#105 Les Schwab (Charlie Munger recommended this book)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. I wrote this in November and December of 1985 I did write this 100% with my 40-year-old typewriter. I didn't have a ghostwriter. I wanted it in my own words. I hope to pass on some of my theories of business to our people, and I hope these theories are used in our business for as long as the Les Schwab company continues. Should we fail to follow these policies towards customers and employees, I would prefer that my name be taken off of the business.
There could be some interest in this book with people who are interested in business. If so, you are invited to read the book. I hope in some way this book might help you in the business world. If you are not interested in business, this book will bore you. And if I were you, I wouldn't waste my time reading it. All right, so that's from the foreword of the book that I read this week and the one I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Les Schwab, Pride In Performance, Keep It Going, and it was written by Les Schwab. All right, so I wanna talk first before I jump into the rest of the book, how I discovered, it's like how I found out about this book. So by this point in time, I've done, I don't know what, three or four podcasts on various books that I've read about Charlie Munger. I've done a podcast on every single shareholder letter that Warren Buffett has ever written. And I did a podcast on two other books on Warren Buffett. These are all in the archives. If you haven't listened to them yet, obviously you have access to them anytime you want, go back and listen to them. But they bring up Les Schwab over and over and over and over again. So it's very simple. Like I've learned a lot from both Buffett and Munger, especially Munger.
And if they tell, you know, they have, they say, they always talk about the operators and the other business people that they admire and they respect. And then if there's books on them, they explicitly say, hey, you should go read this book. So let me just read some of the various little quotes that I've collected in this regard. So here's Charlie Munger. He's giving, it's at the Berkshire meeting in 2004, and he says, if you want to read one book that will demonstrate really shrewd compensation systems and a whole chain of small businesses, read the autobiography of Les Schwab, who has 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. He can tell you a lot better than we can. Warren Buffett on the book says, it's an interesting book, you know, selling tires. How do you make money doing that?
Then he talks, there's a different speech. This is a speech back in 2003 at the University of California. I'm gonna read a few paragraphs from this. This is Charlie Munger talking. And he says, there's a tire store chain in the Northwest, which has slowly succeeded over 50 years, the Les Schwab tire store chain. It just ground ahead. It started competing with the stores that were owned by the big tire companies that made all the tires, the Goodyears and so forth. And of course, the manufacturers favored their own stores. I'll talk to you more about Les' view on that later.