#181 Paul Orfalea (Kinkos)

What I learned from reading Copy This!: How I turned Dyslexia, ADHD, and 100 square feet into a company called Kinkos by Paul Orfalea. ---- 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. ---- [4:23] I've never met a more circular, out-of-the-box thinker. It's often exhausting trying to keep up with him. [5:21] I graduated from high school eighth from the bottom of my class of 1,200. Frankly, I still have no idea how those seven kids managed to do worse than I did. [8:29] I also have no mechanical ability to speak of. There isn't a machine at Kinko's I can operate. I could barely run the first copier we leased back in 1970. It didn't matter. All I knew was that was I could sell what came out of it. [10:24] Building an entirely new sort of business from a single Xerox copy machine gave me the life the world seemed determined to deny me when I was younger. [13:04] The A students work for the B students, the C students run the companies, and the D students dedicate the buildings. [23:02] I learned to turn a lot of busywork over to other people. That's an important skill. If you don't develop it, you'll be so busy, busy, busy that you can't get a free hour, not to mention a free week or month, to sit back and think creatively about where you want to be heading and how you are going to get there. [24:07] There's no better way to stay "on" your business than to think creatively and constantly about your marketing: how you are marketing, who you are marketing to, and, always, how you could be doing a better job at it. You'd be amazed what kind of business you can generate by a seemingly simple thing like handing out flyers. [26:18] The phone rang. It was one of our store managers calling to ask me how to handle a bounced check. I held the receiver away from my face and looked at it, flabbergasted. If every store manager needed my help to deal with a bounced check, then we really had problems.[39:55] I never walked in the back door used by coworkers. I walked in the front door so I could see things from the customer's perspective. [48:06] You had to remember he'd been picking up the best ideas from all around the country. (Founders is doing the same thing from the history of entrepreneurship) [54:14] I believe in getting out of as much work as I possibly can. [54:45] By now, you’d have to be as bad a reader as I am not to figure out that I have a dark side. You rarely hear people talk about their dark sides, especially business leaders, which is a shame because successful businesses aren't usually started by laid-back personalities. I don't hide the fact that I have a problem with anger. [1:03:37] I'll give you an example of a corporate view of money. We used to sell passport photos at Kinko's and we advertised the service in the local Yellow Pages. It would cost us 75 cents to make a passport photo. I calculated that price jumped by $1 to $1.75 when you added in the cost of the Yellow Pages ads. We'd sell those photos for $13 a piece. You think this is a nice business? Shortly after we sold a controlling stake in Kinko's, the new budget people came in and, to make their numbers, they got rid of the Yellow Pages ads. They saw it as an advertising expense and didn't take into account how it affected the rest of our business. I used to go to the office and think, "Are they deliberately trying to be idiots?" These straight-A types drove me nuts. Then, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, we abandoned our passport business. That is corporate dyslexia. There is a lot of corporate dyslexia going on out there. ---- 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?

  Paul says to me, "Hey, do you want to come out with me? I need some local information about rental rates." He grabbed me because I was a student and could give him some feedback about the student perspective on renting near UCSB. So I'm driving with him, and Paul is just a terrible driver. There are two sets of realtors trying to follow us. Suddenly, he sees this black cat about 300 yards ahead of us. He screeches on the brakes, pulls a U-turn, and goes the other way. He will not let a black cat cross his path. Then we're driving along, and he sees Pardell Road, the site of the original Kinko's, which he sold to his partner. Because of that, he won't drive down Pardell Road anymore.

• 0:43David Senra?

  We screech up in front of these apartment buildings. I follow Paul as he runs inside. In each one, he turns on a faucet, lets it run for a minute while he watches it, and then asks me, "How much rent do you think I can get for this place?" I'd say something, and he'd say, "Nah," and then he'd give me a number 25% above my estimate. We saw eight properties in what had to be under an hour. The realtors are running behind us. We get back in the car. He puts offers on six of them and ends up buying four. Basically, he ends up buying about $2 million of real estate in 45 minutes. As we drive back to the office, we stop at a kiosk, where at that time, you had to pay a 50 cent fee to cross the university campus.

• 1:28David Senra?

  Paul accidentally drops a dime between the seat and the door. It must have taken him at least two minutes to fish out that dime. By this time, cars are honking behind us. Paul finds the dime, jumps out of the car, puts it on the concrete, and then stomps his heel on it several times before he gets back in the car. I'm 19, and I'm silent. I'm completely silent. He knew I was mulling that over. I'm looking at him. I'm thinking, "This guy just bought $2 million in property, and he can't drive down Pardell Road or let a black cat cross the road in front of him. Now what does this thing with the dime mean?" He says to me, "You know what the lesson in there is? Never lose money."

• 2:12David Senra?

  All the way back, I tried to figure that one out. I don't know if he was pulling my leg, or if he was extremely superstitious, or just plain psychotic. Paul had some unusual ways of attracting talent, but it worked. He got my attention. So did the company's financial performance. I was the shipping manager, and my job was to send out all the profit and loss statements to each of the stores every month. I mailed them to the approximately 80 stores we had at the time, so I saw how well the company was doing. I became a partner in the organization with five stores in the Bay Area, and I eventually sat on the board of directors. I was with the company for 20 years. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is

• 2:55David Senra?

  Copy This: How I Turned Dyslexia, ADHD, and 100 Square Feet Into a Company Called Kinko's. And it was written by the founder Paul Orfalea and his co-author Anne Marsh. And this is another book that I wasn't aware of. More than half the books that I cover on the podcast are coming from listeners, so please keep the book recommendations coming. I read this book, and then the second recommendation was another book written by Paul. That was, it's like, almost like a 100-page Cliff Notes version of this book, I would describe it as. It's called $2 Billion in Nichols. It has a fantastic title. And the reason it's called that is because Kinko's would sell copies for $0.05 each, and Paul winds up selling the business for about $2 billion.

• 3:40David Senra?

  So I want to start with a description of Paul and the reason behind writing this book from the co-author. As you could guess from the excerpt, we're not dealing with a normal person. He's a crazy misfit, and there's just going to be a lot of crazy stories in the book. And just, he has an entire chap-- let me give you an example. He's an entire chapter called Deal With Your Dark Side. And it's all about the mental problems he has, all the mistakes, the stuff he admits to. There's just very few people-- On the planet that would voluntarily put this into writing, all the deficiencies that he has. And I think that's part of what makes the book so interesting is because he's clearly an extremely flawed person. He knows he's a flawed person, and yet he still was able to build a wildly successful business. So this is his co-author, she says,

• 4:24David Senra?

  "Paul is definitely not a resident of the linear world. I've never met a more circular, out-of-the-box thinker. I'm often exhausting, it's often exhausting, trying to keep up with him. But as I've discovered, it's worth the effort because he has an important story to tell. It's important not only for businesspeople and entrepreneurs who will benefit from his unorthodox and inspirational teaching, but for kids, teachers, and parents struggling with learning disabilities. That is what this book is about. It's the story of how Kinko's came to be and the record of the peculiar genius behind the company." And that's a huge part of Paul's story, his entire life. Everybody tells him, "You're an idiot, you can't read, you can't write, you're gonna be a failure." And he just refused

• 5:08David Senra?

  to believe that. This is an example, or a little description of some of the stuff he went through in his early life. "Of the eight schools my parents enrolled me in, four expelled me. My typical report card came back with two Cs, three Ds, and an F. I graduated from high school eighth, from the bottom of my class of 1,200. Frankly, I still have no idea how those seven kids managed to do worse than I did." And the very next line, we see the contrast between his record in school and his record in life. "My name is Paul Orfalea. In 1970, I started a copy shop in Santa Barbara, California, in an eight-by-12-foot storefront next to a hamburger stand. I called it Kinko's after the nickname college friends gave me because of my kinky hair. Today, there are more than

• 5:49David Senra?

  1,200 Kinko locations across the globe, and revenues from those stores top $2 billion annually. More than 100 of my earliest coworkers and partners are millionaires today because of what we built together." And so that stark contrast really does set the tone for the entire book because he's constantly talking about, other people might describe it as a disadvantage, other might people think you might fail, but you can flip those into opportunities. He talks a little bit more about that now. When tearful parents come up to me to talk about their child's learning disorder, I ask them, "Oh, you mean his learning opportunity? What is your child good at? What is he like to do?" When I meet their kids, I tell them, "You're blessed." It's easy to forget that part of the equation in the face of a dire sounding

• 6:30David Senra?

  prognosis. So he goes to task on the way teachers and principals talked to him and his family when he was younger. He thinks they're doing a lot of damage by trying to make everybody be the same. He's a misfit 100%. "I didn't know it at the time that I opened my first Kinko's, but there's a long history of innovators and achievers who owe their particular brilliance, at least in part, to their deficits." And he's putting "deficits" in quotation marks. "These people make up the ranks of some of the most successful and inventive members of our society. They have for millennia." So he goes on to name people from history that would be, that had some kind of deficiency. Da Vinci, Churchill, Einstein, Disney. He says, "A startling number of successful business people have dyslexia.

