YouSaid · the spoken record

Terry Smith

lines on the record: 143
first: 2025-02-09
most recent: 2025-02-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And it's amazing. I mean, we've for years have maintained this. People have latterly, I think, come to believe it a bit, that if they actually speak in gobbledygook, it's not a good sign, you know? We need people to tell us in straightforward, which we try to do in what we do in investment. We try to tell people in straightforward terms what it is we do and what we don't do.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, Douglas, I think economic reality is it. If you read what we do at Fund Smith, we'll be confident you probably have been preparing for this. We talk about companies with high returns on capital and high gross margins and great cash conversion and growth and so on. But when we found those, and I mean, anyone can find those going through looking on Bloomberg or another data source to find them, you then have to pause and ask yourself a very important question. How do they do that? What's the economic reality, as you say? What product or service are they selling to people that enables them to generate good margins, that enables them to get good returns on capital, enables them to convert profits into cash, but keeps competition somewhat at bay? What do they actually do? And I mean, you do get investments in companies, particularly in the modern era where people buy all kinds of stuff without understanding it, just on the basis of them mentioning AI. Oh, right. Okay. What do they actually do?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anybody else rung up? They said, no. And I don't think it's because other people have discovered it but couldn't be bothered. They haven't read it. It's like, oh, okay then.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they don't. No, I can give you as many examples as you prepare to listen and record to of where we know that people in the industry don't read the accounts. I mean, we have the accounts for a reason, you know, and they look at management slideshows and all kinds of, how about reading the actual accounts? I mean, there's lots of examples of this. I mean, we had one on IBM. We looked at IBM in 2010 and rejected it. wisely so as it turns out as a stop but when we were doing it we found that i need to go look at numbers we found a two billion dollar error in the cash flow statement for the last year and so we sort of rang up the ir department said look um we're these guys we're doing this we're looking at that we just got to ask you something about your customers there's this number in here that we can't make this work and they said they did the usual we'll call you back and they said we've been in touch with the finest arm you're absolutely right the cash flow is out by two billion dollars we said”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yes, it did. I mean, but clearly it wouldn't have done that. I mean, you know, but I hope some people might have read it and regard it as quite. And the interesting thing is, I think it has stood the test of time in a number of regards. I think that's a more interesting reflection. 40 years, over 40 years later, over 30 years later, 30, 5 years later, it's there are examples in there which stand the test of time. The one on pension fund accounting, I think, in particular stood the test of time in there. So I think it was an okay book. I don't think we'd have sold hundreds of thousands of copies without them trying to stop it and sue me and things like that. Yeah.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You to stop the book, right? I said, I think you find the book's mine, not yours, because that's what we agreed. Okay, I'm giving you the instruction to you go and tell them. I said, what reasons shall I give them? Well, there's going to be a huge row over this, you know, and I said, so I'm going to tell a publisher, note the connection between the word publicity and publisher, the same verb, right? That he's got a book on accounting, which he thinks going to sell about 5,000 copies or something like that. But now there's going to be a huge part. I said, have you come across a book called Spycatcher that Mrs. Thatcher tried to ban? I said, it's mainly about a guy who was in MI5 complaining about his pension. I said, but it's sold out when you try to stop him. I said, we're telling you we're going to fire you and sue you. I said, okay. And so I got fired and sued. The book got published. The publisher regarded this as the funniest thing he'd seen, the best thing he'd seen for a long time. Stop the press long enough to put across the corner the book they tried to bet.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, the thing is, people have written other books on creative accounting in the past, one, the first one by any means. But if you look back to some of those, they use company A by company B. And I actually use real companies. And when we got towards publication, the publisher said, you quoted annual reports in here. I said, yes. He said, I think you need to write to all the companies and tell them that you're using that in case they wish to claim copyright. I said, it's a public document. And he said, write to the company. So I said, okay, fine. So I wrote a letter to all the companies saying I'm Terry Smith, I'm publishing a book on accounting. I'm going to quote from your 1988 annual report. I hope that's okay. Let me know if it's not. Of course, having seen who I was and a couple of the companies realized what was about to happen. And the next thing I know is I get called in by the chairman of UBS who says, we're going to stop this book, aren't we? I said, I don't think we can do that. And there was a sort of, I don't think you've understood what I just said.