#231 William Rosenberg (Founder of Dunkin Donuts)

What I learned from reading Time to Make the Donuts: The Founder of Dunkin Donuts Shares an American Journey by William Rosenberg. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- [5:18] The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley [5:30] A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Founders #93) [10:28] When I opened my first Dunkin Donuts store I focused on making the first store a success. Then after I did that I could move on to the second and the third and the fourth, but I gave all my heart and my soul to making that first store a winner. [12:13] From an early age these working experiences taught me that if I put my mind to it and worked hard, I could do whatever I was doing as well or better than most other people. I learned to strive for excellence. [14:05] Odd as it may sound I think one of the best lessons I ever learned from my Dad is what he didn't do properly. He taught me what I never wanted to have happen to my family. [15:02] I decided I wanted to quit school, go to work and help support my family. I knew they desperately needed help. We didn't have enough money to live. [19:25] I learned an important lesson about sales. You don't sell to people. You get people to buy from you. You say to yourself, if I were in their position why would I want to buy this product? If I was in their position why would it be to my benefit? [19:48] The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century (Founders #206) My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising (Founders #170) Ogilvy on Advertising (Founders #82) Confessions of an Advertising Man (Founders #89) [22:58] Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story (Founders #141) [27:00] They were not interested in building a long-term business. They were only interested in a fast buck, buying their wives mink coats, and driving Cadillacs. They did not have the same ideas that I had about building a business. These guys didn't care about gaining respect, about being honest and honorable. I didn't want to be in business with people of that nature. [27:29] Adversity is a great teacher. Little did I know that this downturn of events would catapult me to a higher ground. [30:25] Copy This!: Lessons from a Hyperactive Dyslexic who Turned a Bright Idea Into One of America's Best Companies (Founders #181) [32:18] I came from within inches of quitting that day. [32:43] Not many things are as exciting and satisfying as being part of a business that is succeeding and growing rapidly. There's an atmosphere and a feeling that's tremendous. [41:48] How can you get closer to the customer? And then just keep maintaining that relationship. [42:44] I wasn't content to rest on my laurels. Good enough wasn't good enough for me. I saw that we had a good thing going and I wanted to expand in a big, big way before somebody else did. [43:02] Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business(Founders #20) [50:07] Identify your bottleneck and put all your resources into attacking that bottleneck. [51:33] Focus is saying no. —Steve Jobs [53:34] Bloomberg by Bloomberg (Founders #228) [56:39] Keep your foot on the gas and stay close to the customer. [1:00:19] Les Schwab’s autobiography (Founders #105) [1:02:27] I was eager to have Bob takeover. I think this is common in family businesses when a parent hands over the reigns to the child. But the danger is that the parent becomes blind to some of the drawbacks of such an arrangement. This didn't become apparent until later. [1:10:22] They spent a lot of time in court preparing and fighting legal battles. Instead of building the business. I stuck by my son and his team. My fortune in Dunkin donuts stock went from $30 million to $3 million. [1:13:06] I made many mistakes in my life. I believe one of the biggest mistakes was trying too hard to accommodate my son's desires. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  Back in the late 1960s, Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, said to me, "Bill, I want to write your life story. You've got a hell of a story to tell." I said, "Thanks, Mario, but I'm too busy right now." I was growing Dunkin' Donuts, which I had founded in 1950, and the business was expanding so fast, I didn't have time to stop and reflect about my life. I had too much going on. At the heart of things, I'm a man of action. I like results. But Mario's offer tempted me, because I had read some of his earlier books and thought he was a fantastic writer. But there's a right time for everything. In the year 2000, I finally sat down to write this book. At 84 years old, I've had more than enough time to reflect on what works and doesn't work in business and life,

• 0:45David Senra?

  and I want to share this knowledge with you. Everything in this book is based on what I know to be true and what I believe to be the facts. It's my opportunity to show you the struggles that are part of any successful venture, and impart the wisdom gained, the principles and philosophies that I've developed over the years, so that you may benefit as well. This is my story, as I see it, of all that led up to the founding of Dunkin' Donuts and its phenomenal growth. It's about everything that I achieved, my personal triumphs and trials, and my multiple bouts with cancer. Take advantage of my experiences and use them to your greatest benefit. Nothing is brand new. Whether it's franchising, the internet, or something else that we haven't even considered yet coming down the pike in the future, the basic tenets still apply.

• 1:30David Senra?

  My successes came from hard work, born out of determination and risk-taking, persistence, innovation, vision, and passion. How did I do it? How did a poor kid, who dropped out of school at the age of 14 to deliver telegrams in the height of the Great Depression, become a self-made multimillionaire?

• 1:50David Senra?

  In all that I accomplished, you will notice I establish a method for success that has taken me to the top. I've faced obstacles that I've had to overcome, complications that might have stopped someone less determined. But I can assure you this. If you really want to be successful, you have to be willing to put in the time and effort. Most of the luckiest people I have ever met are the hardest working and most determined. Winning takes effort. I started my first company, Industrial Lunch Service, with one truck, and I built it into a multi-state fleet of 200 trucks and the largest food service business in New England. From there, I opened a store called The Open Kettle, selling coffee and donuts. We renamed the store Dunkin' Donuts,

• 2:35David Senra?

  and the rest is history. In 1960, when franchising was in its infancy, most people looked upon it as an outcast or a misfit. But I believed it was the epitome of entrepreneurship and free enterprise. In all these ventures, I made progress by taking one step at a time. Life will test you. That's a promise. It's what you do with the challenges that determines your failure or your success. I fought lung cancer in 1971. I battled lymphoma six years later. I prepared for my death and got a reprieve. I had three hip replacements. I went through a divorce and remarried. Many times along the way to achieving my goals, I ran into roadblocks and made mistakes.

• 3:20David Senra?

  The difference is that successful people learn from their errors. We turn pitfalls into windfalls. As I see it, most people do their job, work hard their whole lives, and wonder why things couldn't have been better. That's because a large percentage of the population is full of excuses. They have a negative mental attitude. These are the naysayers. These are the people who would tell you all the reasons why something can't be done. They're the complainers of the universe. Nothing's ever right for them. Then, there's the 10% who overachieve. They're bursting with a positive mental attitude. I've always said that it doesn't take a genius to do what I've done, but it does take passion, determination, and persistence,

• 4:04David Senra?

  and above all, a positive mental attitude. All of my life, I've been a learner and a teacher. I believe in sharing success and knowledge with others. You will witness these lessons I learned, successful tricks of the trade, stories of frustration and inspiration, so that you may follow and do even better. My philosophy is this: don't reinvent the wheel. Your problem is not brand new. Someone encountered it previously. Find out who solved it best and start where they left off, not where they began. Learn from my experiences and apply my insights to whatever business or venture that you're involved in. That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is "Time to Make the Donuts."

• 4:49David Senra?

  The founder of Dunkin' Donuts shares an American journey, and it was written by William Rosenberg. Just a few quick things before I jump back into the book. There's two, so last week I read two, uh, two books and I recorded two podcasts. Uh, I released the one, the podcast I did on the autobiography of Lucille Ball. Uh, there was another book I was able to get early access to. So the author of this new book on the history of the early, the early days of PayPal, reached out to me and asked me if I'd be interested in getting an advanced copy of the book. His name is Jimmy Sony. The book is called "The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley." I had talked to Jimmy before because he wrote a book, uh, I did a podcast on his great, his fantastic biography that he wrote on, uh, Claude Shannon. I think that's Founder's number 93.

• 5:34David Senra?

  So Jimmy sent me the book. I had a hard time putting it down. It's over 400 pages on a four-year period from the founding of PayPal until the IPO. I'm going to leave a link down below in case you want to preorder the book. It comes out on February 22nd. I believe a lot of founders are going to be reading and being inspired by this book. Not only do you get to, to hear, like, what was Elon Musk like when he was in his twenties? What was Reid Hoffman like when he was young? Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Keith Roy, all these other, uh, founders and investors that have now, multiple decades into the future, have built these fabulous careers. Like, this was one of the largest concentrations of talent that has appeared in any one single company. And so I'm always fascinated by thinking about what these people were like in the

• 6:18David Senra?

  early days of their career, but I think one of the, another benefit of reading the book is the insane amount of detail they go into and how, all the different problems they had to overcome and how they solve the problems. So I highly recommend reading the book. It's definitely a book I'm going to reread in the future, and the podcast that I recorded on it will be released after the book is released. Also, I'm getting a lot of messages on how to buy a gift subscription. So I'm just going to put this right up front at the beginning of the podcast. Every time I release an episode, you'll see, if you look in the show notes, you'll see a link that says, "Buy a gift subscription." You'll see all the different plans, and then you can choose which one you want to gift. I'm also going to include this if you want to go to founderspodcast.com. I'll put that in the header as well. Okay, so this one thing I want to read to you before I get to his relationship with his dad.

• 7:02David Senra?

  I was rereading my highlights just before I sent them to talk to you, and I realized how much he has a very complicated relationship with not only his dad, but then winds up having a very complicated relationship with his son, too. So first thing, he did mention something in the introduction I thought was a good idea. The fact that entrepreneurs know that we don't know. And so he says, "Though I dropped out," and that is very different from somebody that may have a more formal education. And so the fact that he dropped out in eighth grade is something that appears over and over again in the book. "Though I dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help support my family, over the years, I learned a key lesson, as did other entrepreneurs like me. We know that we don't know. That is why we're always asking questions, seeking answers. Sometimes people who hold a lot of degrees think they know everything.

• 7:47David Senra?