• 7:10David Senra?

  Richard Branson, telecom pioneer Craig McCaw, Cisco CEO John Chambers, brokerage founder Charles Schwab, IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad." I've done podcasts on a bunch of these people. "I'm in good--" and this is his main point here, "I'm in good company. All of these innovators survived an educational system determined to make them feel like failures. Some of my closest friends were social outcasts. Some of them did end up in jail, and I could relate to them all."

• 7:40David Senra?

  So I'm going to move through the book chronologically, but it does not go in chronological order. The co-author described him as a hurricane. I think that's a good way to think about, at least the way he comes off in his writing. This is, he's now flashing ahead and way ahead in the story, he's talking about the way he managed and the fact that he took the fact that he couldn't read and that he couldn't sit still and use that as to his advantage. So he is a big, he's a big proponent of management by walking around. He's like, "I'm not sitting in my office. I'm out in the stores. I'm on the front lines." He constantly talks about that he, he works for the people that work on the front lines. He does not like the executives. In fact, he winds up fighting and yelling at a bunch of them, which I'll go into some crazy stories about that as well. But he says, "Anybody can sit in an office thinking about what people are doing wrong. My job was to get out and find

• 8:23David Senra?

  what people were doing right and then exploit it. Then I would spread those practices throughout the Kinko's network." I also, and then again, he talks about it as deficiency. I also have no mechanical ability to speak of. There isn't a machine at Kinko's I can operate. I could barely run the first copier we leased back in 1970. It didn't matter. All I knew was that I could sell what came out of it. And so the importance of sales and marketing, he'll talk about over and over again. He really identifies as a peddler. You know, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a craft or a job that goes back for centuries. He comes from a giant Lebanese family. All of them had businesses, whether they're selling women's clothing, vegetables, cars. It doesn't matter.

• 9:07David Senra?

  They were taught the value of sales, of paying attention to your customer and then paying attention to the cash that the customer gives you. And so Paul takes a lot of the lessons that he learned from his giant, loud, crazy family. That's his description, not mine, and applies them to Kinko's. This is him on not hiding your flaws and then the impact of his mother. So it says, "My hope is that anyone who picks up this book will come away with new insights into how to better run their business and to cope with and capitalize on what other, what others consider their flaws. In case I haven't made it clear, I'm extremely human. I struggle with my temper, my dark side, as I like to call it. The dark side of the Kinko story is that the company was built, at least in part, on emotional extremes, most of them my own."

• 9:52David Senra?

  So he talks about having a problem with self-control, that he's an extremely gregarious and outgoing and caring guy that can flip at the, it's almost like bipolar, in a sense, where he has this one, like, extremely light side of his personality and then extremely dark, where he, you know, he's cursing at you, he's yelling, he's ripping things off the wall, and he doesn't recommend that. He talks about being embarrassed by it and something that's slowly over the, he ran Kinko's for three decades before he sold it. And he's like, you know, "The way I was in the, let's say, the 1980s is not the way I was in the 90s," although he, before he winds up having to seek professional help and get on medication, that's the only thing that solved his problem, he said. "Building an entirely new sort of business from a single Xerox copy machine, it gave

• 10:32David Senra?

  me, it gave me the life the world seemed determined to deny me when I was younger." And before I go into, I want to pause here just before I go into, he also had extremely positive role model in his mother. What he just said there, the fact that I could build an entire business for myself from a single Xerox copy machine, I could work at it every day for three decades and then sell it, make myself extremely rich, all the people that work for me extremely rich. That is why entrepreneurship is one of the greatest human inventions ever, because it's open to everybody. That doesn't mean everybody can, like, I don't think everybody should be an entrepreneur, but anybody can. It's not like there's not, nobody can stop you but yourself. And so, think about the alternate life, as we go

• 11:15David Senra?

  through this podcast, think about the alternate life path of Paul. He was not going to get a job. I mean, the guy got fired, I'll go into detail, he got fired from every job he had, flunked out of school, but the fact was that he had value and service that he could provide to others. And as long as you have value and service you can provide to others, people were willing to pay for that value. And then you can keep doing that and keep improving and make it bigger, as big as you want it to be, or as small as you want it to be. And he actually created his entire life that was denied to him by everybody, every other authority figure besides his family, telling him, you know, you're just a loser, kid. You're stupid. Get out of here. I had my mother to think for encouraging the development of my own view of the world. So he talks about one day, he was expelled

• 11:57David Senra?

  when he was 13, and the principal just, you know, tells his mom that, you know, maybe he can, he can find some other kind of work, maybe he can learn how to lay carpet or do something else that doesn't require reading. And his mom is just crying, and she's just like, I know Paul can do more. And this is what he says, "My mom dreamed her own dreams." You could say that exactly for him. He dreamed his own dreams. "She never relied on the bleak assessment of others. Whenever I felt down," I'm not even, this is still the introduction. How many times is he compared and contrasted the way he felt, the way his family felt, to the way the outside world felt? That is so important, because that's the only thing that matters. Andrew Carnegie, his autobiography, talks about the way you view yourself, I

• 12:40David Senra?

  think he calls it something like the supreme judge within, but what he was, the point he's trying to make is that there's no fooling yourself. You know what you're qualified to do. You know if you're putting in the work that you need to do. And so, all you need to worry about is making sure that you're not relying on the judgment of other, of you by others, but of how you judge yourself. And I think Paul's echoing that here. Let me go back to this sentence. Whenever I fell down, whenever I started wondering what homeless shelter I would die in, she would buck me up and buck me up by telling me, "You know, Paul, the A students work for the B students, the C students run the companies, and the D students dedicate the buildings." And that's remarkable if that actually is something she said to him, because he winds up graduating with a D average, and then he does wind up having a building dedicated.

• 13:24David Senra?

  I think he donates like $10 million to and has a building named after him at the University of Santa Barbara. This is, he picks up on, he's got, again, a lot of just really practical knowledge about the world that I think is the value in this book. And he talks about, there's a difference between being good at school and being good at life, and it's a lot easier to be good at life than it is to be good at school. And he says, "The education system teaches kids, they have to be good at everything. But out of the classroom, I've found this just isn't so. Adults have a much easier time. They get to specialize. They get to pick one thing. It's a whole lot easier." So his point is like, if you're good at one thing, in his case, he was good at building a copy and printing business. He didn't have to be good at algebra, physics, history, anything else.

• 14:08David Senra?

  But he provided a service, and he also has a great philosophy, and I'm going to run over my future point, that I love, that the culture behind Kinko's, he says, "Listen, we had fun." They call themselves capitalist hippies, but he's like, "We had fun with everything else. The only thing we took serious is the service we provided to our clients. And then everything else of that, we laughed and joked and had a great time." But I love the idea behind what he's saying here. Pick one thing, pick one thing and be better than anybody else is at it. And he had a lot of competition, you know? Anybody, at this point, you could lease, I think it was like $1,000 a month, something like that, to lease a copy machine, which is, you know, brand new technology at the time. And so he had a bunch of competitors that he had to battle through, most of which went out of business.

• 14:52David Senra?

  This is more about his early life and jobs. "In my family, we were all peddlers. I found your average street peddler has more business sense than the guy walking past in a suit. They deal with customers in real time and get instant feedback from the market." So that's something he talks about over and over again, that it's very easy to sit in an office, away from the front lines, away from the customers, and come up with all these theories. But he's like, "You're just, you're just using your imagination. If you just go and talk to customers and try to sell them something, they're going to give you the most valuable information in the world." "I was working at my father's clothing factory. My job had been buttoning up the dresses after they were steamed, but I really wanted to start assembling orders for customers." So his aunt was overseeing this part. A lot of his family works together. And so he goes to try to switch his job.

• 15:35David Senra?

  And it says, "She spotted me trying to pick orders and shouted at the man helping me. Don't let him do that. He can't even read. I walked out of the factory that day and sat in my car in the parking lot. I cried for hours. I remember thinking that it was no use trying to please anyone else. It simply wasn't possible, not with my skill set. So I might as well try to please myself." And that is something that I love about reading all these biographies. Because, you know, these people build giant companies. A lot of people we cover are super famous. They're historical figures. And yet, when you read their own words, they all go through periods of this. This is what, when you listen to interviews with people that are still alive today, still operating companies, like, they're incentivized to lie. You know, "Oh, we're crushing. Everything's good.

• 16:20David Senra?

