Transcript
Introduction
"I wrote this book to help entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. That's why there's a lack of miracles and a surplus of marketing details, including buying, advertising, distributing and running stores and lots of discussion on how we built a successful business on high wages.
In a 1958 partnership with Rexall Drug Company, we started Pronto Markets. After growing it to 6 stores, I bought out Rexall shares in 1962. And then in 1967, when I had reached 18 Pronto locations, I began the transition of Pronto into Trader Joe's. I resigned at the end of 1988.
During those 26 years, our sales grew at a compound rate of 19%. During the same 26 years, our net worth grew at a compound rate of 26%. Furthermore, during the last 13 years of that period, we had no fixed interest-bearing debt, only current liabilities. We went from leveraged to the gills in the early days to zero leverage by 1975. Furthermore, we never lost money in a year, and each year was more profitable than the preceding year despite wild swings in income tax rates.
Still, judgment can be rendered that I failed, that I fell short of what I should have achieved. We will examine this late in the book, but I hope you'll consider the following, my favorite quote from my favorite book on management." The book is called The Winning Performance, and here's the quote. "The general theme in winning corporations is a view of profit and wealth creation as inevitable by-products of doing other things well. Money is a useful yardstick for measuring quantitative performance and profit and an obligation to investors, but making money as an end in and itself ranks low. Along the way in this book, you'll find the angst of a struggling entrepreneur and the slings and arrows of outrageous good and bad fortune. So here we go to an autumn afternoon in 1965 in a bar where Trader Joe's was not so much born as extruded."
All right. So that's in the preface of the book that I'm going to talk you about today, which is Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys, and it was written by the founder of Trader Joe, Joe Coulombe.