  If they think they know everything, they stop growing. They're not open to new ideas." So he starts off telling us a little bit about his early life. This is where he gets into his relationship with his dad. And one of the benefits that he would consider a benefit, most people looking back on his life would not, is the fact that he grew up in the Great Depression because his dad is going to wind up losing his grocery store business. That means Bill has to start working full-time at 14 years old and never stops. So he says, "Everybody knew Pop Rosenberg. He had dark curly hair and stood nearly six feet tall. He had been athletic and good-looking as a young man, but he was big. And when I say big, I mean obese. He weighed over 400 pounds. But he was a tough sucker. He broke wild horses. One of the horses kicked him and split his finger open.

• 8:32David Senra?

  He stuck his bloodied finger into the open flame of a gas burner to get it to stop bleeding. Another time, when he was playing football, he got hit in the face and broke his nose. He just wrapped a handkerchief around his nose and finished the game. My dad taught me a lot. Like many in his generation, he left school in the sixth grade to work. But he had as much or more logic, common sense, and salesmanship as anyone that I've ever met in my life." And he gets into the fact that he learned the importance of resourcefulness from his mother. My mother taught by example. She was industrious from morning until night. She just had a knack for making something out of almost nothing. In the height of the depression, she would go down to the fish markets. The fishmongers threw away the heads, tails, and bones of the fish.

• 9:15David Senra?

  My mother would get them for nothing and make fish stew. These are the things my mother learned to do and that I learned to apply in my business. Find solutions under any circumstances. I learned from her that it's possible to create something out of nothing. And so one of these lessons that his father teaches him at a young age is something that we've heard from both Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. They say, "Listen, you can't make a good deal with a bad person." And so he's talking about the conversation he's having with his dad. And he says, "He taught me that there's nothing, nothing in the world you can do to solve the problems of a liar." When people lie constantly or in the habit of lying, you never know where the hell you're going or what you're going to do with them. So in his opinion, being a liar was the worst possible thing.

• 10:00David Senra?

  That was a great lesson he taught me, and I took it to heart. And then this is the first mention that maybe their relationship's not the best. He's going to go into more detail later. So he says, "My dad had big ideas for things, but he didn't seem to want to start at the beginning and work up to those goals. As a result, he often failed to obtain them." And he blames his dad essentially for causing the family to wallow in poverty. "If you start out setting too high a goal in the beginning, you set yourself up for failure. I applied this principle to all my ventures. When I opened my first Dunkin' Donuts store, I focused on making the first store a success. Then after I did that, I could move on to the second, and the third, and the fourth. But I gave all my heart and my soul to making that first store a winner."

• 10:45David Senra?

  So even before he drops out of school when he's 14, starts working full-time, this is a few years before that happens, he's just always on the lookout for ways to make money. And he learns that it's better to sell something to somebody instead of getting a job, because then you're not, the income that you can make is not capped. And so he teams up with some older boys. And at the time, this is around early 1900s, car racing is extremely popular. So they go to a local track in Massachusetts, and they just start selling ice cream and water and ice chips. And so now he's looking back at this experience in his life 70 years later, and he still remembers it. So he says, "There was a dirt track, and the cars racing around the track kicked up dust. It was dry and dusty, and there was no water." I'm skipping over some parts, giving you the punchline here. We charged a quarter for our ice cream.

• 11:30David Senra?

  Everybody sold out. To replenish our supply, the two men, the older men that he's working with, went, drove down and bought two 300-pound cakes of ice and then drove back to the car race again. With an ice pick, we broke off and sold chips of ice for 10 cents apiece. They gave me, at the end of the day, they gave me my share. It was $71. I got home and gave the $71 to my mother, and she cried. What did you do? Why did, where did you steal this? She could not believe that an 11-year-old kid could make that much money in one day. I said, "I made it, I made it." She couldn't believe it. $71 was a fortune for us. And then he talks about the stuff he learned from this experience, and this is something he preaches throughout the entire book. You saw he put in the introduction about the power of your mind and having a positive attitude.

• 12:14David Senra?

  "From an early age, these working experiences taught me that if I put my mind to it and worked hard, I could do whatever I was doing as well or better than most other people. I learned to strive for excellence." And then he wants, he sees somebody else succeeding in a venture, he's like, "Well, I'm pretty sure I can do better than them." He just has an insane level of confidence. So he says, "The older brother who lived next to us was doing quite well, selling magazines, so is his other family. So I said to myself, if he can make that kind of money selling magazines, why can't I? So that's how I started selling magazines. If I saw someone shining shoes and they were doing well or better than others, then I would ask, why are they doing so well? Do they have a better location, a better corner, better traffic?" The reason I'm reading this to you, and I'm going to interrupt myself here, is he applies,

• 12:56David Senra?

  again, he's a kid doing this, whether it's selling ice cream, shining shoes, magazines, doesn't matter, opening Dunkin' Donuts locations later on. This, these questions that he's asking, he does this over and over again. So he says, "If I see somebody doing better than other people, I would ask, why are they doing so well? Do they have a better location, a better corner? Do they have better traffic? So I'd say to myself, if that's the case, I have to get myself to a better corner with better traffic and shining shoes. I need to smile, I need to make friends. Without really knowing it, I got into the habit of thinking like a winner. I'd ask myself, can I do this? Sure, I can do it. If someone else can do it, I can do it too." And so one of the issues with his father is that his father had a real bad temper and would beat the crap out of him.

• 13:40David Senra?

  And so he says, "We were close, but we had our problems like everyone else. My father had a violent temper. One time, he got so angry with me that he picked me up and threw me through a screen door." And looking back, I think he would identify some of the anger issues with the fact that his father was not happy with the outcome of his life. And Bill mentions being motivated to almost be like a, for his life to be like the opposite of his father's. He says, "Odd as it may sound, I think one of the best lessons I ever learned from my dad is what he didn't do properly. For all his innate abilities and potential, he taught me what I never wanted to have happen to my family. I learned that my first obligation was to take care of and financially support my family. That was probably the thing that brought us to greatest unhappiness.

• 14:24David Senra?

  The fact that we lived in such dire poverty and my father never provided for us, although he was capable. I never, never wanted my family to go through the sufferings that our family went through because of a lack of money. Sometimes, the best lessons you learn in life are from what you discover in the weaknesses of otherwise good people." So then he gets into why he had to drop out of school. And he says, "My dad couldn't say no to all his customers he had over the years, so he kept supporting them." This is the very beginning of the Great Depression. "So he kept supporting them and supplying them with food and products, but they simply couldn't pay him. Dad got to the point where he couldn't pay his own bills, and he had to go out of business. I decided I wanted to quit school, go to work, and help support my family.

• 15:08David Senra?

  I knew they desperately needed help. We didn't have enough money to live." So he drops out of school in eighth grade. He starts delivering telegrams, and he thinks it's the best thing ever. He's like, "I cannot believe I'm making $15 a week." Some of his other friends are also delivering telegraphs at the time. And then one of them jumps to another opportunity. And so he says, "My friend quit the postal telegraph to work for an ice cream company. He rode a truck and sold ice cream. He made $30 to $40 a week. That was big money, almost twice what I was making then at Western Union."

• 15:46David Senra?

  And Bill is willing to work from early morning to late at night. The more success he has, the more excitement he has, and it just kind of feeds on itself. He talks a little bit about that here. He says, "Whatever my reasons, my lack of education, the circumstances from which I came, I had a fire in my belly, a determination to succeed, a determination to do as best as I could. That striving for excellence started at an early age and has never stopped. The more I achieved, the more I felt I was capable of achieving, the more confidence I gained, all of which helped me reach greater heights. I liked to work and I excelled at it." And this idea of, okay, I'm selling ice cream out of a truck. This becomes really important later on because it indirectly leads to his path for Dunkin'

• 16:30David Senra?

  Donuts because later on he decides, hey, I want to start my own company. And instead of selling ice cream out of a truck, he starts selling things that factory workers would need for like lunch and breakfast. So like sandwiches, pastries, coffee. And then when he realizes like how much of his business is coffee and like donuts in the morning, that idea leads him to like, well, how much money could you make if instead of a truck, right? If I just went direct to customers and I actually had a store that sold donuts and coffee. And so that's why he mentioned earlier, like, he's like, listen, I'm a lifelong learner. I know that I don't know everything, and so I'm just constantly keeping my eyes and ears open, looking for new opportunities, and then I take everything I learned and try to use that to start something new in the future. And so he's working for this ice cream company for a while.

• 17:14David Senra?

  He's now 21, I'm fast forwarding in the story, he's 21, and he gets a little state of melancholy because he has no free time. He's just, he has no, he doesn't have the opportunity for free time. And so he brings his ice cream truck down and he says, "It was one of the big holidays. It might have been Memorial or 4th of July. I parked my truck on the side of the road. People would stop, buy some ice cream and be on their way. As I stood there, I remember saying to myself, I wonder what it would be like to have a day off. Look at all those people going away to lakes and camps to enjoy the holiday. I've never had that in my life. I've always had to work. I wondered what it would be like to go out on a holiday and enjoy myself and have fun instead of having to work. In those days, I just never took any days off.

• 17:57David Senra?

  Sundays and holidays were the busiest days of my year. I was feeling sorry for myself that day. I was down in the dumps, hoping that someday I'd be able to enjoy myself like those people, not realizing that that time would come when I could."

• 18:13David Senra?