  Everybody says the same thing." But when you pick up the books, you realize that's not the lived experience of anybody. Everybody's going to go through this time. He's constantly fighting, in this book, to deal with his emotions, to deal with a setback, and just realizing, okay, that's fine. I'm going to cry. I'm going to sit in my car. I'm going to cry for a little bit. But then I'm going to try again tomorrow. And I'm going to make some progress. And then I'm going to run into a setback. I'm going to be down on myself. Maybe I'll go have a drink. Maybe I'll just take the day off and wander around. But I'm not going to stop. And reading stories like that just fires me up. All right. "It took me a lot longer before I actually succeeded in doing so. My dad eventually kicked me out of the company, so he gets another job. I was serving ice cream. A couple of days into that job, I was fired. Then I tried to work at a local gas station." I'm just giving you the highlights here.

• 17:05David Senra?

  He's fired from that job as well. Delivering newspapers, painting, none of this is going to work out. So it says, "It didn't take long for me to conclude that I was basically unemployable. The only hope for me was to go into business for myself." Okay, so I want to fast forward. He's in college. They're working on a group paper. He's at University of Southern California. And his job is to go make copies and to turn the paper in. You know, again, he's not going to be reading. He's dyslexic. So this is where he actually gets the idea for Kinko's. It starts as a very, very small idea. And I'm going to tell you how this made me think of The No Life Myself. It's one of my favorite quotes from... What is, if you're only going to read one book, and I hope you read, obviously, dozens of the books that we cover here, but it would be James Dyson's autobiography.

• 17:50David Senra?

  It's hard to find, hard to get, constantly out of stock, but it's something you can read in a weekend, and it's all about the value of stubbornness and perseverance, and it's just a really fun, interesting book to read. But he said in that book, he's like, "Listen, people like put barriers in front of themselves." And one of them is like, "I don't know how to do what I want to do." And his point was like, "You can always learn, you have time to learn the technology later." His first vacuum cleaner, he built out of, the improvement to the Hoover vacuum cleaner that he wanted to, that he thought was just a piece of junk and led him down this path that he, that, like, his career path that he's on. It was built out of cereal packets and masking tape, long before I understood how it worked." And this, we're going to see the same example here.

• 18:34David Senra?

  He goes to make copies, and he says, "I went to the university's copy center." This is in LA, okay? "I saw something far more interesting. The copy center itself, this was the spring of 1970, and people were scaring around making voluminous copies of legal paperwork for the trial of Charles Manson. I came running back to class, nearly out of breath. I had to talk to Danny." So this is one of his best friends at the time. And he says, "As Danny remembers it," this is Danny now, the quote from him, "Paul was shaking all over. He told me, 'Danny, I've got this great idea. I realized I could start a copy shop myself, and I always knew, and I knew a place that needed one. My girlfriend at the time was a student, two hours north of Los Angeles, up on the coast, at the University of California at Santa Barbara. There weren't any copy centers there for students or faculty.

• 19:18David Senra?

  I didn't write out a business plan or study the market, but my gut told me I could make money selling what came out of those machines. It didn't matter that I had no idea how they worked.'" And he moves on this right away. So he sees that by the fall of 1970, he's set up. And he says, "I rented a small storefront near the university that was only 100 square feet. The rent was $100 a month. The place was so small, by the time we needed a second cop, a second machine, we had to lug it out on the sidewalk. Yes, customers made their copies outdoors. I was 22 years old." So the very first day, their first order, I think, is like $50. So think about his entire rent's $100. And you have a professor that comes in, that's all, he's anxious, he's upset.

• 20:02David Senra?

  And Paul really hits on something that's smart here. He understands that what he's actually selling. It's not that I'm selling copies. I'm selling a way to relieve your anxiety. People in general, especially at this point in time, are stressed out about technology. This is not a very different insight. If you think about the way Steve Jobs talked about how people approached personal computer before the very first Apple computer. Or how the book on Johnny Ive that we just did, where he talks about, you know, I love designing, computers are becoming a huge part of this, but I'm frustrated, I don't think I know how to deal with them. And then he sees an apple way before he works there, and he's like, wow, okay, this is simple. This is now, like, he was able to calm down and his anxiety was relieved. And so this is what Paul realizes about this professor.

• 20:46David Senra?

  He says, "Like each and every one of the subsequent millions of customers we would serve over the next three decades, he was stressed out and in a hurry. It was a state of mind all of us at Kinko's would come to be immediately, or, excuse me, intimately familiar with. Later on, we would learn that we weren't so much selling copies as we were assuaging anxiety." And right from the very beginning, we see he's got a very, again, when you read these autobiographies of founders, you're essentially downloading their philosophy on how to run a business, right? There's no formula. The idea is take a bunch of ideas from other people, combine it, make your own unique philosophy, because there is no single right way to do it. And so he's gonna, he's got this idea that's really, really unique. And one you should know about Paul, he tries to get out of as much work as possible.

• 21:31David Senra?

  He's not working nights, he's not working weekends. He's always thinking about the business, but he makes sure his physical body is still there for his family. He doesn't have a family at this time, he's still a college kid, so this is many decades in the future. But one of his ideas is that you have to ask yourself if you're in or on your business. And so being in your business is like, you're so mired in the details, you're not running your business, your business is running you. And therefore, you're not thinking clearly, you're not doing, and his whole thing is like, you need to think harder. Before you, you can work hard, but you have, a lot of people work hard and never think hard. It's more important to think hard and then work hard. But if you're on your business, you're not mired down in details. You can see where the business is going. You can make better decisions.

• 22:10David Senra?

  And he talks about the time invested in thinking yields more leverage for you than just doing an extra print job, right? And so we're going to go into the difference. He's going to bring this up in many different ways. And so another good thing about this book, he, just like, I love, I'm a sucker for aphorisms and maxims. He thinks in maxims and aphorisms, very much like Charlie Munger. In fact, in the back book, the last, like, I don't know, 10 pages are just aphorisms on how he thinks. One sentences, like one-sentence maxims on how he thinks about businesses. So one of them is, you know, make sure you're on your business, not in your business. So he says, "As soon as I could, I had to turn tedious tasks over to others and pay them well for doing them. I could not let myself get swept up by all the monotonous busy work that comes along with starting a company.

• 22:53David Senra?

  I was already vowing to stay on my business and not in it." And he talks about his dad. He learned some of this from watching his dad do things the wrong way. He was just always mired, couldn't make any progress. But this is the reason, I'm going to skip over that part, and this is the reason. "I learned to turn a lot of busy work over to other people. That's an important skill. If you don't develop it, you'll be so busy that you can't get a free hour, a free week, a free month to sit back and think creatively about where you want to be heading and how you're going to get there. When your mind can break free of all that worry and clutter, you'll find yourself coming up with the most improbable and inspired ideas." And one thing he really likes, he really likes sales and marketing, and he really likes getting other people to do the work. "I didn't spend much time in the store. Now, you may not believe that, but it's true.

• 23:37David Senra?

  When I started the original Kinko's, I was still a student two hours south in Los Angeles. I stayed in Santa Barbara for a full week when we opened the store, but after that, I only worked there two days a week. I hired people to run Kinko's for me, and I left it in their care. As a result, there was simply no way to become too bogged down by lots of busy work. One day, or excuse me, on days I was there, I rarely made copies or worked behind the counter. What I really enjoyed was getting out and meeting people. In a word, marketing. I went around campus handing out flyers. There's no better way to stay on your business than to think creatively and constantly about your marketing. How you're marketing, who you're marketing to, and always how you could be doing a better job at it.

• 24:18David Senra?

  You'd be amazed what kind of business you can generate by seemingly simple things." So he talks about this over and over again. I forgot. I think it might have been Warren Buffett. Like, "Don't dismiss a simple..." I don't remember the exact quote, but I want to paraphrase the meaning. It's like, "Don't dismiss a simple action as not being effective." He said it a lot better than I just did, because I don't have it in front of me. But he talks about, you know, "We started building the business just going door to door, essentially handing out flyers on college campuses." Kinko's now, well, I guess it doesn't even exist. It's like FedEx Office. But for the first maybe 10 years of its life, it is going to be anchored around college campuses. They eventually make the transition to serving more of the corporate world.

• 25:00David Senra?

  And one of the reasons they did this is because it gets away with the cyclical nature of revenue if you're only, like, during the summer, they're making no money because school's out. But he says, "You'll be amazed at what kind of business you can generate by seemingly simple thing, like handing out flyers." "I also sold pens and pencils out of a backpack." No, this is funny. So he stores a backpack, and then he goes and sells... Oh, I should back up. So he's selling, he knows he's going to sell copies. They start printing. They start selling pens. He essentially used his first store as a giant experiment. He's like, "I had four or five business lines in there. I wasn't sure which one was going to work. Whichever one generated the most revenue, we doubled down on." So most of that is obviously going to be copying, printing. "So I also sold pens and pencils out of a backpack out in front of the store on the sidewalk by just talking to people passing by.

• 25:45David Senra?

