Warren Buffett Leaves The Audience SPEECHLESS | One of the Most Inspiring Speeches Ever

These people had one thing in common, you know, they knew that they had it in themselves, they knew that they could be something beyond where they were, they were willing to dedicate their time, their energies to improve, what could really be done with more skills , it is simply extraordinary. I would like to tell you just a couple of short stories and maybe we will get a couple of lessons from them. I'd like to tell you about two women who each sold the business to Berkshire Hathaway. For me, actually, for many, many, millions. of dollars they both started with two thousand five hundred dollars by coincidence the exact same amount was all they had in the world and one of them was a woman who landed in Seattle in 1917 she couldn't speak a word of English she had a label around her neck the tag said fort dodge iowa the red cross took her to fort dodge where she was reunited with her husband who had arrived in the country a couple of years earlier and she lived in fort dodge for two years and as she said she felt like a fool, she couldn't learn the language, she couldn't learn a word, so she decided that she and her husband decided to move to Omaha, so they came to Omaha in 1919 and there she found a small colony of Russian Jews.

So she started to feel more at home and then when her oldest daughter went to school, she would come home with her daughter Francis and she would teach her mother the words that she learned in school that day and this woman, Rose Snotlout, spent 20 years saving money to bring her first. brothers above his mother and father fifty dollars at a time he sold used clothing to do so he had four children during this period and in 1937, after 20 years, he had saved 2,500 he went to Chicago and bought what furniture he could. Her dream had always been to open a furniture store and this woman who she had n

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gone to school without a day in her life with 2,500 but with the same spirit that the people in this room had of having a dream and working to achieve it, she built a business that she sold to me in 1983 for approximately $60 million in which she did business worth a billion and a half dollars last year the fourth generation is working in that business this woman woke up stupid she worked for me until the 103 years... and then I'm not saying that he retired and died the following year, which is a lesson to all Berkshire managers that premature retirement you know nothing, you can't say what's going to happen, but Mrs.

B with her 2,500 one more A fact about her: She did not know how to read or write and she went into a furniture business and did not bring anything unique in furniture, but she brought the determination to succeed. She knew that she could surpass anyone else. She knew that she cared about her clients. with very low gross margins, but she built this incredible business and I saw another woman who did something similar with two and a half thousand dollars. I paid hundreds of millions of dollars for her business, so I decided to go to the source and get these people. before you know why I don't want you guys to come ask me for hundreds of millions of dollars.

I would like to join you much sooner, so I followed this group and today I would like to tell you about one. Another small businessman, this person, I went to buy his business and he turned me down, which was very wise, but this was a guy who was born about eight years before me. He was born in 1922. We will call him Jack Lived. in the midwest he was a pretty good athlete, he didn't like school much and I'll tell you one thing at the beginning of the story, maybe you can find out who the guy was, the company he built hires more college graduates

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y year than any other. another company in the states and this guy who was meant for this but i didn't know it jack went to college for a year and then he dropped out, he really wasn't that interested in school and the year he dropped out was 1941 and when the country became the United States and was under attack.

He went to the army air force recruiting station to volunteer and they turned him away because he had hay fever, so he went to the navy and again volunteered and they took him. He was put on an aircraft carrier. He flew small airplanes during World War II earned two Navy Distinguished Flying Crosses and then returned to the Midwest, so now we have a young man who was probably 23 or 24 at the time and the interesting thing is that he returned to the Midwest. west and actually went from job to job for a short or not so short period and eventually became a used car salesman at a cadillac dealership in st louis missouri and at age 35, having moved up in the organization , the sales organization, said to your boss, could I go to the car leasing business with you?

The boss told him: well, if you cut your salary in half and you will figure out With 25,000 that you borrowed we can become partners in a car leasing company, so my friend Jack started at the age of 35 in the car business. car lease and had seven cars. He was quite slow, in fact, one of the things he did was every time the phone rang. He let it ring three or four times so people would think he was too busy answering other phones and of course the only call he was going to get all day, so his first venture was fine, but it wasn't really going to happen. get nowhere and there is a lesson in this for all of us at 40 years old he decided that with 17 vehicles, 17 cars, he was going to compete in the car rental business, so now he is facing hertz, avis, national and people so he has hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cars and he has 17 cars and his cars are no different than theirs, I mean he's buying them from General Motors or Florida Chrysler and he can't get the airport locations where those companies They have them all sold out, but he was determined that Basically, he would offer the customer to get everything from a different car, but he can offer friendlier service than he has ever seen, so he started the company and named it after the battleship. from which he had flown in the Pacific, which was the United States.