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do and I sort of said, Oh, okay, fine, I'll go for that. And I sort of said, Well, what do you want me? And they said, well, obviously we want to be profitable. We want you to reclaim the moral high ground with institutions who you've got this. It comes back to the visa, you've got this reputation for telling things how they are. And we'd like you to use that to rebuild our reputational institution. So I said, sure. So I published this piece of research and that was all done. And so on. Then I got a phone call from somebody at Random House, the publisher, and said, we think that we could sell a book if you could write a book. Could you write a book based on that? I said, yeah. So I went to the UBS management and said, I've had this approach. I think it might be a good idea because you're trying to do this more high ground stuff. And they said, yeah, good. I said, and I think this will be sort of another feather and our cap to doing that. What do you think? They said, yeah, if you want. So I said, do you want the book to be UBS's book or Terry Smith's book? They said, Terry Smith's book. I said, fine. Okay. So I wrote the book.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Market making book, which was exempt from disclosure. Now, this was regarded when it became apparent as a bit of a foul by two people. One was the institutions, because a few of them had bought these bonds, not very many, but they thought the whole issue was sold because they published newspaper sort of adverts saying successful issue, triumphed, da-da-da-da, you know, and they felt a bit aggrieved, so they stopped dealing with people like UBS over it. And the regulatories and sort of police authorities who went and arrested the CEO, the head of research, the head of trading and the head of sales. So the headhunter rang me up and said, because I'd been a bank analyst for a number of years, successfully seven years. I think I've been a bank analyst. I'd like to do something more. I'd like to do something looking at the whole market because a wider scope of things rather than doing banks forever, I know quite a bit about banks, like do something new. And so he rang out the blue and said, look, UBS have got a vacancy because of these arrests. They'd like to hire.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was, for what it's worth, voted the best piece of research published in London that year by the sort of Reuters. You need to back up a bit. Why was I hired by UBS? They'd been involved in a thing called the Blue Arrow Affair shortly before they hired me. Blue Arrow was a UK shell company run by a man called Tony Berry, who owns Spurs, I think, for a while at the football club. And he used that to bid for a company, a much, much, much bigger company, because this was a shell company called Manpower, Temporary Services Company based in employment service company, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And it was a huge acquisition, and they did a $750 million converter, which sounds quite a lot of money, but try and think back to 1989 in terms of the size of that deal. It was done by the Leaf Banks were Barclays and that way, so BZW and UBS and Nat West. And the issue was a complete flop because the deal was a complete lemon. And instead of admitting that they were stuck with the 750 million pounds, they put it on their...”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I probably did show rather more tack than you've given me credit for. So I, together with a guy who was a transport analyst, I worked with him on it, said, why don't we write a piece of research about why this is happening, why we've got companies which are reporting record profits and going bust six weeks later, big companies, right?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put our some recommendations generally. Anyway, you're doing on the company. And I said, well, yeah. And look, through grigid teeth, the management of Barclay said, yes, this is absolutely wonderful. It proves the independence of our investment banking subsidiary. And the boss said, I think you're going to have to leave because you've got no career here. And so I left. And that was that, you know, and I guess, you know, I've kind of, not for the first time. I reclaimed the moral high ground a notch too high for people's comfort zone. I've got to say, looking at what happened subsequently at Barclays, I was right because this was 86. And by the turn of the 80s into the 90s, they ended up cutting the dividend because of the size of their property losses. I was talking about their inability to lend without incurring higher than average bad debts, which is basically the thesis I was putting forward.