  When this form of guerrilla market produced results, I expanded our use of it." So he talks about, then he goes and hires a bunch of students, and they're now selling pens and paper and advertising Kinko's door to door. They just go knock on people's dorm rooms. "We also targeted the faculty. By going into their departments and pretending we were supposed to be there, we stuffed flyers into the mailboxes of most of the professors on campus. University professors later drove some of our highest-revenue businesses." And now he's going to flash forward. Remember, he just told us his first story. He's telling us about this. Then he goes ahead in the story like he does. It's this hurricane ball. And this was hilarious to me. I don't know why, but you can summarize it by saying, "Be inaccessible." "Some years later, when we had a few stores up and running, I made my mind to be truly inaccessible. I happened to be sitting in my office that day when the phone rang. It

• 26:30David Senra?

  was one of our store managers calling to ask me how to handle a bounced check." I held the receiver away from my face and looked at it, flabbergasted. And that's just, it was funny because I could picture in my mind him doing it. But his insight here is he's 100% correct. If every store manager needed my help to deal with a bounced check, then we really had problems. I made up my mind then and there, I wouldn't be picking up my own phone every five minutes. Staying relatively inaccessible was the only way to stay on my business. And so we're still in the chapter about staying on your business. So everything relates to what I'm telling you here. Everything relates to this idea of don't get mired down. You're the one running the company. Make sure that you're actually running it and it's not running you,

• 27:13David Senra?

  that you're thinking long-term, that you're coming up with the very best ideas you do, like you can. I would summarize this next section that you can work in sprints like Larry Ellison, study competitors like Sam Walton and invent and wander like Jeff Bezos. And those are all insights from past podcasts I did on those three guys. Multiple, I think I've done what, like four or five podcasts on Jeff Bezos now, two on Sam Walton and three on Larry Ellison. If you haven't gone back and listened to those. I worked in cycles, spending roughly three weeks on the road, followed by three weeks back at the main office. I visited different stores. I also visited as many competitors as I could, since the fact that they existed meant they were doing something right. That sounds just like Sam Walton. I wanted to find out what those things were. They got me away from the main office so I could leave people alone to do their work.

• 27:57David Senra?

  Because the best way to show people you trust them is to leave them alone. Equally important, I found that leaving headquarters got me away from the mundane, daily grind that left no space for insight, inspiration or innovation. Instead of chief executive, I preferred the title of chief wanderer. And I guess now's a good time to talk about this bizarre, this bizarre organizational structure of Kinko's. They're all individual partnerships. So you know, you think you start a company, you either, the company either owns, as you open new locations, either you own it or maybe you have a franchise model. He didn't do either of that. Some of them he owned 100% of, but he had, by the time he sold it, he had 127 different partners. All of them were individual partners, partnerships.

• 28:42David Senra?

  So in some cases, he might earn 30%. So maybe there's one store and he owns it with one guy, right? And he owns maybe 40% and the other guy owns 60%. Then sometimes he, there's a series of partners. They all own maybe 15% of the store, but they own 15% of 10 stores. And it was so cumbersome that they had to hire. Once they get bought out, before they get bought out, they had to hire a series of attorneys and some venture capitalists helping with this, but they had to go through and roll everybody up into one corporation so you can actually sell the corporation. But the reason I bring that up is because what he's saying here is like, I'm a chief wanderer. He's not, it's almost like he's, it's very analogous to what nature does, right? There's no top-down hierarchical systems in nature.

• 29:27David Senra?

  There's a bunch of, there's millions of different experiments and all those experiments result in different slightly, like slighter variations of different outcomes, right? And so what Paul did, it was actually really, really brilliant. He's like, okay, I'm gonna do a light hand from central HQ and tell you, you know, this is basically what we do here, but you come up with the best way to do it. Then he's traveling around observing all these good ideas and then he'll pick up a good idea, say in Toledo, and then he'll go back to California and give it to the California stores, or he'll go down to Florida and do it there. But he's allowing this like hotbed of experimentation. They talk about, you know, one time in the book, I don't think I'm gonna cover this later, but one time in the book, he's traveling with some other partners of his and they come

• 30:09David Senra?

  up with a great way, they sum up a story that has like this is the greatest way they've seen so far to organize the workflow of Kinko's. And his partner asked him like, why don't you mandate, instead of telling people this idea, like why don't you mandate every store looks like this? And Paul said something that was brilliant. He said, because if I do that, this will be the best it ever is. And what that comment tells us is there's always room for improvement. Again, there's just a lot of practical, like simple knowledge is the way I would describe this book. It was very, very fascinating, the way he thinks. And again, it just comes from, there's no theory. It comes from three decades of trial and error. And I think that's the most valuable knowledge you can tap into. So now we're getting to a lot of the, he talks about like his brain. Like your brain being your own adversary. Like you just can't figure something out.

• 30:54David Senra?

  So maybe you think it's impossible. And really, I would, I would, um, this reminds me of Charlie Munger's idea. Invert, always invert. And so he realizes, I don't want, I don't want, he, he, he's not thinking about what he wants. He wants, he's thinking about what he wants to avoid. And he's like, I don't want only one store. One particularly effective way of staying on your life is to envision the kind of future you do not want. In my mind's eye, I saw this scene unfold. The parents of incoming freshmen take a tour of their old alma mater. Look, Paulie, one dad says, there's Kinko's. He runs Kinko's, or he runs Kinko's copies. There I sit, my curly hair shot through with gray. I waved back at them. That's not where I wanted to be in my old age. But try as I could, I couldn't figure out how to open another store. So he can't figure it out.

• 31:38David Senra?

  He's got, what's the equivalent of, I guess, writer's block, but for your mind, right? So he's like, all right, I'm out of here. Dad used to tell me, um, so he talks about, again, contrasting like what his dad did with, okay, I gotta avoid that mistake. They go, him and his, uh, his, his dad, before he's born, uh, his dad and his mom go on this long vacation. He says, uh, he used to tell me that was one of the few times he got a proper perspective on his life. He finally had time to think. Uh, he never gave himself another trip like that. So he's like, okay, I gotta avoid that. So he thinks traveling is a way to find perspective. So his business is up and running. Two years later, they don't have any, I don't, I think there's only one store at this point. So he, he takes off to go backpack in Europe. He says, I left Kinko's in the care of my coworkers for a few months while I took off on my own.

• 32:23David Senra?

  I guess I should pause there. He does not use the word employee. He does not believe in the word employee. Everybody's a coworker. If they have, he does profit sharing. He does a lot of like, a lot of interesting things. So his partners are called partners. Everybody else is called a coworker. All of them have, uh, ownership in the profits of the business. Uh, so he says, and it, um, backpacking around Europe was highly motivating. I became ambitious again. So he talks about, you know, he's extremely poor. He's like, I watched vacationers strolling in and out of five star hotels in Paris and Milan. And he just, he says, I could not imagine how, what, how is it possible that they could afford those rooms? And I think that is a very common experience for entrepreneurs. I remember, uh, listening to Mark Cuban talking in an interview one time. They used to drive around, he was really poor. I think he was running like a bar in college and he would drive through and just look at

• 33:08David Senra?

  these like 20,000 square foot houses. He's like, what do these people do? Um, so we're seeing a very similar experience that, that, that Paul's having. It's like, I'm, you know, I can barely keep this tiny little 100 square foot. Company opened, like, I can't imagine ever staying in a five-star hotel in Paris. And, you know, a few years later, this guy's gonna be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It was highly motivating. I became ambitious again. That's what a little perspective can do for you. I started to envision how I might open a second store. I can't even tell you exactly what changed my mind. My thinking just unstuck itself. And so he's giving now, direct advice to the reader. Do what you need to do to get some time off. Let your soul catch up with your body. It could change your life.

• 33:53David Senra?

  So I'll tell you his idea of, really paying attention to incentives is what I would call this. But first, this is the best definition of management he's ever heard. It's a really good definition. He says, "My wife gave me the best definition of management I've ever heard. She said, 'The goal of management is to remove obstacles.'" It's a good way to think about how this guy manages. And he talks about the difference between employees and why he wanted to make sure he provided ample financial incentives for all of his employees. "I don't want employees." Some of the definitions, one of the definitions of that word, "employees," to make use of. "I didn't want to use people. I wanted coworkers who would be empowered entrepreneurs, who tried to instill a sense, or excuse me, we tried to instill a sense of entrepreneurship in all of our workers. One very important

• 34:37David Senra?

  way we accomplished this was by giving everyone a share of the profits from the stores." This is why he said at the beginning, you know, "Hundreds of people have been millionaires off of the business they built." "I wanted to work with people that I made money with." And the best, single best book you can read about the importance of that incentive structure, if that's something that you might want to consider. I was going deep. This is like, back when I read every single Warren Buffett shareholder letter. I read like, three or four books on Charlie Munger. I've done podcasts on all this. This is like, from the 80s to like, around in the hundreds in the episode numbers. But something, as a result of reading and studying Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger deeply, is they talk about constantly the operators and the entrepreneurs they respect. And they led me to a bunch of people

• 35:21David Senra?

  that I read books on. So I want to read this quote from Charlie Munger. He said this back in 2004 at a Berkshire meeting. And he says, "If you want to read one book that will demonstrate really shrewd compensation systems in a whole chain of small businesses, read the autobiography of Les Schwab." I covered this, it's called Pride and Performance, Keep It Going is the name of the book. It's founder's number 105, if you haven't listened to it. Read the autobiography of Les Schwab, 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 shrewd systems. And he can tell you a lot better than we can. And, you know, he was an orphan. I think he starts the tire center, you know, you've got plenty of competition. He starts it with like 3,500 bucks when he's like 35 years old or something like that.

