efficiencies, and he continually emphasized passing on savings to customers.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “After digesting the letter, I reflected on the fact that here I was in my seventies, and I'm still seeking approval from this guy. What was it about the man that engendered so much admiration and respect? Not just for me, but from thousands of us who work with Saul over the years Certainly there was his intelligence and creativity, but that's not the complete answer because as we know there are millions of bright people in the world and only a handful make a lasting impact. There was so much more on Saul's leadership qualities that touched all of us and made everyone confident that we would persevere regardless of the obstacles.”

    2020-01-20 · Founders · #107 Sol Price (Costco) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source