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't actually a week after I joined. I mean, I joined sometime in the summer of 1986, just before Big Bang in London. And then I wrote a piece on the bank piece of research in the run-up to Christmas and left it for publication. These were the days when you left it, the publication department ran it out and mailed it to people. And I went off for a holiday. I can't remember where I went. And so I said, I'm going away over Christmas. And I left my number two in charge of everything. I've got this research. Anyway, he went out for a lunch in the days when people did go for a lunch with the FT banking correspondent and gave him a copy. And of course, on the first working day of New Year, there was absolutely no news anywhere in the financial world. So the front page article, Financial Times says BZW says sell Barclays. And of course, I mean, everybody went completely crazy about this. That wasn't allowed.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you're going to be quite an important guy in a bank, and then that's going to be that. He said, I think you should come and work in our industry where the rewards are much greater. Obviously, if you fail, then there's not the same sort of parachute that you might get in your job here. He said, but I don't think you will. And he said, you're far more like you, this is a partnership. You'll end up being your own boss. He said, and I think you get it. And I said, oh, okay. So I quit the bank and went off and became a bank analyst. Much of the shock of everybody involved increased the managerial turnover by literally 100%. People don't quit and go off. I said, well, no, I'm going to be a bank analyst. And I went and I joined a stockbroking firm and I became a bank analyst.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they would ask for the finance directory who didn't like taking their calls, so he put them through to, well, my boss, but he wasn't there. So me. So the phone would ring and it would be a bank analyst working at a stockbroking firm in London or New York who would start questioning me about the results or the forthcoming year and what was going on and where we were positioned in relation to property lending or less developed country lending or whatever. And I dealt with all these people and that was fine and learned quite a lot from them about how the market viewed us over time. And investors who would come in as well from a capital group and people like that and they come into interview and I would tell them about that. And then eventually one of them said to me, you're wasting your time. You know that, don't you? And I said, what do you mean? I'm wasting my time. He said, you're going to do very well. He said, I said, yeah, they've told me sort of I'm on the sort of fast track up towards the board, possibly, or something like that one day. And he said, I'm absolutely certain. He said, but you really, you're just going to have a career.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Loads of things. I mean, lots and lots of things that you see. I mean, one of them is cash flows and profits are completely different things. I mean, they are clearly related. Accrual profits or accrual accounting is a way of spreading cash flows across reporting periods. But you can have plenty of profits and go bust. It's the two things that you've got to be very careful with businesses that require leverage or borrowing in order to function, which banking does, right? Because the margins for error in terms of success or failure are very slim at that point. When you're on 20 to 1 leverage or something like that, it doesn't take long to go bust. Really, you can do it quite quickly by taking risk, you know, in that regard. So lots of things I've done. But in the course of doing that job, in those days, the investor relations industry, which we've now got where companies have IR offices, didn't exist. There was no such thing. Nobody had one, not even one. So what would happen is these people called brokers outlists would ring up.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was great, and I had a good boss insofar as he was a good mentor and he really liked to go sailing. And I got one of those deals which I think you do get sometime, which is I did his job when he was away, which meant he could go off for six weeks and go sailing. And so I learned an awful lot. I got an awful lot of early responsibility doing that. So, you know, I was basically the manager straight underneath the CFO managing the bank's finances, if you like.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Across different businesses and learned a lot different things like production engineering and human resources management and all kinds of stuff like that, manpower planning with different organizations and then told me this, but they were going to form a finance department. So they had a guy called John Spencer, who'd been with Pete Marwick, and they made him head of the department. They made a guy called Derek van der Weyer as the first sort of CFO really, but this guy, John Spencer, who I'm still friends with to this day, friendly with to this day, still work together with nearly 50 years. And a guy from Slater Walker, which had blown up very recently, the Jim Slater acquisition, me and a couple of other boys, and said, you're the finance department. I'm like, what do we do? We wanted to create this management accounting management information, budgeting, forecasting, planning theme from scratch. And so I got to sit there and do that for the next three or four years.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Liability is an interest rates and nothing. I always said when I discovered this, I said we would never have lent money to a company with our level of management information. Anyway, what they did was they grabbed me out of what I was doing in training for commercial banking and sent me off to do an MBA. They sent me to Henley, to the management college, and I did a very peculiar or different kind of MBA, one with different, you did three months in.