  And so the entrepreneur that he's working for that owns all these ice cream trucks has to diversify his business because in the winter, no one's really buying ice cream. So he has this idea, he's like, listen, I'm gonna start a vending machine company. And we're gonna, we're going to stock like cigarette and candy machines inside of factories. And there's a ton of factories in New England at the time. And so this is where Bill learns how to overcome fear. And then the, he has a really good perspective that he learns for sales because he considers himself a master salesperson. And so he is learning on the job here because these sales skills and then pitching ideas to factories, to companies that own the factories, is also gonna give him a jump in his first business, the business that he owns before he does Dunkin' Donuts. And he says, "In the beginning, it took a lot of nerve to go into a big factory.

• 18:57David Senra?

  The first time, I must have driven around the block six or seven times before I got enough moxie to park and go inside. I went in and asked to talk to the industrial relations man. He was the vice president. I sat down and explained to him why, in my opinion, he should install the vending machines. He didn't have any at the time. And I told him how it was an advantage to his employees and no cost to him. And how we would pay him 2% of gross sales. I sold him the account. This was the very first big factory we installed. I was very proud. I learned an important lesson about sales. You don't sell to people. You get people to buy from you. You say to yourself, if I were in their position, why would I want to buy this product that I have to sell?

• 19:40David Senra?

  If I was in their position, why would it be to my benefit?" And so the idea that you start, you always start with the benefit of the customer, this is something you and I have learned from people like Albert Lasker, Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvie, all those people built fantastically successful advertising businesses on the principle that the most, your most important job is what benefit are you going to promise the customer? People are self-absorbed, they do not care about your company, they care about what you can do for them. And so that is why, where you always start. Bill's discovering that quirk of human nature in when he's selling to factories as well. So remember that idea where he's like, hey, if I saw somebody doing something, they were shining shoes, selling ice cream, whatever, I was like, okay, I can figure out how to do it as good or better than them. So this is during World War II. He's gonna take a detour because he's got to serve the country.

• 20:25David Senra?

  But before that, there's a regulation that's passed because you have to amp up the production of all the American factories. And this is going to lead people to open businesses, like crafty entrepreneurs to open businesses to serve this need. And this is where he's like, oh, I can do this too. So he gets approached, says, soon after the government decided that companies that wanted to be big producers had to set up cafeterias in their factories to feed their workers. The government rightly felt that people working around the clock should be fed properly. I had already become great friends with the senior vice president at one of these factories. And so he comes to approach him. And he says, now because of the war effort, he approached me with an opportunity. He said, Bill, we need to set up a complete system to feed all of our employees. I would like you to take it over and run it. So this is the idea. Other companies are gonna do this, right?

• 21:07David Senra?

  This is the idea that he's gonna use to launch his first business after. He's got to serve at a shipyard, which I'll get to in a minute, though. His boss that he was working for, right, that was doing the vending machines, the ice cream trucks, this guy had his hand in all kinds of stuff that I'm omitting, but he also at the same time is like, I don't want you to leave. I'll give you a promotion. So he says, Harry had asked me to come back to Boston and take the job as a national sales manager. Now I had two big opportunities. My head was spinning. And it's always fascinating when you're reading these life stories and these stories of people's careers that span over multiple decades, how like the idea will be there usually, like they'll stumble upon the idea and it just kind of like sits in the back of their mind for a while.

• 21:52David Senra?

  And so remember Dunkin' Donuts comes after this industrial lunch service that he's gonna start, but during the war, he's serving at Hingham Shipyard. And there's a spot by the shipyard, and it's just a little doughnut shop, a retail doughnut shop. And so he says, it had doughnut, the little town had a doughnut shop that sold fresh hot doughnuts. The place was always mobbed. I couldn't believe the business it did. The smell of those freshly made doughnuts and the business that small doughnut shack generated left an unforgettable impression on me. So this is happening, I want to say like six to seven years before he founds Dunkin' Donut. And then he mentions multiple times in the book that you can't like, there's a

• 22:36David Senra?

  large contingent of humanity that is just completely negative and you have to ignore them. Really, he's talking about ignore the naysayers. If you remember last week, and I referenced the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger was mentored by Lucille Ball, and that she gave him advice when he was in his early 30s that he would repeat four decades later. And so from his autobiography, I think this is Founder's number 141, if I remember correctly. The book is called Total Recall, My Unbelievable True Life Story. Highly recommend reading the book. It's insane. It's one of the craziest books I've ever read. But Arnold said, he's like, "Lucille Ball gave me advice about Hollywood." And this applies to obviously other domains than just Hollywood. "Just remember, when they say no, you hear yes, and you act accordingly. Someone says to you, 'We can't do this movie,' you hug him,

• 23:18David Senra?

  and you say, 'Thank you for believing me.'" That sounds crazy, but this is, Bill's kind of echoing that point. He says, "In every venture that I've ever undertaken, from a project such as a welding issue that he's dealing with at this point in his career in the shipyard, to later on when I was building the organization that became Dunkin' Donuts, I ran into people who resisted what I was trying to do. You have to figure this into your equation. The most important thing to learn from this is to not let these people get in your way. Negativity is part of human nature. It is part of life. You'll find these people wherever you go, but don't let them stop you. Do whatever it takes to pass them by." And so now, at this point in the story, he's 29 years old. It's, we're getting to the

• 24:02David Senra?

  end, World War II is ending, so he, now he can go back to work. He doesn't have to work in the shipyard anymore. And a tragic, tragedy is gonna happen. And he's reminded how fragile life is, and that he's gotta hurry to build the life he wants now, because he doesn't know how much time he has. So he writes, "The desire to have my own business had been stirring in me for quite some time. Now I felt the time had come to prove myself, to prove to myself what I knew I could do and what I had long desired. I knew I could do better for myself. With the terrible loss of my brother and the end of the war, his brother was fighting in Germany and gets shot in the head and killed. Nothing could stop me. I wanted to go into business for myself. I had a fire in my belly." He repeats that phrase over and over again, "fire in the belly." "I had a fire in my belly, that

• 24:46David Senra?

  essential ingredient that all entrepreneurs must have to go out on our own."

• 24:52David Senra?

  So he's like, alright, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do like a lunch truck. He gets approached, and this is another example, there's a lot of shady people that he's dealing with. And again, another example of that, you can't make a good deal with a bad person, that Warren Buffett quote. And so he gets a call, this, these two partners, Irving Miller is one of them, and his partner with the last name of Siegel, I think, wind up buying, they had bought old, uh, like trucks, like, uh, out of service, like, ice cream trucks from, from Bill's old boss. And they were retrofitting them so they could be like lunch trucks that, they were a new thing at this time, but they're very common, if you go to any like construction site or anything else, you'll see these, these trucks that are serving, you know, food.

• 25:34David Senra?

  And they're like, hey, they give him a call, they're like, hey, we, we want, uh, you know, let's partner up, or, excuse me, we want you to work for us. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm not working for anybody. So it says, we'd like you to come work for us. Look, I'm not gonna go work for anybody. I'm going into business for myself. And so they approached him multiple times, every time he says, no, no, no, they're like, okay, what if we make you a partner? And so he's able to buy into the business, he says, for twenty-five-hundred bucks, I bought a third of the company. I had fifteen-hundred dollars in war bonds, and I borrowed the remaining thousand dollars from my mother. So he's, does not have a lot of money at this time. Uh, these fellows, and then here's the problem, what I meant about you can't make a good deal with a bad person, these fellows were disorganized. I decided it didn't make sense to go out canvassing for additional business, until we had the commentary working efficiently. And then he just realized that they're doing shady stuff.

• 26:18David Senra?

  It came to my attention, my partners were not on the level. They had been getting contracts for candy and cigarettes, things that were not available because of the war. So they had special exemption, that you could get these things, right? And then they would turn around and sell them on the black market. We had been allocated these desirable items because we were serving them to people working for the war effort. See how shady that is? So these supplies are people are building supplies for the war effort. They're saying, hey, because other people can't get them, they're, they're valuable on the black market, let's not give them to the people that are building for the war effort, let's sell them for a profit. When I discovered what was happening, I realized I was in business with the wrong people. Short-sighted, they were short-sighted, unpatriotic, and dishonest.

• 26:59David Senra?

  And they were not interested in building a long-term business. They were only interested in a fast buck, buying their wives mink coats and driving Cadillacs. They did not have the same ideas that I had about building a business. These guys didn't care about gaining respect, about being honest and honorable. I didn't want to be in business with people of that nature. And so he's gonna wind up leaving, there's this like fight they're having. Give me my money and I'll get the hell out of here. It was a bad relationship and I didn't do well financially. And then he has a great line here. "Adversity is a great teacher. Little did I know that this downturn of events would catapult me to a higher ground." And so this is his first bad experience with a partner. Remember, he'll have, remember that for later because he'll have another bad experience.

• 27:44David Senra?

  And then later on, he's like, "No, no, no, no more partners. He's gonna wind up owning 100% of Dunkin' Donuts before it goes public." So he's like, "I'm ditching my partners. I'm gonna do the same business, but I'm, instead of doing it," I think he's in Connecticut at the time. He's like, "I'm gonna go back to Boston. Without question, I like the business, but I had made up my mind. I was gonna go back to Boston and open up an industrial lunch service without these two characters. I was back to square one." And so this is a crazy thing. Remember, he's around like 30 years old at the time. He's married, he's got two kids, and I just wrote, "How bad do you actually want it?" He could've got a job, you know? He was, his skills are in demand, but he's like, "I don't want to work for anybody." So he moves his small family back in with his parents. "My wife, my two kids, who are now eight and five years old, moved temporarily into one bedroom at my mother's, at my mother and father's place.

• 28:29David Senra?