• 36:03David Senra?

  Over the next couple decades, he winds up building this gigantic profitable company. If I remember correctly, every store, he'd split like 50% of all the profits with the people that worked in the store. So this is an idea that, that different people in different industries have used in different times of history. Whenever I come across that, I have to bring it to your attention because that's like, it's like a siren should go off, red flashing lights in our minds, like, hey, this idea can, can work in a lot of different domains. We might find it useful, let's remember it. And just, I love people like Les Schwab. He reminds me very much of like Paul, it's just like this no frills business, just take care of your employees, focus on like the service you provide to your customers and don't overcomplicate things. And I love that because I think a lot of people just, all, human, it's human nature

• 36:47David Senra?

  to overcomplicate things. And when you see the way these, these guys, these people approach their businesses, it's just like, all right, this is simple. I can understand this, I can wrap my mind around this. And I didn't even, I just turned the page, I didn't even realize I'm going to run over another, I mean, I just talked about how they keep it simple. He says, "Our plan for expansion, our expansion was a pretty simple one. I got the idea for how to grow by playing the board game Risk when I was a kid. In Risk, the object of the game is world domination. Playing the game taught me there was no reason to expand in a neat geographic progression. In fact, we didn't need to respect geographic boundaries at all." So that's something he talks about a lot. He'll learn business, business lessons from games that he applies in real life.

• 37:30David Senra?

  So he learns lessons from playing poker, from playing Monopoly, from playing Risk. And the note, and the note I left on this page is, we're about five years in, they have 15 stores at this time and no master plan, they're just taking it as it comes. Another thing Paul talks about over and over again is the importance of saving money, being frugal. He says, "We were really frugal. We, I would sleep," excuse me, "we," talking about his partners at the time, "and him, "we'd sleep in our cars to save on hotel rooms." He continues that trade. Not only does he have that trade, but he wants to make sure all his partners have the trade. He says, "I would never do, I'll never do business with people who can't save money. Spenders won't be cautious with their store profits." So, the importance of saving, avoiding debt, being frugal. He talks about it maybe a dozen times in the book, in different scenarios.

• 38:14David Senra?

  Paul also, in addition to like putting all his like warts and ugliness of him out in the book, talks about, you know, "I have ADHD, I have dyslexia." Like, he's gone through just tragic, tragic experiences in his life. When he was younger, he was molested. He was kidnapped and molested, I think by an older neighbor. This, at this point in his life, his first child dies, and it's just fuck, just devastating. I just couldn't, I'm gonna read this to you, just so we understand who this is as a person. It's just, it kills me when I read stuff like this. "Our firstborn son, Ryan, died of congenital heart defect. Some things you just never really get over. You just try to come to terms with them.

• 38:55David Senra?

  Ryan was seven months old and had been doing well when he died unexpectedly. We were with him long enough to know that he was a special boy. We still keep photos of him in our house." It's just, I have, you know, my son's a little over years old, a little over a year old, and it's just, it's just devastating, reading stuff like that. Moving on, there's a great quote from Naval Ravikant, that he says, like, "There's no skill called business." I would add, this, these few sentences I'm gonna read to you, I think that's a good way to think about this. "It's really all service, and anyone can learn to serve. Our first partners and our first coworkers weren't business majors. They weren't even particularly interested in business. This is fine by me. We had biologists, philosophers,

• 39:37David Senra?

  psychologists, English majors, and lawyers. We had more degrees at Kinko's than a thermometer." He's got another great aphorism about are we looking at our customers or as our customers? And so his whole point is like you always should be looking at things from your customer perspective. He talks about most businesses, we've talked about this, it could all be so simple. Start with what's best for the customer and work backwards, right? Most companies, most businesses don't do this because they look at it from their perspective. The only perspective that matters is the customers. So he says, "I never walked in the back door that was used by my coworkers. I always walked in the front door so I could see things from the customer's perspective." And then he talks about there's hidden little actions that people do as a result of not looking at things from the customer. And this is where some of the times he flips out on his partners, his coworkers, everything

• 40:22David Senra?

  else because of this. He has a, he's maniacal about looking at things from the customer's perspective. And this is just really, really smart because a lot of the, the cost to a lot of these actions you'll see that businesses do, I just went through an experience like this and I'll tell you about it in a minute, they're hidden. And that's his point. This is extremely wise what's about to happen here. "Some of our partners created an inhospitable climate for customers. Some posted negative signs. At one store, a manager hung a sign warning customers that they would be charged a steep fee if they bounced a check. It said, 'The bank doesn't make copies and we don't cash checks.' That really got me boiling. I jumped up on the counter and ripped it down as customers and coworkers looked on amazed.

• 41:06David Senra?

  They may sound extreme, but I needed to make the point in a memorable way. I didn't want signs like that staring our customers in the face. I told our coworkers that the occasional hit we took for a bounced check cost far less than what we lost and couldn't quantify," that's the most important part of this entire sentence, "by creating a subtly hostile atmosphere. Customers didn't need to be reminded not to write bad checks, especially when, as we knew, they were stressed out and anxiety ridden to start with. I noticed the managers had stopped putting out little freebies customers love so much, the paper clips and the pens. But the customers steal them, my partner complained. 'Of course they do,' I said."

• 41:48David Senra?

  And so let's go back to that point that it talks about an occasional hit for a bounced check costs far less than what we lost and couldn't quantify. I had to pick up like two, you know, like the outlet covers. They're like, you know, $1.50, $2, something like that in the local hardware store. So I go pick them up by this hardware store by my house. I'm waiting in line. First of all, I think it's weird because there's only one, it's like a long line, there's like five people in line, one, there's only one cashier open, but there's three people behind the counter just sitting, talking to each other. It's like, oh, great, this is another poorly run business. Then you see all these signs about, you know, no refunds and just like, nothing positive. And they're like taped up and like this mismatch, like really just shitty way to, if you're gonna, if you need to convey something to your customers, like that's a terrible way to do it.

• 42:33David Senra?

  So then I get up there, I think the order's like $3.50. Pull out, try to pay by credit card. And so the lady's like, no, you're not spending $10, you can't use a card, you have to give me cash. I was like, but I don't have any cash. And she's like, well, that's too bad. And I was like, okay. I was like, can you please make an exception? I just, these are the only two things I need. Can you please make an exception this one time? No. Okay. So I left this thing on the counter, walked out the door and ordered on Amazon. And I'll probably never go back to that store again. So like, that's the point. Like the owner of that store doesn't know that's happening, or maybe they do know, but they sure as hell can't quantify what their ridiculous policies are losing them in the long term. And one of the things I love about reading all these books and studying the history of entrepreneurship is you really see the contrast.

• 43:17David Senra?

  And I think it's also motivating because there's a lot of people that want to run a business or want to start a business, and I get emails from people like this all the time, but they may think it's too hard, it's just, it's, maybe they don't have the skills. It's just like, the bar is so low. The vast majority of businesses you will ever encounter are poorly run. I want to read this quote from one of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters that I think is dead on, that, you know, because how many people have analyzed more businesses that are alive today than Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger? I don't think anybody. And it says, "Our major contribution to the operations of our subsidiaries is applause, but it's not the indiscriminate applause of a Pollyanna. Rather, it is an informed applause, based upon the two long careers we have spent intensively observing business performance and managerial behavior.

• 44:00David Senra?

  Charlie and I have seen so much of the ordinary in business that we can truly appreciate a virtuoso performance."

• 44:09David Senra?

  What Paul was doing, he was taking an ordinary or a poor experience from the customer's perspective and setting the tone, it's like, that's not acceptable. We're going to do a virtuoso performance. It doesn't matter that the customers steal our paper clips and our pens. It doesn't matter if they bounce a check every once in a while. Because the percentage of people that are doing that are tiny compared to the 100% of customers that come in and realize, hey, I don't have, this is not convenient. I don't have a pen, I don't have a paper clip. Hey, I got this sign that's trying to make fun of people that bounce checks or whatever the case is. That is extremely wise. And maybe you do this already, but if not, just think about when you go in, whether it's a restaurant, a business, anything, I'm constantly

• 44:50David Senra?

  looking, it's like, could this be done any better? Like, is this an actual good experience? And the businesses that provide excellent experiences, I obviously return, just like anybody else would. And the ones that don't deserve to go out of business for their incompetence. Because it's easily avoidable incompetence. Just ask yourself, the decision I'm making, is it best for the customer? Yes or no? And Paul used that as an operating system. This is an example of this. Whenever I saw managers from the head office disrespecting coworkers from the field, I defended the field. The energy in most other companies runs in exactly the opposite direction. And he makes the point that the people serving our customers are a lot more important to the overall health of the company than you sitting in the office. And he goes over this over and over again. This is not very different. Remember back,

• 45:34David Senra?