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I went and worked for them. It was a training program. They put me through courses on everything you can imagine, law, accounting, et cetera, credit, through all that, which is very good. And I always say to people, people ask me for career advice. They say, get a job, take all the training courses. Number one, right? I think it was Lucy Kellaway writing the FT said that the sort of the dot-com era, the gig economy and the digital age have done great disservice to some young people who just want to start business. Go and get some experience first, right? Go and get some training first, then have a think about all that. So I did all of that. And then Barclays had nearly gone bust in the 73, 75 secondary banking crisis. And their own management accounting was lamentable. I mean, they had none, basically. They had audited accounts, which were produced three months after the year end. You could look at them and see the balance sheet and the income statement and cash flow. But actually having a budget and monitoring against budget and working out what your exposure was to assets and”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, we'll talk about mentors a bit probably, but Jose Barclays, I mean, I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do when I left when I was in the university, so I went to all these so-called milk round interviews where companies come and I was interviewed by the metal box company, by Unilever, by Marks and Spencer's, by Barclays, by Natwest. All these companies had to make a decision. I made it on the, you might consider perverse basis of the one that gave me the toughest interview. I thought, yeah, I'm going to go with them. guy called Roger Brocklehurst. I remember him well gave me the toughest interview. I like these guys.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A villainous villain. I mean, this was the east end of London. The craze ran the east end of London during this period. You know, he was a guy who was involved in operations of that sort.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're giving it to them, right? Should be mortified by the idea. And her kind of, you know, what people now call moral compass was quite an important thing, I think, as well in terms of how she treated people, I think. My uncle John, who I mentioned earlier, he was a boxer and sometime villain. He was a good guy.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bear in mind nobody in my family had ever been to university, right? So, you know, getting the grades and going to university was a process applying for university which nobody, I couldn't go home and say, what do you think I should do? It wasn't going to work terribly well. And so he kind of helped me with that. And he was a history teacher and he's the guy more than anybody else kindled my love of history. And I went and did a history degree at the university that he himself had attended. And that was a big help when I think about it. I could have done other things at other universities and people said, oh, you've got to go on Oxford Cabez, you could have done this. I'm very happy that I did what I did because I had his sort of help and support in thinking through that process in doing it. And lots of different things. Going back to the, you know, determination, my mother, my mother was the kindest person I think I've ever met, as far as I know. She never harmed anybody. She would be mortified if she harmed anybody. Sort of person who, I mean, obviously we're dealing in a different era in terms of going into shops and buying things. If she came out and the shop had given her too much change, she would be back.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In business. So, I mean, I couldn't possibly have started there. I mean, business wasn't something I encountered other than doing various menial jobs until I was in my 20s. I had a good primary school teacher, Mr. Wirehouse. My last year in primary school, he basically, I guess if you said, what did he do, if anything at all, he probably gave me help, impetus, if you like, to pass 11 plus and get to the best grammar school in the area. I remember him fondly. Fondly, although he was quite tough sometimes, you know, I mean, this was an era of corporal punishment, you know. I mean, he was quite tough. And then when I was in secondary school, Dennis Blow, my history teacher, who...”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He kind of because he stayed in London and kept in touch a little more than I did. He sort of says, the only two guys who were left alive are not in prison.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes, yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, I think that's right. And yeah, I would say it's a bit like that. It depends upon the circumstances and the situation and who I'm with and what I'm doing and lots of other things. But look, you don't get out of where I was where I am without a lot of determination, obviously. Yeah. My classmate who was my best friend in school, who I'm still in touch with him, but I'm in touch with both him and the guy I sat next to when I was five, which is interesting. And he assures me that out of the sort of the boys in our class, the only two who are at liberty and not dead are me and him.