  We slept in one room until I got myself organized. These were pretty tough times, I want you to know. Many years later, I heard a rumor that Miller and Siegel, his two old, his other partners that he just left, got into an argument and that one killed the other and wound up in jail." And so he gets started with limited money. He's gotta buy all the equipment secondhand, but he's really good at sales. So he'll go out and he'll sell the factory, saying, "Hey, let me provide lunch and breakfast and everything else for your employees. It doesn't have, has no cost to use." So it says, "Over the next two years, we grew rapidly. We were, we were expanding our commissary to the next empty store until we took over the whole block. We grew like crazy. We had more routes and more trucks." Remember, he said he started out with, with one truck and then eventually builds his business to 200 trucks.

• 29:14David Senra?

  But everything didn't go as easy as it sounds. And so we get into like his workaholic nature here. "We had to get up at 2:00 AM to assemble the sandwiches and make coffee. We had to get everything ready for the men so they could be out on their roots and be the first, and be at their first stop by 6:00 AM." And then he talks about, so not only is he focused on sales, but he's always focused, what I'm about to read you, everything he does is like this. He's constantly just observing the workflow. And they're like, okay, how can we make this better, faster, better for the customers, cheaper for us? And so he says, "I noticed the lines at the factories were getting tied up because our men had to stop and look at the sandwiches and then read each label in order to charge the correct price. I thought, why couldn't we get waxed paper with a blue stripe, a red stripe, yellow and a black stripe? Red would represent a 25 cent sandwich, blue a 20 cent sandwich, excuse me, red would

• 29:59David Senra?

  represent a 25 cent sandwich, blue a 20 cent sandwich and so on and so forth. That way, my man could stand back with his money changer and bang, bang, bang, look at the colored stripes and know the prices instantly. So we established a color code system and that sped things up." And so he's doing this many, many years before he does Dunkin' Donuts. Later in the book, after Dunkin' Donuts gets to 100 stores, then it gets to 500 stores, then it gets to 1,000 stores. He spends a lot of time, very much like Paul Orfala, the founder of Kinko's, spending a lot of time just going around the country, looking at the stores. And this is what he meant. He's like, "I'm not a genius." He's like, "I just have passion for this and I'm paying attention." And it's just like, we gave the franchisees a basic system and you wouldn't believe how many of them could just screw it up just because they're not paying attention.

• 30:43David Senra?

  And so he'd go, he's like, "Taste the coffee. Something's wrong with the coffee. Let's identify what's happening here. Look at the donuts you're putting out. Those are not the freshest donuts." And it was just like, really, it's really amazing to me because you figure like this person that bought the franchise is a large investment of time and money and yet they just approach their work in such a lackadaisical manner and just like this, they're comfortable with mediocrity and this Bill is not. Bill's psychotic when it comes to quality. And I think his observation that this is just, it doesn't take a genius to just improve things. Just look at it and like, okay, how can this be better? What if I make it 1% better every time I come here over the years? If I do so, this business will drastically outperform the competitors that are just not doing this. They're fine just showing up, turning on the lights and waiting for the customers and

• 31:28David Senra?

  seeing how the day plays out. So what I just described to you earlier is about he's growing, he's adding trucks, he's adding routes. That's the euphoria. Remember the famous Marc Andreessen quote that startups and startups you only feel two emotions, euphoria and terror. This is the terror part, and this is the closest he gets to ever quitting. He says, "A year and a half into the business, I damn near went out of business. Due to a serious flu that was going around, many of the men got too sick to come to work. People were sick at the factories, too. We worked all night and pushed the carts all day. I got so upset, I walked outside and said to myself, 'Who needs this shit? I stood on the curb and threw up in the gutter. I was sick to my stomach, but it wasn't the flu. It was the pressure that got to me. And I

• 32:09David Senra?

  said, 'Who needs this goddamn shit? To hell with it. I'll just take a job and be happy like everybody else. I won't have all these headaches and problems. What am I gonna do about tomorrow?'" I came from within inches of quitting that day. Then I said, "Wait a minute. I've worked really hard. I found a way to get these things done before when everything couldn't get done. I did things when everyone told me that they couldn't be done. Now I've gotta convince myself that I can do it. I picked myself up and went back in." And he talks about, "Good thing he did this. Not many things are as exciting and satisfying as being part of a business that is succeeding and growing rapidly. There's an atmosphere

• 32:53David Senra?

  and a feeling that's tremendous."

• 32:57David Senra?

  So he's talked a lot about what happens when you get bad people, but now he's gonna give a short story about what happens when you have good people. "That first winter, we had a huge snowstorm, and the entry in and out of our garage became snowed in, so the trucks can't get out for that day. We made all the sandwiches, everything was ready to go, but the trucks couldn't get out. All the food spoiled. It was a bad day. That same winter, another big snowstorm came. This time, I got up and said to myself, 'I better get down there and shovel, so we can get the trucks out.' I went down at 3:30 in the morning and found Jimmy and a group of other employees that he had assembled shoveling out the driveway. I swear I had tears in my eyes. Jimmy came up to me and said, 'Bill, I got the gang together because I didn't want you to get stuck with all that

• 33:39David Senra?

  merchandise and have to throw it away again.'" Their loyalty was heartrending.

• 33:45David Senra?

  And then he's got another great metaphor here. It's the Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside metaphor that he learned from watching football. And he just realizes like, where are my strengths? So I need to maximize, spend all the time where I'm strong at and just hire somebody that can take care of where my like cover up and take care of my weaknesses. His strength is like motivating people, managing people and sales. And he's like, I need somebody to do like the details, the numbers, like almost like an accountant kind of type. And so he talks about this as being Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside. Mr. Outside is obviously him. Mr. Inside is gonna be his partner and they're gonna wind up having falling out. And then after this, he's gonna swear off partners. But he says, "I wanted to spend more time doing the things I was best at, promoting and developing the business. But I was unable to do that because I was devoting so much time to inside concerns of the organization.

• 34:28David Senra?

  In those days, West Point's Army Football Team was the best football team in the area. The team became champions as a result of the halfback and the fullback. The papers used to write them up as Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside. When they tried to stop Mr. Inside, Mr. Outside went ahead and scored touchdowns. I knew if we could get a top-flight inside man, someone who had strengths in systems and cost control and purchasing, we would make the business fly. There was no question how fast and how far we could go if I was free to get out and devote my time to bringing in new customers and making sure the old customers were satisfied. So I started thinking, who do I know and who can I get?" So I didn't realize as I was reading the book, but now looking back on it, how much

• 35:12David Senra?

  of it is just like interpersonal, like how to solve interpersonal relationships with other people. So he's building out this gigantic organization. So he's got employees, but he's also got customers. Like at this point in the story, he's got tons of people in the factories he's got to deal with and make happy. Later on, he's got the organization he's building for Dunkin' Donuts. He's got the franchisees he's got to make happy. He's got the customers he's got to make happy. And he just, there's a lot of crazy stories of people doing both great things and terrible things. And so this case, he tries to give, this guy's stealing money. And he tries to give him another chance. And the guy, well, we'll see where the story goes. We hired many, many people. I met all types of individuals. As a result, I learned more about

• 35:57David Senra?

  human nature. People are all different and you have to handle them differently. Just as my father taught me, I came to the conclusion that if a man was a thief, a gambler, a drunk, or a drug addict, it was pretty difficult to correct those problems. And when I'm reading that, I really think of like what Charlie Munger says. He's just like, "Stop trying to be brilliant, just avoid being really dumb." And if you're a thief, a gambler, and a drunk or a drug addict, it can be really hard. Like if you just avoid those things for your entire life, it's very hard to have a great life when you're drunk or a drug addict. One unfortunate time, one of my executives came to me and said that a manager was falsifying the reports and taking some money. They had caught him red-handed. You're gonna see he just struggles with like, to you and I, this seems like this is just like a basic thing that

• 36:39David Senra?

  you shouldn't have a problem with, but so many people do have a problem with. And we might have to hire or work with those people, or hopefully avoid them. I guess this is a lesson here. So he says this guy's, you know, "Why are you taking money from the store? Like you have a good job, what the hell are you doing?" He was a married man with two children, but he had a problem spending money he didn't have, because he was running around with another woman. "They called me and I went to see him. He was heartbroken. He said, 'You know, Mr. Rosenberg, you've been so good to me all these years. I'm very sorry for what I've done.'" And so Bill does something here, in his early days of his career, I don't think he would do later on. "You should be terminated," I said, "but every man deserves a second chance. You seem like you're sorry and you realize your problem. You don't want to destroy your family. You love your children and wife, but you started running around with this woman, buying her gifts. I'm gonna give you one more chance, but I want to make damn sure

• 37:24David Senra?

  you don't ever do this again." He promised, so we gave him another chance. A year later, I got a call telling me that he'd been found dead. He put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He left a note that said, "Mr. Rosenberg, I can't face you. I'm sorry for what I've done in the past, but I did it again." Rather than face me, he killed himself. "I felt so sorry that in trying to be a decent person and giving a man another chance, I actually cost a man his life. Whether he would have done it anyway, I don't know. I certainly felt guilty." Okay, so now we get to the beginning of what's gonna turn into Dunkin' Donuts. And he's realizing, he's like, "Man, well, let me just read this to you." "The more we grew, the more donuts and coffee comprised a big portion of our sales, over 40%.

• 38:09David Senra?

  To take advantage of that, I decided I want to have our own donut department." And so he tries to recruit this guy named Alvin, who works at this company called Puritan Donut Company, and they're donut wholesalers. And so they're having lunch. He told me about his background and his experiences at the Puritan Donut Company. He said, "Do you know something, Bill? We had 12 wholesale trucks, and then we opened a little retail store in front of the donut-making plant, and we made more money from that one store than we made from 12 wholesale trucks." He explained the reason for it. "If retailers sold donuts for a nickel, as we did, they paid the manufacturer 2.5 cents, so the retailer has a 50% food cost. But when the people at Puritan Donuts sold in their own retail store for a nickel, they had no delivery costs, no trucks, no employees, or anything of that nature, no delivery employees, that is.