  I think it was on Founder's Number 37, one of the best books I've ever read for the podcast. It's such a crazy story. It's called The Fish That Ate The Whale. And it's Sam Zemurray. Comes to America, he's like a 17 or 18-year-old Russian immigrant, starts a business around rotting bananas, or ripe bananas, bananas that other banana companies would throw away. He realizes, hey, I got two or three days. If I move fast, I can sell them and they're still good and they're cheaper for customers. But anyways, his competition, they'd sit, I think their headquarters are in Boston, if I remember correctly. And he's like, but I'm out here in the field. And then when he winds up taking over that giant company, right? He starts a small company, takes over a giant company. And he's constantly asking them, when he's their largest shareholder, he's like, you hired a guy that's running

• 46:16David Senra?

  your plantation down in Honduras, but you're overriding his decisions up here in Boston. Who knows more? And so he's like, that's why he would work out in the fields. And that's why he had respect for the people that worked for him. Because this guy's out here doing the same stuff we're doing. And it just came from a simple idea. Who actually knows more about what's happening in our business? The people in Sam's case, the people in Honduras on his banana plantation. And in Paul's case, the people in the Kinko's store. Okay, so let's go to some of the ideas he had to come up with to get around his dyslexia. He can't do email. He still won't do email. He has a hard time reading.

• 46:50David Senra?

  The funny thing is, he's really good at numbers. So he'll pour over like the income statements. That's what he really likes. But so they come up with, this is funny because they're, they use, instead of email, they're using essentially asynchronous voice recordings. And I actually see there's companies trying to do the same thing. This is, you know, well, close to 40 years ago. So they're using voicemail. But it says, wherever I traveled, I found great ideas. Let's say a coworker in Idaho had devised a particularly brilliant inventory system. When I met this coworker, I dialed into our voicemail system and then handed him the phone. Go ahead, I'd say, introduce yourself and explain it. The coworker got a chance to explain his idea in his own voice. And by the end of the week, thousands of other people would have heard about it, too. So it's not like a conference call. You can pick it up and listen to it whenever you want.

• 47:33David Senra?

  And this is how, this is the tool that Paul used to spread information throughout the company when he wasn't in like in the physical store. So even though I was generally inaccessible at any given moment, it was still possible to reach me. And so he continues about the importance of you need to pick up the best ideas. We just covered in two of the books I just did on Jeff Bezos. Talks about, anybody can email [email protected]. Jeff and his team would read through these emails. They would think about customer anecdotes as valuable intelligence to fix problems that you don't see in your business. So Paul's not going to use email. He's a suggestion box. And then he finds these suggestions and he starts talking to people at different stores. Like, why is this important to you? And one of his partners made the good point.

• 48:14David Senra?

  He's like, you had to remember, he's been picking up the best ideas from all around the country. And when I read that sentence, I'm like, hey, if you really think about what founders are doing, we're picking, you and I are picking up the best ideas from the history of entrepreneurship. And we're spreading that around. And hopefully, when you learn these things and you go tell your employees, your co-founders, your friends, and then they keep spreading these ideas. And we just create this giant tsunami of some of the best knowledge that you've ever found in the history of entrepreneurship. And those ideas and those insights can actually make people more effective. It's amazing. We also relied on the prosaic suggestion box for the, for input from our customers. So in this case, there's a suggestion box. It all goes, I'm not going to go into detail, this weird structure I just told you about.

• 48:59David Senra?

  But in this case, it all goes, for some reason, with this other company called Kinko's Northwest. But this is very fascinating. The marketing manager and the president of Kinko's Northwest, remember, you figure they got, they could be sitting in the office, you know, coming up with theories. So like, no, no, we're reading every single message. They read every single customer suggestion from their region for nine years. And so it's another idea. Paul and his team were using this decades ago. Jeff is still using it. And the customers that care enough to write you, to talk to you, to send you a message, like, they care enough about your business that they're going to tell you what they feel could be improved. Like, that's very, very valuable. Let's go back to this. I love this idea. Take the service you provide your customers seriously, but have fun with everything else.

• 49:42David Senra?

  They knew, they're talking about this group of capitalist hippies. They have, like, hair down to their butt. A bunch of the, you know, partners were in their early twenties when they started Kinko's. Now, we're a few decades into the story. They knew how to enjoy life, and they knew not to take things too seriously other than delivering their product. And I love that. I go back to, go back to what we just learned from Jeff the last few weeks. You know, he's talking about, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things he says in the meetings, and it's really saying, you know, yeah, you could do a shitty job, but do you have professional pride? A third of your life is going to be dedicated to your work. Do you actually care about that or not? And I love this idea. It's like, listen, we're going to have fun. We're going to, we're going to have beers after work. We're going to have picnics. We're going to go bowling. We're not going to be too stressed out as much as you can.

• 50:26David Senra?

  I mean, Paul has a lot, deal with a lot of stress, and he gets on antidepressants later on and everything else. But the idea is like, listen, you know, life is temporary. It's an experience to be enjoyed, but our work is serious because we're serving customers, and we can never take advantage of that because then they'll go somewhere else. There's only one, that's what Sam Walton said. There's only one boss, and it's the customer. He could fire you anytime he wants. We were the kind of anti-business, we were a kind of anti-business in a way at the beginning. We felt we were going to do it our own way. We are going to have good values, and we're going to make money. They started talking about the, they're, it's almost similar to, I don't know if it's similar, but. Yvon Chouinard had that kind of that let my people go surfing. One of my favorite founders ever come across because he's like, listen, if I, if I, I'd never want to be a businessman, but if I'm going to be, and it appears I'm going to be,

• 51:09David Senra?

  and I'm going to be one for many decades, I have to come up, I have to do it my way. I have to come up with my own philosophy. And we're seeing the same kind of ethos here from, from Paul and his partners. And this is an update in the company 13 years in. By 1983, we were doing about 70 million in sales a year with 120 stores. We were 30 partners with an average age of 28 years old. We were motivated by our own value systems, ideals and ambitions. With scant input from the head office, each person made his or her own decisions. And then Paul's going to talk about, there's even difference between the partners. This is, I'm really running over the point I just made. There's no formula. Your philosophy should match you is the note I left on this page. And this is why we all did business differently. Dave, one of his partners admired and sought to emulate big blue chip companies like General

• 51:54David Senra?

  Electric. He ran his company with many more levels of bureaucracy than I would have. And yet, the policy manual that his company wrote up ended up being adopted by most, by most of the other partners. So it was a voluntary adoption basis. This is how the company was run up until it was sold. I hate policy manuals myself. Obviously, I'm never going to spend free time reading them. But if our other partners could make use of one, I'm glad that Dave got it written. He loved concocting five-year strategic plans, an activity I find pointless and unbearable. In contrast, he thought my stores were loosely and poorly run. I repeatedly told him that he could have expanded his business 10 times faster, where he not so wrapped up in tending to all the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo. So even then, he's like, okay, well, I'm going to have other ideas on the stores that I don't own with you, and we don't have to agree on everything.

• 52:39David Senra?

  And this goes back to why he wants to spread the best information, why he wants to get feedback from customers, why he wants to talk about what he experiences at other stores. Like, hey, you know, they had this sign up about the bouncing the checks, don't do that. And his, the point of this section I'm about to read to you is really, if you have skin in the game, you want to know the dirt inside your company. I've observed that corporate executives, those who take a salary but don't have a stake in their enterprises, like to be lied to. It makes them feel comfortable. They are the type to be deluded into thinking that everything runs as smoothly as the table service at their favorite restaurant. They don't want to know about the problems. It might upset them. They are more interested in managing their careers than their companies. But if it's your own money on the line, you have a completely different attitude.

• 53:23David Senra?

  You want to find out all the dirt. You don't want to be spared the gory details. And that's another point he makes in different, in different words later on. It's like if, there's no such thing as a smooth running business. Like businesses problems. Companies are just effective problem solving machines. You might solve a problem now, there'll be a problem you can't even imagine that you're gonna run into a year from now. So this idea, you're just gonna, okay, I set up my business and it's gonna run smoothly. That doesn't, doesn't exist. So knowing that going in and knowing that other people experienced that. For when you inevitably run into yourself like, okay, okay, this is normal. This is how things are supposed to be. This is just another problem. I'll solve it and I'll keep moving forward. Talks about more about not wanting power, about constantly trying to, to, to delegate work and, you know, not being a workaholic.