Enterprise and died about a year and a half ago, but when he died, his car rental company, starting with those 17 cars, was worth more than Hertz and Avis and the rest of the rental cars combined, the man's name was jack taylor and his son Andy Taylor is a good friend of mine runs the business now a grandson is in the business they will probably be fourth generation alumni so this guy in the United States didn't invent artificial intelligence you know? He didn't do anything like Mrs. B selling furniture, I mean, any of us could have gone into those businesses, but he lived by the creed of basically delighting his customers and working with people and building relationships with them so that his Maybe I would have liked the customers.

He couldn't go out and deal with all the car rental possibilities, but he learned to project himself and his attitude toward his peers and his desire, you know, to make a friend. of each client managed to take very ordinary cars and turn them into this extraordinary business from practically nothing and it illustrates several points, one is that you don't necessarily do it right the first time exactly right the first time, I mean the car leasing business. basically, you were competing on the cost of money to finance cars and it's very difficult to delight a customer when you just give them the car and tell them to send you a monthly check for five years and that you'll be back at that time, so their talents are They were basically wasting in that business, but at the age of 40, with all that experience behind him, he found the golden key, took a very ordinary business and turned it into an absolutely extraordinary operation, just as the Mrs.

B. Rose is a jerk with the furniture. and he wasn't worried about whether the federal reserve was going to tighten or relax he wasn't worried about whether the stock market went up or down yesterday he wasn't worried about the things he couldn't change but he was worried he focused on the one thing he couldn't change and that was the customer experience and I have seen what I did not see, what I missed. I went to Florida and tried to convince him to sell Berkshire and he was. Smart enough not to do it, the value of the company has probably quadrupled since I made that visit, but he was smart enough to see that he would find that Henry Ford's business, as you know, failed twice before it started. the Ford Motor Company in 1903 I mean, the test is not if you have the best business idea in the world the first time, the test is if you keep learning as you go, what your strengths are and what you can do for your customers, what you can contribute especially. go to the party and to do that you need the education that I know you've received through ten thousand small businesses, but you need a genuine desire day in and day out to delight the customer.

I have never seen a business and I have seen many businesses, but I have never seen one that delights the customer and is not successful. I mean, what you want is for the customer to think the next day if I want to rent a car or if I want to buy it. some furniture what's on their mind you know it's the place where they've had a great experience I don't know how much I paid for this guy actually probably someone gave it to me but for the purposes of the speech I'll say I I have no idea what I am or the shirt that others are wearing, but I do know that I will remember how they treated me when I bought it.

I mean, for a long time you forget about the price, but you never forget if you had a good or bad experience. experience with the purchasing experience and you will have a hard time finding a person who has had a wonderful experience, a delighted experience when buying anything that is not going to come back and in the same way if the memory is of rudeness, indifference and whatever it is . "I will never go back and as a small business owner and as you grow, not only do you have to be able to project that interest in people's well-being and delight them yourself, but you also have to do it through other people and you will win." I can't do it through people who feel that they are not being treated fairly and that their views are not being properly considered, so you really have to learn to multiply yourself through other people and I advise young people to do that. come to omaha we have many classes the key is without a doubt in terms of your personal life the

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important decision you can make is the spouse which

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of you will probably have and it is very important surround your people with people who are better than you, you will move in the direction of the people you associate with, so if I have consistently been very lucky in that sense, I mean, I just had Teachers, friends and a spouse who really was a better person and I had enough common sense to learn from these people that life was better if you behaved better.

It took me a while, so I advise you to find someone as your partner. business, your partner in life, whatever it is, look for people who are actually examples for you rather than someone who needs, thinks you need to straighten up and simple rules like that, delight customers, work through other people, Partner with people who will. They'll take you on a better path than you could ever have, They'll take you so far in life that, uh, it's hard to believe, I mean, they took a redneck with roses who couldn't speak a word of English, couldn't read or write and they took it into what is now a billion and a half dollar business and, by the way, no money has been invested in it since the year 2500, which has been the total capital paid in the Nebraska furniture market and I think if you look at the company, I don't know. their books the same way, but I guess very little equity has been added to the company over the years and the company built on itself, so I want to tell you that I greatly admire this group when I met the class from Dr.

Mello on September 22. uh eight years ago, I was excited and I admire people who are doing what you've done. You know, working hard at your job while also taking on a lot of extra work to improve your skills. 99 graduate. I mean that's a mind-blowing statistic and I'm looking at 2,200 people here that I admire. I am encouraging you and I can tell you that the best is yet to come, thank you.