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That approach basically, and I don't think it's a somewhat more selfless approach, I think, than the one that people might think that you're talking about, portraying there. Of course, the quote ends, people think that the quote which ends there, one of them is a man who's helpless in Carbun with him. And the quote ends here, they say, you've only got half the question, the quote does end there because the girl says to him, what's the other one? And he just looks at her. The tooth of brother. I'm a big softy, really.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Movie night once a month with friends I've got a little private cinema and I've run that in, et cetera, et cetera. The quote is from the movie, the cult movie assault on Precinct 13, which not many people will have heard of now, but it's about a convict who's on the way, I think, to the death row, and he's been a bus. The bus gets diverted to a police station, which is closing down. And there's some suspect in there who's been involved in a clash with the gang. The gang come and attack the police station to get him. And of course, it ends up with the convict, a girl. a policeman fighting for their lives against all this. And at one point, the girl says to him, what I can't understand, she said, is why you didn't take off, because they sent somebody out to get help. Why didn't you take off down that drain and just leave it? Because then you could have escaped. And he says, there are two things in life a man should never run from, even if it costs him his life. One of them is a man who's helpless and can't run with him. And I like that. I like.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't really see myself that way. I think I'm a big softie actually. I really do, you know. And I think I am in many respects. I think a lot of people who know me well might tell you that as opposed to the sort of the public image that people have got. If you look on my WhatsApp, where you can put a phrase,”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On smoking Joe, he was a sort of slugger and so on. He wasn't. He wasn't that. If you look at the analysis of the first fight, the fight of the century in Madison Square Garden, where he knocked Ali down and broke his jaw, Eddie Fuchs, his trainer, had trained very specifically. He worked out that Ali couldn't throw an effective uppercut and was vulnerable at that point. And so he said, whenever you get within Rangy Frog. And eventually he caught him throwing this uppercut. And it was just a piece of Eddie Fuchs. Boxing is, you know, people think it's no fair amount of analysis goes into successful boxing as well. Eddie Fuchs trained four of the five men who beat Ali. That's probably not a coincidence. Probably not a coincidence.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I much admire people like that. I mean, people obviously are lead certainly on that era was regarded as fantastic. And he was. He probably wasn't the greatest professional heavyweight of all time. I think Joe Lewis and Rocky Marciano got better records. He probably wasn't the greatest heavyweight of all time. Capilio Stevenson, the Cuban amateur, had a fantastic record as well. But he was a huge global personality. And in so being, he needed, and that's why I tried to bring out the article, he couldn't be that on his own. He needed to fight other men. And Fullman and Fraser in particular, but also Ken Norton and some others. If he hadn't had those, he couldn't have been great like that. But those men that you thought were different to him because if they weren't different, it wouldn't have worked. They need to be different styles to engage the enemy. And one of the things that I think it brings out is that your enemies and those you engage with shape you. The way that you engage with them and so on, it shapes you. And one of the sort of common sort of thoughts that people have.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do you think What was I like at that age? I don't know, it's difficult to probably shy, intense, I would say, probably at that age. Sponge.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Went in there, and somebody who knows I'm a bit of a sofie for these things took me along to see them and trained with them and so on. And they said, well, what is it you most like about this? And I said, they just remind me of me when I was at their age, you know This is the outlet. This is something which they probably look forward to every week.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so then my uncle, who lived in the house, my uncle John, was amongst other things a boxer. And so after a bit of this, he said, I think I'm going to teach you how to fight. And so he did. And it was something I liked. I've always liked and felt a home going into boxing gyms. So, you know, in boxing gyms, whether they're in London or Mauritius or New York I've always kind of liked the atmosphere of going into them. I said here when I was setting up the gym for the kids, I went to see them in a municipal hall that they had where they had no facilities. They didn't have a boxing ring and they couldn't keep their stuff there.