• 54:07David Senra?

  Even he says, you know, I can't, I won't stop thinking about it, but I'm not gonna give up all my time. I'm still gonna have fun. I'm still gonna spend time with my family. And I think this is really smart. A lot of people don't believe me when they hear me say that I'm not interested in power. But in the deepest sense, I'm really not. Power to me means having to do a lot of work. I believe in getting out of as much work as I possibly can. When you're not stuck working 12 hours a day, you've got time left over to goof around, to think creatively and to get to know the people next to you. And to get to know the people next to you. And eventually you'll be back on your business instead of in it. Okay, so now we got to this chapter that is just remarkable. You don't find many chapters like this. This is all about his dark side and all about the things that he does not like about himself, the imperfections that he has. By now, you would have to be as bad a reader as I am not to figure out that I have a dark side.

• 54:51David Senra?

  You rarely hear people talk about their dark sides, especially business leaders, which is a shame because successful business, businesses aren't usually started by laid back personalities. I don't hide the fact that I have a problem with anger. I'm not proud of those outbursts. I apologize to all my coworkers and partners who've had to deal with the worst of my anger. Someone once told me that the only true victories in life are victories over ourselves. And I think that's true. My suggestion is fight your emotions. Don't let them rule you. I let my anger rule me too often at Kinko's and at home. And then he starts talking about all the ways that they have a philosophy, they have aphorisms to spread around the company, but he's like, they're aspirational. I don't,

• 55:36David Senra?

  I failed, like, no one's perfect. I failed to reach up to meet my own expectations. And this is, he's gonna go into more detail about eventually seeking treatment for this and realizing, like, I kinda don't wanna live like this. Everything in each of our businesses were guaranteed with a personal signature. I personally was on the hook, as were many of my partners, for every Xerox machine and least guarantee in the entire business. If Kinko's took a dive, as it nearly did at several junctures in its rapid step ladder-like growth, I stood to lose everything. By 1990, when we had about 450 stores, I remember discovering my liability was many times greater than my net worth. So for many years, despite the motivational pep talks I delivered at company meetings, I was literally running scared. So he's like, you can't make money if you're running scared.

• 56:21David Senra?

  He's telling people not to be running scared, and he's doing the exact same thing. And he's doing this for a long period of time. He talks about the outcome here. After a time, these fears wore me down. In my mid to late 40s, he's talking about fear of going broke, fear of failure, which I think everybody feels. In my mid to late 40s, I struggled increasingly to manage my own emotional nature. He was, I think, 52 when he sold the company. Sometimes I felt I'd created a monster. The monster wasn't Kinko's, it was me. After I retired, I started taking Prozac, and believe me, it's a much more pleasant experience living in my own skin. Now, this is, think about, who's gonna admit this? Who's gonna write a book and put this on the page? We all benefit from

• 57:03David Senra?

  this. This is remarkable that he bears so much of this. He's like, listen, from the outside, I'm this hugely successful, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and it was not a pleasant experience living in my own skin. It's much more pleasant for the people around me, too, now that he's on Prozac. You know, it talks about, you know, going to, he'd had counselors. He'd had to go to like couples counseling for some of his partners. I mean, there's a lot of times where he's going and trying to seek help for his like just extreme behavior. And this is just a really, really ugly story. Like, how many people would share this voluntarily? What I'm about to read you. I'm going to let Dave tell you an ugly story. So Dave was one of his partners. In the prime of my Kinko's life in 1992, I was in the hospital.

• 57:47David Senra?

  I'd been diagnosed with leukemia. I'd already written out all my, read upon my death letters to my kids and gone through massive doses of chemotherapy to wipe out my bone marrow. I had no marrow left in my body. I was left totally without an immune system and any sort of infection would have killed me. I get this phone call from Paul and he says, what about these P and Ls? What's the problem with them? He just gets on me. He's the godfather of my daughter. He's the lead trustee of my living trust. I just knew Paul didn't know what to say. He's a rhinoceros. I don't know what that means. I just said, Paul, I'm going to have to get back to you on that. So your partner, your friend is on the verge of dying in the hospital and you're calling about profane lost status.

• 58:30David Senra?

  Luckily, this guy survived and he recovered. Another partner. Paul could be abusive. He's immature. He could be hostile, but he could flip that and be phenomenally gracious. He would create chaos. There was constant turmoil in the organization. You never knew what was expected of you. Paul's extremely difficult to work with because everything else is so personal. And this, this trait of, you know, somebody being borderline genius, as far as like an operator is concerned, and being, you know, difficult, there's a quote, you know, this is a very, this is something we've seen a lot. 60, 70 years ago, David Ogilvie wrote, he's like, listen, you have to learn to tolerate genius, talking about some of his best employees.

• 59:14David Senra?

  He's like, you have to tolerate genius because it usually, and he used the word tolerate because he says genius usually comes with disagreeableness and difficult personalities. More examples of him just flipping out. This is him losing his temper over bureaucracy. I fought overhead every day, or excuse me, I fought overhead from day one at Kinko's. It was an uphill battle all the way. Everywhere I looked, I saw unnecessary expenses. The problem with bureaucracy at most headquarters is that there's so much, there's so much passing the buck. No one takes any sort of responsibility. And then he's going to compare and contrast. He hated hanging out at headquarters. So he winds up getting in fights there. And he's going to compare and contrast the behavior he sees at headquarters with what he sees out in the field. So no one takes the sort of responsibility people shoulder as a matter of course out

• 59:58David Senra?

  in the field, where achievement is transparent and measurable. I also began to notice that often the people who survived and received promotions at our head office were the cautious ones and not the creative, audacious thinkers. The culture was upside down. At most companies, the headquarters is a notoriously uncreative place, spared from reality. It is a danger to the health of many companies. That said, I think I was wrong in my passionate dislike of our head office. I just couldn't keep my feelings in perspective. I was like a caged animal when I was there. And so that leads to him throwing things, yelling, fighting, tears. There's a lot of turmoil there, a lot of emotional turmoil, which is exactly what this entire chapter is about, which again is so important because this is hidden from outsiders.

• 1:00:42David Senra?

  He says, "The upside to my dark side is passion." Now, this is very interesting. Another example of, this is another partner of his that just, this is the guy he hires. I think he winds up hiring to be CEO of one of his, these sub-companies in Kinko's, let's say, one of these companies that maybe owned like 25 of the, you know, 100-something stores at the time. But really, the reason I'm bringing this to you is like, you have to stand up to bullies. That's the only thing they respect. So it says, "Mark Madden is a passionate guy, which is why I tapped into run my own company. One day, I lit into him more severely than usual. As Mark remembers it, one time Paul was nagging me about something. Then he started sending me voicemails. He left me about three or four in a row, all personal attacks. I had had it.

• 1:01:25David Senra?

  I hit reply and I said, 'Hey, Paul, fuck you.'" And I sent the message. Then I sat there and thought, that probably wasn't a good idea. I ran to Paul's assistant because I knew she could stop the message, but she wasn't in. I called the VMX guys, these are the people who run Kinko's voicemail service. Couldn't get in touch with them. A few minutes later, the phone rings. It's Paul. He goes, "Hey, buddy, how you doing?" Then he goes, "Hey, hey, that message, that was great. The passion was there." "Hey, thanks, buddy." And he hangs up. Then he calls back and said, "Hey, don't ever do that again." As long as a person, this is Paul speaking about this. He says, "As long as a person had passion and gumption, I could forgive a lot."

• 1:02:09David Senra?

  He also talks about in great detail where the financial insecurity or financial anxiety that entrepreneurs go through is a source of a lot of his troubles, even if he's wildly successful two decades into his career, he's worried that he could lose everything. And so it's just something that he has to deal with. And really, what he's talking about, he's like, "I just want the independence of wealth that wealth provides, and I wanted it desperately." "As a dyslexic, I never lost sight of the fact that savings were going to get me much farther along in life than any report card ever would. I wanted to grow up to be like my uncles. When they were older, they had fancy cars. They spent their days polishing them. The hardest decision they had to make was where to go to lunch for that day. They were also free to take care of their kids, to spend time with their families. They never missed a dinner at home."

• 1:02:51David Senra?

  People often equate wealth with immorality, but that's not what I saw as a kid. I saw people who both made and then saved enough money to have the leisure time to devote to their hobbies and to their families. So that's what he wanted. I'm going to talk a little bit about, because remember, I told you this is like a chronological book, where we're inside the mind of Paul, and he's just telling us whatever's on his mind at this point. But what's so fascinating is how he felt and how his partners felt after they sold the company. But he works at the company for a little bit after he doesn't own anymore. And there's a lot of things that are going on this page. Let me read it to you, and then I'll read my note. "I'll give you an example of a corporate view of money. So remember, he always thinks, he's like, "I ran my business like a peddler, and I'm just focused on cash flow.