• 38:54David Senra?

  So it was much more profitable for them." And so the weird thing is, Bill makes the point, he's like, "These companies are wholesalers, so they opened one retail store, why wouldn't they keep doing this?" And they just didn't do that. So it says, "It hit me on the head. Wow, here's a situation where I could get into a business and utilize Alvin." And so I said to him, "Hey, how would you like to run a retail store for me?" So Alvin agrees. He's not gonna last long. He winds up being an undercover alcoholic. We opened it up on Memorial Day weekend in 1950, and we called it The Open Kettle. So Alvin's gonna run away. He disappears in a drunken stupor, and so Bill winds up recruiting some people that he used to work for at the shipyard. And he makes a really interesting point here, and I think, again, it's like central to how to think about what he learned from his life and career.

• 39:39David Senra?

  He's like, "Listen, these things existed before donut stores existed. I did not invent them. I just made them better." And so he's constantly looking for like, "What are these people doing?" So he's gonna copy the best ideas, but then he's also like, "Okay, what are they not doing that I can actually improve on?" So it says, "Right from the start, we were very different. We were the first to put seats and beverages in a retail donut store, so customers could eat out on the premises. So all the donut stores were just like takeaway counters. The typical donut store had only four kinds of donuts. I wondered, why can't we make 28 different kinds? Or 52 different kinds? Or 108 varieties of donuts?" And the second thing is, donut stores made all their money on donuts. That's where they focused on, but they also sold coffee, but their coffee sucked. So he says, so he's like, what if we had the highest quality coffee you could get anywhere?

• 40:24David Senra?

  People talked as much about our coffee as they did about our donuts. So his first donut store is doing well. Now he's trying to expand to a different location. And he's saying, well, we're still not real known. Like, not many people know what open kettle is, but they didn't know what donut is, or what donuts are, rather. And he's like, well, how do we get traction? So he had an idea. It works too well, where he doesn't do this in the future. So he says, "On opening day, we gave away a free dozen donuts with every dozen bought. Needless to say, we opened the store with a bang. We attracted such a crowd that my wife, and kids, and our friends, who had come to wish us well, all had to help wait on the customers." So imagine that, your promotion works so well. Your wife and kids show up, your friends are showing up to support, and you're like, "Hey, put on an apron.

• 41:09David Senra?

  I need you to get to work." And so he's running Dunkin' Donuts. His other company, the industrial lunch service company, is much larger at the time. But then he starts to realize, so think about it, maybe you have 200 trucks, maybe he's got at this point, I think, like, three stores, something like that, four donut stores. Actually, this chapter's called "The First Five Donut Stores." So he has up to five stores at this point. And he's just realizing, he's comparing the two businesses, one is big and mature, and the other one's small and growing. He's like, "I like the donut business way better." And so he talks about that here. He says, "The donut business didn't require going out and selling accounts, which we had to do for industrial lunch." So he had to go into the factory. And really, the way you think about this is like, how can you get closer to the customer and then just keep maintaining that relationship?

• 41:53David Senra?

  If the factories, he doesn't have a direct relationship with his customer. They're factory employees, and the factory can change their mind, as some of them have do, and say, "Hey, you know, we're moving you out because we have somebody else, like, we gave your contract to somebody else." And so he says, "I don't have to go out and sell accounts at factories. In the donut business, it was just a matter of getting a store, opening it up, and you owned the customers. The name Dunkin' Donuts attracted people. Customers liked our products and the way that we conducted business." And so it's going so well, this is the first sign that him and his partner, really what they're going to break up over, and he's gonna wind up buying his partner out is because his Harry, his partner Harry's like, "No, we got enough stores. Five's enough. What's wrong with you?" And Bill's, as you've probably picked up so far, like, he's an extreme character.

• 42:37David Senra?

  He's like, "No, no, my foot is staying on the pedal. I want to get to thousands of stores," or whatever the case is. Harry was very happy with five stores we had. I, on the other hand, wasn't content to rest on my loyals. Good enough wasn't good enough for me. I saw that we had a good thing going, and I wanted to expand in a big, big way before somebody else did. I decided that we're gonna sell franchises. And so he has this idea to take a cross-country road trip. This is very similar, if you remember the book, The Autobiography of Danny Meyer. He, I think this is like, it's called Setting the Table. I think it was like Founder's Number 23 or somewhere back there. But he did the same thing when he was gonna open a barbecue shop. He goes on this like, and when he wanted to found Shake Shack. He'd go all across the country tasting different barbecue and the barbecue case,

• 43:21David Senra?

  and then checking out all different hamburger places. And so we're gonna see that that's not a unique idea, that Bill did this as well. And the term that Bill Gurley, the investor Bill Gurley, put on this is that it's professional research. So he says, "I told Harry that I was gonna take a trip across the country in my car and see what was going on with donut stores. If we were gonna move ahead, we needed to move fast and we needed to move now. I wanted to see what the potential was. I took a six-week road trip across the United States." And so he says, "All these donut stores were selling only four kinds of donuts, and were not only surviving, they were doing a pretty decent business. I knew I had to get a hold of this thing before somebody else stole my idea. Traveling around the country, I realized we really had something different. Through franchising, I could grow the company before somebody else came up with my idea and took over our leadership position."

• 44:06David Senra?

  And so he goes back to his partner and says, "We're gonna expand. We have this idea." This starts like a two-year fight. And so this is gonna play out on a couple of different pages. The notes I have is, "You can't have a partner like this." And then later on, "Childish, crab behavior." And so essentially, he's getting a lot of press and a lot of attention. He is an eighth grade dropout. His partner is a highly educated, you know, business school educated person. And there's just jealousy. And this is like the downside to human nature. So it says, "He and his wife kept asking why I was never satisfied. Why did I have to keep building? Why aren't you satisfied with what you have? What is your problem?" And then they start to say, he's like, "No, your idea is stupid. No one's gonna buy franchises. Who would wanna buy a franchise from us?

• 44:51David Senra?

  Why would they buy a franchise from us? He brought suppliers and friends to the office to convince his stupid, crazy partner that he should be satisfied and not expand." This is terrible. "He even got the people who sold us the donut mix to come and talk to me and tell me how crazy I was. And I said, 'I think this is where the future lies. I could not be talked out of it. I refused.'" It's gonna wind up leading to a lawsuit because Bill goes out and sells franchises, but his partner won't sign any agreement. "He didn't want a franchise and wouldn't allow me to sign a franchise agreement. He said he owned 50% of the company. He said, 'Everyone told you that you were crazy and you can't franchise.' I told him, 'I don't care what they said. I believe that we have a great thing.'" And then Harry says, "I don't believe we have a great thing." "Harry grew bitter towards me. I sat him down and tried to get to the bottom of his feelings.

• 45:35David Senra?

  He started to tell me that his wife and daughter were unhappy. It became clear that Harry's wife was jealous of the attention I was getting. She was bothered by the fact that her husband, the businessman who had college degrees, whom she thought had superior knowledge to me, was not getting the top billing. He told me that people looked upon me as their man responsible for the business, technically, he's the one that founded it, rather than the two of us together." Then his wife lets him have it. She starts getting, uh, his partner's wife starts yelling at him. "She let go of me. You are egotistical. You wanna have all the publicity. Now the whole problem no longer rested in common sense and logic. It became fueled with jealousy and envy. Success, rather than failure, was doing us damage. Success was becoming more difficult to deal with." So this fight goes on for quite a while. Bill's trying to avoid a lawsuit.

• 46:20David Senra?

  So he's like, listen, I'll buy you out. Okay. Or you could buy me out, whatever. So I made him an offer. I told him he could buy me out, or I'd buy him out for 350,000, which is the total book value of the company. In other words, 100% of the book value for 50% of the business. I told him I didn't want to get out of the business. If he bought the company, he would have the names, but I'd have the right to go back into the business. I would not sign a non-compete agreement. He could not, or excuse me, he would not have the same rights, or excuse me, he would have the same rights if I bought him out there. So what he's saying is like, listen, I'll take the deal. The same deal I'm offering you. If you don't want it, I'll take it, vice versa. Regardless of who winds up with the business, the other person can go out and start their own doughnut business and then run it the way they see fit. And so that seems like pretty fair. Harry did not want to do that.

• 47:05David Senra?

  He just kept stalling. And Harry winds up having like scumbag behavior. Says everyone knew that Harry didn't want to run the whole thing. So they're going to go into equity court to figure this out. Our former mutual lawyer had convinced Harry to turn the business over to the kid who left the eighth grade with the implication that it wouldn't be long before things would go downhill. And the uneducated kid, he's obviously talking about himself, wouldn't be able to pay the money he owed. It wouldn't be long before Harry would own and run the business. Everyone, everyone knew I wanted to buy him out. I founded the business. I wanted to stay in the business. Although we were successful, we hadn't built up a large cost balance because we kept reinvesting to build the company. I had to dig up the money to pay Harry. I went to my friend Abe and I borrowed 50,000 from him. I borrowed money from some of my suppliers. I got Harry his down payment and agreed to pay him out so much over time.

• 47:50David Senra?

