#181 Paul Orfalea (Kinkos)

**David Senra** (0:00)
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 this path.
Then we're driving along and he sees Pardell Road, the site of the original Kinkos, which he sold to his partner. Because of that, he won't drive down Pardell Road anymore.
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 could 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.
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 two million dollars in property and he can't drive down part of the 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 try 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 Kinkos. 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 the books that I'm covering 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. It's almost like a 100 page Cliff Notes version of this book, I would describe it as. It's called Two Billion Dollars and Nichols. It has a fantastic title. And the reason it's called that is because the Kinkos would sell copies for five cents each, and Paul winds up selling the business for about two billion dollars. So I want to start with the 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. 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 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, 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 business people and entrepreneurs who will benefit from his unorthodox and inspirational teaching, but for kids, teachers, parents, and parents struggling with learning disabilities.