• 1:03:35David Senra?

  That's all I focus on." And he says, "Corporate, like, they complicate things, and they overthink things, and they wind up doing things in a worse way, in his opinion, than like a simple peddler would." "We used to sell passport photos at Kinko's, and we advertised the service in the local Yellow Pages. It would cost us $0.75 to make a passport photo." The price jumped to $1, excuse me, the cost jumped to $1, to $1.75 when you added the cost of Yellow Pages. So now, all in... To get the customer in the door and buy the passport and make the passport photo and sell the passport photo to them, they're at $1.75, right? We'd sell those photos for $13 apiece. You think this is a nice business? Shortly after we sold a controlling stake in Kinko's, the new budget people came in

• 1:04:20David Senra?

  and got rid of the Yellow Page ads. They saw it as an advertising expense. I used to go to the office and think, are they deliberately trying to be idiots? Then, like a self fulfilling prophecy, they abandoned the passport business. That is corporate dyslexia. There is a lot of corporate dyslexia going on, going on out there, rather. So, first note, he says he ran his business like a peddler. He just focused on cash flow, I already told you that. The second thing, which I found interesting, because he's like, they saw it as an expense. And then he quotes David Ogilvie again. And, you know, maybe he's speaking his book a little bit because he made his money as an advertising agency. But he's like, listen, you need to treat advertising agency, or you need to treat advertising not as an expense. It's a production. It's a part of manufacturing the product.

• 1:05:05David Senra?

  And his point was that some people treat it as like a sales and marketing expense, right? But he's like, if you can't sell your product without advertising, what happens is, and he's seen this many times, is people in like a downturn in the economy, they'll cut back on advertising, we just cut backs on sales. He's like, no, you have that in the wrong expense column. It's a part of, it's a manufacturing cost. And if you're going to keep manufacturing your, your product, then you need to keep advertising. And we see a similar idea here from Paul. It's just like, Yellow Page ads work. And there's just plenty of books that you can, like, I think of Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's. You know, one of the first books I ever did for the podcast, he talks about, once they started advertising in California, I think that's where some of their first stores were. And he says it was like a blindfold was, was removed from our, like, we went from like

• 1:05:49David Senra?

  a trickle to like an overflow. It clearly works. There's an entire section in Zero, the book by Peter Thiel, Zero to One, talks about, you know, everybody talks about, oh, advertising doesn't work on me. And he's like, yes, it works on you, it works on everybody. A little bit about the kind of businesses that Paul likes. They're simple, they're high margins, and there's no inventory. The copy business appealed to me because it fell perfectly within my circle of competence. It's a simple business. It didn't take extraordinary genius to figure out the fundamentals, and it wasn't an inventory business. And I think at the time he started, Copies would cost, let's say, half of one cent. So it's, and then they charge 10x that to the customer. Well, this is a good aphorism that he has. So this is something he learned from his mom.

• 1:06:33David Senra?

  No point in bragging in good times. And the aphorism is, "Give the glory, but take the money." During our years of most rapid growth at Kinko's, I made a policy of not talking to the press. What would I have stood to gain by doing so? I kept my personal profile intentionally low when it came to my relations with the outside world. When Forbes published its first piece of me back in the mid-'90s, I wouldn't let them take a picture of me. I always told my partners to give the glory and take the money. There's no point in bragging in good times, as my mother used to say. Your friends don't need to hear it, and your enemies won't believe it anyway. And as many other entrepreneurs know, it invites competition, unwanted competition. Okay, so they went up selling the business to this venture capital firm that reorganizes

• 1:07:16David Senra?

  it and then resells it to FedEx a couple of years later. And this was the surprising, this is in a chapter called "Know When to Walk Away," and it says, "No matter what anyone says, walking away from something you spent 30 years nurturing..." Remember, this is going to make him hundreds of millions of dollars, and this is how he feels after the fact. This is very surprising. "No matter what," or maybe counterintuitive is a better way to describe it. "No matter what anyone says, walking away from something you spent 30 years nurturing, whether it's a child, a company, or even a hobby, is going to take a toll. How could it not? How is it humanly possible to say goodbye to something that contains so much of you and your love and devotion? When my father shuttered his business in 1981, a part of him died along with it. It wasn't that he stopped living after, but it was hard on him.

• 1:07:59David Senra?

  I don't know if closing the company took the life out of him, but he died soon, five years after." And so one of his main partners, Dan, there's a quote here, where it talks about how he felt after the sale. And he says, "When the Kinko's thing ended for me, I almost felt like I wasn't anywhere, I wasn't anywhere anymore. When the job was gone, I was gone." Dan went into a severe depression. Most of us men identify far too personally with our work.

• 1:08:28David Senra?

  It's only human. And the note I left myself is, there should be a podcast. Here's a podcast idea if you want to start one. You know, we're always interviewing people that are raising money now or running businesses now. Obviously, we focus on learning from dead entrepreneurs as much as we can. Our people that are at least close to dead, or at least retired, I guess, is the better way to put that. There should be a podcast that only interviews founders five or 10 years after they sold, and to see if they regret it. I would definitely subscribe to that. And this is a little bit more about what happened after the sale. He wasn't ready for this. The first decision of C D and R, that's the firm, made after the sale was to name himself, this is the guy that did the deal, interim CEO. This was not what we were expecting.

• 1:09:12David Senra?

  C D and R swiftly began to set about creating a new company on its own terms. Very quickly, relations between the old and the new guard disintegrated. It was startling how quickly they stopped listening to us. Increasingly, I was cut out of decisions. I should have left right then, yet in truth, I wasn't yet ready to let go. And then he talks about, he's writing this book about five years, six years after this happened. The book is close to 15 years old. I think it was published in 2006. And what's interesting is like, he's still emotionally troubled by this. He says, "For emotional reasons, I just can't go inside the stores anymore. I don't know if I ever will again. It's too difficult for me.

• 1:09:57David Senra?

  When I see Kinko's coworkers today, they naturally want to tell me about their problems. I can't blame them." I spent, this is a very interesting statement he's gonna make. "I can't blame them. I spent three decades browbeating them to confess every grievance about their work lives to me, but I don't want to hear their complaints anymore." And he continues this thought about the ideas, like, "I'm a hypocrite. We all are." He says, "The truth is, for everything I just told you about keeping Paul separate from Kinko's, it's been excruciatingly difficult for me to let go." My friend John used to tell me that sometimes in life, you have to forget who you were and learn to be happy with who you are. I'm trying to do that now.

• 1:10:41David Senra?

  And then this was, I mean, honestly, I laughed the first time I read this sentence because it was completely out of the left field. He's talking about the health issues that the company caused him. 10 years ago, I had bad gas. I couldn't sleep at night and my neck hurt constantly. I've read almost 200 biographies for this podcast. No one's complained about the bad gas they had. Now I don't have gas. My neck doesn't hurt and I sleep like a baby. Getting to this point hasn't been easy, but it was necessary. We finally took our chips off the table and let the game move on without us. And one way he's coming to accept who he was is he finds a new mission. He calls it repurposing yourself. He's like, okay, I don't run Kinko's anymore.

• 1:11:23David Senra?

  So now he runs, at least the time in the book, he starts doing, he starts an asset management company. He runs, he invests his own money and then invests money on behalf of other people. He develops, he has a lot of money in real estate, stuff like that. But so he has a business he can run that's not, that doesn't require as much stress as it was when he was running Kinko's, but still gives him a purpose in life. You know, he's got to find something to do for the next few decades. He's got a great definition of success. I want to read this to you now. I always believed that the definition of success in life is when your kids want to spend time with you after they've grown up. And so that's something, you know, he tried to be aware of even when he was building Kinko's. He's home on the weekends. He's home at night for dinner. He's still thinking about the business, but he's not going to just, he's not going to be an absent father, an absent husband.

• 1:12:08David Senra?

  And then I'll close on this. There's just still obviously a little bit of ambiguity. As for myself, I'm still letting my soul catch up with my body. How long will it take? I can't answer that question, but it's a good one to ask. Do you know why children finally outgrow their tendency to ask millions of questions? Not because they've got the answers. They figure out that it irritates the grownups. If you've stopped asking questions, start asking them again. Learn to be immature, at least some of the time. It's taken me my whole life to figure out that I don't have all the answers. All I've ever had was a bunch of questions. When you think about it, Kinko started with a question.

• 1:12:49David Senra?

  How come there's a copy center here at USC and not one up at UCSB? Why is that? The most important thing is to keep dreaming, keep playing, and keep asking questions. And that is where I'll leave it. For the full story, I recommend you buy the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. If you have a friend or a coworker that you feel would benefit from learning these lessons as well, and you want to give them a gift description, I'll leave a link in the show notes to do that as well. That is 181 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.