  In 1955, so this is five years after he founded Dunkin'. I bought Harry out. Harry had the right to compete with me if he wanted to. That's the deal we made. I then found out that Harry and our former mutual lawyer had formed a company called Mr. Donut. Look at what they do here. We also found out that two outstanding locations that our former lawyer had been negotiating for Dunkin' Donuts had contracts drawn up for Mr. Donut. That's shady. That was a breach of fiduciary relationship. Both Harry and the lawyer had been employed by Dunkin' Donuts at the time. I told Jack about it and I told him I thought we should sue. Jack, being the kind of man he was, wasn't interested in starting lawsuits. And he gives him good advice here. Or advice at least that that Bill agrees with. He said, "Bill, for Christ's sake, forget about it. Let Harry have them.

• 48:35David Senra?

  Continue on. Build your business. Go ahead and do it because you could spend all that time fighting in court." I took Jack's advice and I let them go. For two years, the company had stagnated. Beginning anew, I sat our people down and said, "What we have to do now is start franchising as rapidly as possible." So there's all kinds of struggles that he has trying to build a franchise at this point. He's trying to look for alternate sources of money. But the problem is, a lot of those sources of money come with a partner. And he says, he's like, "I need a partner like I need a hole in my head." Like, he's done. He's, "I'm not doing a partnership anymore." And we see the closest thing he has a partner is going to wind up being his son's going to come into the business.

• 49:18David Senra?

  And that is, uh, that does not go well. So, he's, basically what I'm trying to tell you here, is that banks wouldn't finance, so he's got to find other solutions. And so he says, "As Duncan grew from five to 10, then 20 and now 30 stores, I did what I could, what I could to find sources of financing other than going to the banks. For instance, I convinced my suppliers to finance my growth. I pointed out that they would benefit with the increased volume of sales. Some helped with a small loan, but most gave us longer-term credit to pay them off." Why is that important? Because he says, "Unlike many companies, which had to wait for their money to come in, in our business, we got the cash the minute we sold our product. Some suppliers went as far to give us 120-day credit." So they have like a four-month float here.

• 50:01David Senra?

  "We found ourselves in a position where we had credit from the supplier and cash from the customer." And he really hits on an important point that like, what you think is your, like, you really have to know what your bottleneck is. And then if you can identify your bottleneck, put all your resources into attacking that bottleneck. He wants to grow fast. And he says, "Finding franchisees," he compares multiple times in the book, that at this point in American history, Franchise, franchisee or franchising is, was like really popular and hot. He continued, he said it was like the internet stocks of their day. Remember, he's writing the book in 2000, 2001. That's probably why he's making that comparison. But he realizes like, I can find tons of people that want to buy Dunkin' Donuts. That's not the problem. Says, finding franchisees or locations wasn't the problem.

• 50:45David Senra?

  Financing stores was the problem. And so as Dunkin's growing, he's looking for other opportunities because you have McDonald's is growing at the time, Kentucky Fried Chicken is growing at the time. And so he says, he's like, maybe I'll start another franchise and like a franchise organization. He realizes this is going to be a mistake. In addition to Dunkin' Donuts, I kept my eye for other ventures. At one point, I opened a hamburger and fries place and called it Gulp and Gallup. And so he's got a partner that wants to come in with a lot of money for Gulp and Gallup. Hood offered me $500,000 line of credit to get involved in Gulp and Gallup. I agreed, but after I gave it some consideration, I realized we didn't have the organization to do that and Dunkin' Donuts. I went back to Hood and explained my thoughts. Ultimately, Gulp and Gallup wasn't the way, wasn't the way to go when we closed it.

• 51:29David Senra?

  I wanted to devote my time to expanding Dunkin' Donuts. And so we see that idea that I think Steve Jobs put it the best way. Focus is saying no. He's saying no to $500,000 and another business because he can't do that and Dunkin' Donuts. So I just mentioned that he says that the franchisees or franchises in the 1950s were the dot com stocks of their day. He's really giving us a lesson on human nature when people start to get, make a lot of money really fast. He says, as with anything new, and you have to understand at the time, franchising was very much a new and innovative enterprise. The fast buck artists got involved. Some of the fly by nighters had generated negative attention. People of all types were eager to buy franchises, just as people were clamoring to buy dot com stocks in the late 1990s.

• 52:14David Senra?

  If done right, franchising was a cash cow. Those looking for a fast buck would get together and open a franchise. They would often use other, use famous people's names. So we saw this when I did the Johnny Carson book. So he gave examples like Johnny Carson's Men's Clothing, for example, or Joe Namath Hot Dog Stands. I didn't even know that was a thing. They didn't have any background in the business and they simply sold franchises. The people, uh, these people who were selling franchises didn't have an organization as we had to back them up. The other people who took the franchises, so these are the franchisees, set up corporations to go on the leases. So it was a domino effect. The individual franchisees were getting hurt. As a result, a lot of people were getting angry.

• 52:55David Senra?

  Consequently, some had complained to their local congressman and local state representatives. In response, the government started passing legislation that was determined, or excuse me, that was detrimental to the industry. Things weren't looking good. It got to the point where you couldn't place an ad in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times with the word franchising in it. That's crazy. That's how bad their reputation had gotten. You can't even run an ad in the New York Times or Wall Street for your business. In actuality, there were many good outfits out there. McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dunkin' Donuts. These were solid organizations with good people. But of course, all you heard about were the bad eggs. So a few weeks ago, when I was doing that Bloomberg autobiography, I just realized

• 53:36David Senra?

  he's always got, he's always looking for ways to get in front of more customers. And Bloomberg's running, you know, media and subscription business was a little different than, than, um, than selling food. But Bill was the same way. And so here's an example of this. He's got this idea of what he calls setting up satellites. As a rule, supermarkets measured their success by how much money they took in per square foot. So I went to a grocery store and spoke to the management and pointed out that there is an area that where people walked through after they checked out and it wasn't generating any money at all. If you would let me put a case of donuts up on the wall and a coffee set up near this area, uh, similar to what we set up at, at our Dunkin' Donut stores, people could buy coffee and donuts on the way out. It would be advantageous to us and to you because you would receive a percentage of the sales.

• 54:21David Senra?

  The management agreed.

• 54:24David Senra?

  So at this point, he's building up his business. He's focused completely on Dunkin' Donuts. It's doing really well. He's making enough money and getting rich enough that his son can go to Harvard Business School. And his son is in Harvard Business School. And he's like, Dad, I don't understand. Like, you have an eighth grade education, but you've been telling me my whole life the stuff that now I'm learning in Harvard Business School. Like, how did you do that? And so he says to his son, that's how I learned it. I learned from people like me who started successful businesses. I learned from other successful people how they achieve their goals. If I had to make a choice between a formal and an informal education, I would take the informal education. I think you learn a hell of a lot more once you get out into the world and really do it. You really don't know what the world is all about until you get out into it.

• 55:08David Senra?

  And so that was the first mention of something that's going to come up later on because his son tells him, hey, I want to be like you, Dad. I want to come into the family business. You know, he's thrilled that his son says that. And eventually, he's going to turn over the company to his son. But his son hires all these business school graduates without actual, real-life experience. And he's like, they just do one dumb thing after another. And it's just a weird... When you read the book, it's a weird thought to have where it's just like, he's got to tell us his life story. His life story is obviously... Why are people interested in his life story? Because he started Dunkin' Donuts, right? So he's got to tell us the history of his Dunkin' Donuts as he tells us the history of his life. But there's a lot of things in this book I could never imagine writing about my son.

• 55:53David Senra?

  And it's a hard decision to make. Like, if you have a business, completely understand. You put all your life energy into this. Of course, you'd want to set up the future generations of your family, and maybe they manage the business. But there's many times in the book where he's got to choose between maintaining the relationship he has with his son or what's best for the business. And over and over again, he chooses to stand on the side of his son. And they wind up doing so poorly when his son runs the business that they're bought out. Now, that was a financially successful exit, but it wouldn't have happened if the company was strong and under better management. So it's a... I don't know. That is something that was on my mind a lot. It's like a cautionary tale throughout this... It's a weave throughout this book, and it goes on for many, many chapters because it's over many, many decades.

• 56:39David Senra?

  And so then he talks about the fact that his business and his life were intertwined. The summary of this section, it says, "Keep your foot on the gas and stay close to the money." And so he says, "So much of my life depended on the success of my business. As much as I was enjoying the fruits of our success, I never sat back. I was always a stickler about the maintenance and operations of the stores. I constantly called my people if quality didn't meet our standards. It was my belief that you had to be where the cash registers were, because that's where the customers are." And so later on, this fierce dedication to the customer, which you and I have seen over and over again in these books. Like, later on, he'll have like a meeting with an executive and they're like, "Here's the organizational structure of this business that we've built. Look at it." And they're looking at it. And he'll like tear into the guy. He's like, "I'm not at the top of the company."

• 57:23David Senra?

  And he's like, "What the hell are you talking about? You're the founder, the CEO, the chairman? Like, of course you are." He's like, "The customer is." And like, he'd rip up the papers and make them redo it. He said, "The customer is the boss. They are the most important part of the company." Now, this part made me laugh, and when I read it, so I just wrote, "This made me laugh." That's the note, right? I didn't realize how, this is like a warning sign. Red lights flashing now that I look back on this. And so his son graduates from Harvard Business School, he comes into the company, and this is before he turns over the CEO role to his son. And he's just talking to his son about this, like any dad might talk to their son, right? Give him advice. "You must know how the coffee should taste and what our standards are." He said, "I don't drink coffee, Dad." "You don't drink coffee? Are you kidding? I couldn't believe my ears."

• 58:07David Senra?

  He said, "No, I drink milk." I said, "Bobby, if you're gonna be the president of this company, you better learn to like coffee. And if you don't start to drink coffee, you're gonna, uh, this is funny. If you don't start to drink coffee, you're gonna get it in the form of an enema. One way or another, you're gonna like coffee." He laughed, and then he said, "I like Hostess Donuts." I said, "How the hell can you be president of this company and tell me you like Hostess Donuts? Don't you like Dunkin' Donuts? I buy Hostess Donuts," he said, "and eat them at home." I said, "Bobby, you better throw those Hostess Donuts down the toilet and start eating Dunkin' Donuts and learn what a good donut is and what we stand for. You cannot be president of this company and not wholeheartedly believe in its products.

• 58:51David Senra?

  You just can't do it." And my thought is just like, you never even use the products of the company that your dad has been running for multiple decades. The company has generated the profits that has given you a wonderful life, a life that is 180 degrees different from the life that your father had to struggle through. What the hell was that? This is what I meant. Like, it's gonna be really hard to read this book and come away with a positive outlook on his son. And so, again, I don't, I could, my son's only two, you know, but I could never, I just could never imagine putting like this business out for the public, like this family business out for the public. It just seems odd to me. There's something that he repeats in the book or whatever, the importance of

• 59:35David Senra?

  sharing. He felt like you should pay your employees as well, as much as possible. Your goal should be to make everybody who works with you as rich as possible. This is gonna remind me a lot. This is what the note I left myself here is, this is the Les Schwab way. So I'll tell you what I mean by that. I used to say to our employees and franchisees, I only have one wish for you, and that is, I hope every single one of you becomes a millionaire. Frankly, if all you become millionaires, I'll become a multimillionaire. That's how I thought then, and I still think today. Try to bring along great, bring along great people. Give them incentives to do well. Remember that point. The more people you have doing well, the better off you'll be. I was, it was absolutely my philosophy and my policy, and I did not tolerate anyone who thought otherwise. So I just finished

• 1:00:17David Senra?

  rereading my highlights for a book that I did a long time ago, probably, now, over two years ago. It's Founder's Number 105. It's the autobiography of Les Schwab, and it's called Les Schwab: Pride and Performance, Keep It Going. And I'm a very simple person. If Charlie Munger tells me to read a book, I read the book. And so Charlie Munger said, if you want to read one book that'll demonstrate really shrewd compensation systems, remember what Bill just said, give your people incentives to do well. Let's go back to what Charlie Munger said. If you want to read a book that will demonstrate really shrewd compensation systems in a whole chain of small businesses, read the autobiography of Les Schwab, who has a bunch, who had a bunch of tire shops all over the Northwest. And he made a huge fortune in one of the world's really difficult businesses by having

• 1:01:02David Senra?

  really shrewd systems. He can tell you a lot better than we can. And so what Les would do, which gave him a huge advantage because he got better quality people, is he would share 50% of the profits of every store with the people that work in the store. And in the book, you'll love the guy. If you read his book, he's like, "I wrote the book, every word myself on a typewriter." He's just completely lovable because he's just like this old school dude. He's just like, no education, his dad was a drunk and died on the side of the road. And he's just like, you know, he wanted to run a business for years. I think it was like, not until he was like 35 till he actually had the money to do it. And he just like chastises other like greedy, what he considers greedy business people. He's like, "I don't understand." He's like, "If the store makes $10 million, I still make $5 million and everybody else makes $5 million.

• 1:01:45David Senra?

  Why the hell would you not share this with the people that were responsible, partly responsible for your success?" And if I remember correctly, I'm pretty sure, yeah, even though it was one company, each of the profit sharing happened, like, the profit sharing was tied to the store you were in, not the overall company performance. So if you really kicked ass and the store down the street didn't, you would still get money. So that's what Charlie, I think, is talking about. Because, you know, if you study Charlie, he mentions the importance of incentives over and over and over again. And so the idea was like, this guy had really shrewd systems. And those shrewd systems, in part, allowed him to make a huge fortune in a very difficult business. And so we go back to this relationship with his son. This is still in the beginning. And I wrote, "Uh-oh, what does this mean?" "It was eager to have Bob take over.

• 1:02:29David Senra?

  I think this is common in family businesses when a parent hands over the reins to the child. But the danger is that the parent, like myself, becomes blind to some of the drawbacks of such an arrangement. But this didn't become apparent until later." So then he starts talking about the mistakes that... siding with his son caused him to make for the detriment of the business. We had a good group going, but they supposedly weren't sophisticated. And he put that in quotes. So this is what his son is saying, oh, these people aren't sophisticated. Remember, the son and the business school graduates, no experience, tons of education, are telling these old school guys, generation older, who've now built this business from nothing, that you're not sophisticated. That's fucking ridiculous. And why are they not sophisticated? Because they didn't write out reports and sit at meetings to the degree that my son's group did.

• 1:03:13David Senra?

  But they knew how to go out, but he's talking of his group, but they know how to go out and make money and build a business. It was a difference in culture that arose between the old and the new regime. So the new regime, obviously, is the son, the older, the people that are like him. They may not have, in many cases, not only they don't have college degrees, they don't even have high school, they didn't finish high school, but they know how to build a damn business. I think I should have listened more closely. And so they're talking about like, all these people that they want to replace. And so he's getting information from his other employees that have been with him a long time. They're like, hey, are you sure this is the right idea? And he's like, I didn't know what was happening. And so he's essentially telling us the mistakes he made, so we can avoid them. I should have listened more closely, but I didn't. Little by little, some people left or were let go. I had put my son in charge, and I stood behind many of the decisions he made.

• 1:03:58David Senra?

  But I was torn internally. I couldn't turn my back on my principles and what I believed. This conflict of interest between my son and me became a source of many heated arguments in the years to follow.

• 1:04:11David Senra?

  I didn't realize it at the time, and this is so, it's just not worth it. Like, think about the sentence, how crazy it is. I didn't realize it at the time, but it seemed my son and I were slowly growing apart. So he is 50. I think his son is 25 at the time. And one of the problems, too, I understand what he's about to say here. This is a couple of years later. So his dad's like, you know, like, or not his dad, his son was like, I think I should be CEO, like, I, you know, I can run the company or whatever. And so he acquiesces to that, to that request, but it's not, it's CEO and title only. So he says, I didn't care about titles. So Bob became president and CEO on paper. I was chairman of the board and the treasurer. In reality, I was still the man in charge.

• 1:04:56David Senra?

  So he mentioned in the introduction of the book that he had to fight cancer multiple times, he had hip replacement surgery. He's got, I'm omitting a lot of this from the book. He's got this weird relationship with his weight where he's just like, he likes to do everything to the extreme. So he eats and he gets fat, but then he'll go to this like, it's like a, it's almost like an adult fat camp at, it's called like the rice diet, very popular in, at Duke University. And so he'd constantly go away for like six weeks to lose all the weight really fast. Then he'd go back out and then he'd gain a bunch of weight. So he says essentially like, he couldn't maintain his weight. He would gain 20 pounds and then lose 20 pounds. And that's how he did everything. So he'd be eat to excess. This seems like a really bad idea to me. That's why I'm telling you that. Eat to excess and then starve yourself and then do it back and forth. It's just like, why don't you just maintain a healthy weight dude? I don't know what you're doing here. But he's got

• 1:05:41David Senra?

  to fight all these like health issues and it takes time away from the business. And this is, one of this is the fact that he had, he had, he had to have cancer surgery. He was a smoker. So he's like, don't ever smoke. He says that in the book. So in 1971, fighting cancer and then recovering from the surgery and regaining my strength took up most of my time. I ceased to be as active in Dunkin' Donuts and frankly, that is when shit hit the fan. And this is what I mean about, you're not gonna have a good view of his son. They had already gone public, right? And the stock is gonna drop and this is gonna happen twice. The second time, I think, is when they get bought out, somebody takes it over. But I'm gonna read a bunch from these pages. I think this goes on for a few pages here. And the

• 1:06:26David Senra?

  way to think about this is Harvard Business School graduate torpedoes great business built by middle school dropout. And so one of his executives comes to him and says, listen, there's a manager who's mishandling funds, so stealing money and we need, we fired him. Next thing I know, Bob rehired this man, so Bob's his son, we hired this man to work in the real estate department. And Bob's like, oh, I do this because this guy is smart. And he says, he says to his son, I don't care how smart he is. You'll never have enough people to watch a crook. It wasn't long before my son called to tell me that we had a problem. So this guy is working in his Dunkin' Donuts. He's stealing money. He gets fired by the old school, rehired by the new school, right?

• 1:07:11David Senra?

  Because he's quote unquote, "smart." Let's see how smart this guy is. So let's hire him for the real estate. It wasn't long before my son called to tell me that we had a problem, a big problem. It had come to Bob's attention that we had 100 stores in bad locations. He wanted to go with me to check on these stores. So he goes with Bob. Sure enough, he goes with the son. Sure enough, this ex-manager, the guy that he told him, "Hey, the guy's a crook. Doesn't matter if he's smart, don't hire him." And he winds up not being smart. Sure enough, this ex-manager had taken out lousy locations and they were not doing well. Bob had put him, the new guy, in competition with Dave Siegel, who Dave Siegel is from the old school crew, who was in charge of real estate in the east and who had adhered to our strict standards. So he's like, "It's obviously you're running a retail store.

• 1:07:55David Senra?

  Location is a huge, huge factor in that. You can't have low standards." But this other man, the guy that they rehired, just took anything that was available. The damage was done. We had to close 100 stores and get rid of the leases the best we could. And it makes it even worse because that job of unloading them and trying to undo this, unravel this whole thing goes to the guy he was competing with, that Dave Siegel guy. So it says, "Then the question became how to write off these losses. In all the years I'd been in business, before then and since, we always made a profit. So they never lost money." And now we're going through, so now the company's been around for 21 years, has never lost money. The son's just a few years into his tenure and is essentially destroying the business. The question arose whether to write off the loss over a long period of time or buy it and take it in one year.

• 1:08:39David Senra?

  So they go, they have, they talked to people that know about like public equities and also their accountants and they said, the accountant said, "Take the $3 million, the $3 million loss all at one time." Our accountants agreed and so that's what we did. As a result of that, the stock fell. The stock had been trading at $66, slipped below 12 and then bottomed out at $1.75. And so the board of directors meets and they're telling Bill, they're like, "We gotta fire Bob." Bob doesn't know what the hell he's doing. The director said that they felt I needed to replace Bob. I had to make a choice that repeated itself many times over the next few decades. I came to a crossroads with my son where I either had to fire him or let him run the business. I always chose in his favor.

• 1:09:24David Senra?

  Had it been anyone else but my son, I would have fired him. I would have made the change. I wanted desperately to have him run the family business that I worked so hard to build. And I was afraid that letting him go would destroy him. And so that was 1971. Here's what Bob does in 1972. In 1972, Bob's group got into a problem with some of the franchise operators by forcing them to buy some of their equipment from the company. Bob and his executives were smart, but they lacked wisdom. We ended up in a class action lawsuit that was brought to us by the franchisees. So now they have to fight a lawsuit. They recommended a Philadelphia attorney because the trial was taking place there. We met with him. I could easily tell by the way he talked that he knew nothing about franchising.

• 1:10:08David Senra?

  When the attorney left, I told the others not to hire him. My experience had taught me that people don't win when they don't believe in the cause. But I was overruled by Bob. Sure enough, they hired this Philadelphia lawyer and sure as hell, they lost the case. They spent a lot of time in court preparing and fighting legal battles instead of building the business. I stuck by my son and his team. My fortune in Dunkin' Donuts stock, which is about everything I had, went from $30 million to $3 million. Even if I was going to be destroyed financially, I was gonna ride it out, and I did. So that's the early 70s. Then he goes into, this happens, remember, he says this plays out for multiple decades, but he had the warning signs. And that's the problem.

• 1:10:50David Senra?

  He had the warning signs, he couldn't understand loyalty to his son. But that's why you have to think twice about getting yourself in situations like this where it's like, you should back your family, but your business and the thing you worked for, like, maybe you shouldn't have them involved in it. And so we get into one of the biggest mistakes in his life. This is gonna happen in 1989, and Bob essentially destroys their business. Bob and I had our differences. Over the years, we didn't always hold the same beliefs. Some of our interpersonal dynamics were typical of many father-son relationships. I had my arguments with Bob. All fathers and sons have them. So I, again, I'm a sucker for, for, he's writing this book, he's 80 years old. Just like he said in the introduction, like we've seen this over and over again, why do entrepreneurs write autobiographies?

• 1:11:34David Senra?

  They sure as hell don't do it when they're in the middle of a career. There's something in human nature that says, hey, I'm 78 years old, I know I don't have much time left, I'm gonna write down all my lessons so you could benefit. They explicitly say that, just like build it in the beginning of this, this, this book, right? And so when I think about the time I spent, I probably spent, I don't know, 14, 15 hours reading this book, something like that, and it's like I'm having a one-sided conversation with, first of all, somebody that's dead, right? So there's only way I can talk to him now. But I'm having a one-sided conversation with an 80-year-old, super-successful founder. And he's telling me the lessons of his life, both good and bad. And all I'm thinking about it, because a huge part of this relationship, or excuse me, this book, at the beginning, it's a relationship that a man has with his father.

• 1:12:15David Senra?

  And then, well, I don't even know why I'm getting like broken up over this, and then the relationship a man has with his son. And so that, to me, is really the part that resonated and like made me sit and think and really ponder about, like, what am I learning from this one kind, this one-sided conversation with Bill Rosenberg? And I think that is the value in reading the book, is like, when you're, when you're gonna have these relationships, either with the previous generation that raised you or the generation that you're raising, like, it's important to internalize their, this is a smart, capable, driven person, making mistake after mistake. That is extremely important for us to realize. It'd be foolish to think that we're just gonna dodge this easily if we don't learn from the experience of others. I guess that's what I'm trying to tell you.

• 1:12:59David Senra?

  So it says, "Some of our interpersonal dynamics were typical of many father-son relationships. I had arguments with Bob. All fathers and sons have them, especially those who are in business together. As much as I was torn about certain decisions that Bob and his group were taking, when push came to shove, over different issues on, on which we strongly disagreed, ultimately, for the sake of the team, I went along. I've made many mistakes in my life, but I believe one of the biggest mistakes was trying too hard to accommodate my son's desires. Whatever my son wanted to pursue, I backed him, though many times I disagreed." Harsh as this may sound, if there's any lesson I comport to others from this, it is to never assume others will treat you as you treat them. I presumed that my son would do for me as I would for him. But I was wrong.

• 1:13:42David Senra?

  In reality, it simply doesn't always work out that way. Family relationships, especially when they're tied to business, are complex. But that's another story and another book. Because of my emotional bonds and my love for my son, I made business decisions that otherwise I would not have made. I gave up control to my son and ultimately allowed him to control the board. As it turned out, Bob and the board of directors outvoted me. So there's a backup, there's a backstory to what I'm reading to you that I didn't, that I failed to fill you in on. So their business is selling franchises, right? That is what their business is. Bob gets this idea, like, we should buy franchises. And so let's buy a Chili's franchise. And so he's looking at the contract and he's like, telling his son, he's like, "Son, we're on the wrong side of the transaction here.

• 1:14:27David Senra?

  Like, look at the money that's left over. That's not enough money to make this a profitable business. This is a bad deal. You can't take it. You should stick to what we're good at. Not buying franchises, selling them." And Bob's like, "Nope, you know, you have a bunch of experience. You have an A3 education and you built this company from nothing. You own 100% of it and got public. I know better. No, you don't, Bob." They decided to purchase a Chili's franchise. I felt we should have remained focused on our coffee and donuts, but our time and put our time and effort into that. It was a, why wouldn't you think that? You've built a fabulous business that has generated hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for you and your franchisees. Why the hell would you be like, "Hey, you know what? Let's get into a sideline. Let's buy a Chili's franchise." Like, what are you talking about?

• 1:15:12David Senra?

  I felt we should have remained focused on our coffee and donut concept, put our time and effort into that. It was the final blow, concluding a series of many disagreements that had occurred between us over the years. At that point, I was 73 years old. And though I had originally planned to retire, by the time I was 75, I thought, "What difference would a few years make?" It seemed to me the time had come to move on. And so now what happens? Fast forwarding a little bit, you know, you already know where this is going. Bob runs the company aground.

• 1:15:42David Senra?

  Unfortunately, the Chili's division of Dunkin' Donuts posted substantial losses over the next several years. These losses drained Dunkin' Donuts profits. And as a result, our stock began selling for far less than its true value. Somebody from Canada saw the bargain prices and decided to raise, to raid us. In 18, excuse me, in 1989, I got a phone call from Bob. "Dad," he said, "a company is raiding our stock." I told Bob I'll do anything to help out, but by then, the media had caught on to what was happening. So, they're, they're getting raided, they don't have the money to fight back, so it's either take a hostile takeover, remember this is the late 80s, we saw this before on, on previous books, or find a white knight to buy you out. And so that's what they did.

• 1:16:25David Senra?

  We went looking for a white knight during the time we were getting raided, so instead of a hostile takeover, it's a quote-unquote friendly takeover. So they find, one of the executives found a company called Allied Lions. Allied Lions bought us out. Allied bought everybody's Dunkin' Donuts stock for cash. Bob stayed on, so he loses his CEO job, but he stays on as chairman. And then in the epilogue of the book, he repeats something that he says over and over again. He started a book with it, he ends with it as well, and that's the importance of learning from the experience of others, which is what you and I are doing every week. Follow successes. Take off from where the successful people left off, not where they began. You will get the advantage of their experiences. There is all kinds of information out there that you can gather.

• 1:17:10David Senra?

  Although it may not relate exactly to what you're trying to do, put the information together and ask yourself, who else has done something similar? How did they accomplish it? Why was it done that way? If someone has a more successful family life, he's talking about family and business, find out how that person accomplished this. See if you can copy their methods. And then he ends on what ties a lot of successful entrepreneurs together, and the importance of belief. The idea that the mind is a powerful place, and what you feed it can affect you in a powerful way. And he says, "If you talked individually to people like Kemen Wilson of Holiday Inn, or Ray Kroc of McDonald's, or Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken, or Fred DeLuca of Subway, and so many other self-starters about the things I've been talking about

• 1:17:54David Senra?

  in my book, you would think that you were talking to the same person." We all have that passion, that desire. We all strove to be the best at what we're doing. Our pride is tied to it. I'm a promoter, but you can't be a good salesperson by giving lip service. You have to feel it in your heart. Ray Kroc believed in hamburgers with all of his soul, just as I believe in coffee and donuts. And that is where I'll leave it. Take it the full story, read the book. If you want to buy the book, use the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player. You'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. You can also see every single book that I've ever done. And if you buy a book using this link, you are supporting the podcast at the same time.

• 1:18:38David Senra?

  It's amazon.com/shop/founderspodcast. And finally, if you want to buy a gift subscription for a friend, that link is in the show notes as well. That is 232 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.