Transcript
Introduction
"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 can 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 Pardall Road, the site of the original Kinko's, which he sold to his partner. Because of that, he won't drive down Pardall Road anymore. We screeched up in front of these apartment buildings. I followed 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 $0.50 fee to cross the university campus. 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 Pardall 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.'"
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, 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, Ann Marsh. And this is another book that I wasn't aware of. More than half of the books that I'm covering on the podcasts 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 like cliff notes version of this book, I would describe it as. It's called Two Billion Dollars in Nickels. That's 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.