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“kid tell tell me about that well i went to stratford grammar school and uh i uh the school uniform uh was red as an owl in fact i went past it quite recently and the concrete owl statue is still outside and so the badge was an owl which was on your cap and your blazer and i had to walk past the secondary modern school on the way home and so i got into a fight more more nights than i didn't really on the way home and if you can imagine some kid going to the sort of the local posh school as it as it was regarded a bit coming home with an owl on his head and his blaze was was, I may as well have just drawn a target, you know?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been to Thailand a couple of times and stayed in Maitai camps for weeks and trained at Mai Thai and I do Maitai. I sponsor a Mai Thai fighter here in Mauritius. She's actually in Cambodia at the moment. She just fought for a belt in Cambodia. But I train with her most days and I've got a gym, a kickboxing gym here in Mauritius, which I bought and equipped and gave to the coach and the kids to use. And I turn up occasionally and train and spa with them. I'm a kind of a curio. I'm this old white guy who turns up.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've got that Rolls-Royce. Partly that. And my father as well. He was very interested in cars and motorcycles. And one of the earliest photographs I've got of me is me sitting on my father's motorcycle. And so I could sort of ride motorcycles and drive cars and fly planes and helicopters and things from relatively easily. He definitely had a talent for it. It wasn't just that he was driving buses and trucks. He had some talent beyond that, I think, probably.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money and just a feeling of wanting to escape as much as just money, I think. I mean, the thing that more than anything affected my thinking, which is strange, people ask me, they always ask things, and there are teachers I could talk about, my mother I could talk about as well. But one of the things was in 1968, I went to the ABC cinema in Upton Park, which is, you know, between us and the West Ham Football Ground. And I watched the Thomas Crown affair, the movie. As I always say, it's Steve McQueen. That's a pretty good start. He's wearing several rose suits. He drives a Rolls-Royce and flies a glider and plays polo. It's like, and I literally watched this thing and thought, there's another world out there, isn't there? There's just another world out there.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My father, I think, was one of these people who was trapped by his background. He was one of 12 children, which is pretty amazing, and had to leave school at 14 and go to work, so there was no other alternative but to that. But he was clearly a very intelligent man. In the time when people did crosswords in newspapers, he regularly won crossword competitions day in, day, every week, a book or something would arrive where he was winning crossword. And he did eventually before he died aspired and became a manager of a cold storage transportation facility and things like that. He was clearly a guy who had native intelligence sort of brain power who hadn't had the education to be able to capitalize upon it, I would say.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my father was, as you touched upon already, a lorry driver, truck driver, very talented driver. You don't have to be the drive buses and lorries, but he drove other things as well, worked for a company. His undoing was he worked for a company embarking in Essex, which amongst other things made brake linings, which I guess was where he got involved with them. And the problem was that they used asbestos, and that was his undoing. People say asbestosis, but that's a kind of loose term. He got mesothelioma and lung cancer and was wiped out by that in due course, as was the entire shift of the place. And my mother was worked in various very, very, very modest jobs. She was a cleaner. She worked in a factory making dartboard. She worked in a factory making brooms and so on. So they were, yeah, it was a very poor sort of background, frankly. Yeah.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My grandparents and my parents and my uncle and various other people was a very modest house which has been knocked down in some clearance program since I lived there and it had no hot running water and it had no bathroom and it had no inside toilet. I mean that's kind of where I was. And the one thing I would say more than anything else about all that is it gives you a big incentive to try and do something better.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it wasn't a very nice place. As you rightly say, I mean, it was still very damaged by the wall, the blitz in particular, with lots of bombsights and some of the housing was prefabricated housing, which was built for temporary accommodation. And it was a very poor area. If you look at the statistics of the time for what it was worth, in terms of educational facilities and achievement, it was the worst metropolitan borough in Western Europe at that time, West Ham, which is where I technically was Forest Gate, West Ham is where I was pretty poor. The story I always tell people just to illustrate it is I went to Odessa Road Primary School and in the very harsh winter of 1963, we had outside toilets and they froze over. And so we were sent home from school. And when I say sent from God, I don't mean for the day. I mean this lasted for about six weeks or something like that. And that would have been great apart from the fact we also had an outside toilet at home, which also froze over. So it wasn't a big help. And the house I lived in.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT