From selling ACs to becoming the tourism king of Jamaica

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
If you're like me, you're gonna get despired by this story. A white dude from Jamaica who built an incredible, multi-billion dollar business and lived life on his own terms. That's the headline. This is my Billy of the week. So this is a guy who created something called Sandals. Now, let me tell you the story. First, we just gotta look at this picture because I'll be damned if this doesn't look like a young Sam Parr. Look at this guy. Is this not you?

**Shaan Puri** (0:34)
Yeah.

**Sam Parr** (0:35)
This guy's you.

**Shaan Puri** (0:36)
Is he actually, he's Jamaican?

**Sam Parr** (0:38)
So he lived in Jamaica. Okay, so here's the story. So his name's Gordon Stewart and he's born in Jamaica, white kid born in Jamaica. His mom calls him Butch because he was chubby. So he becomes known as Butch for the rest of his life, which is amazing. As a young kid, he does all kinds of odd job, little hustles. So he's like helping out the fishermen, then he buys a boat. Then he starts making money, boating the fishermen around and repairing boats. And he would skip school altogether. He was like, he's like, I just want to be on the water. And he goes, he said later, I didn't want to be a businessman. I want to be a fisherman, just a rich fisherman. And that led him into business. So I love this guy. So he's like, along the way, he's living in Jamaica. Obviously Jamaica is super hot. And he realizes as air conditioning becomes a bigger and bigger thing, that air conditioning is going to be huge in the Caribbean. You know, things take time to diffuse, right, from different places. And so maybe it was normal in the States, but it wasn't as normal in the Caribbean yet. And so he saves up $3,000 and he starts a company called Appliance Traders Limited. And the idea is he's going to import AC from the US AC units and he's going to go door to door selling them himself. And he decides, I'm going to do this B2B. I'm going to convince business owners that they should have AC because for them, it's not just about their own comfort, but they're going to have more sales. If their store has AC and the other store doesn't, customers are going to want to spend time in their stores. So great idea. Now he's like, how do I differentiate myself? So he tries selling door to door. He makes some progress just hustling and he hires some other island boys to come help him sell. But he's going up against General Electric, right? So he's going up against Westinghouse. He's going up against these huge companies that have much bigger sales forces than him. So he's like, he asked himself a better question. Instead of how do I outcompete them on sales where they're excellent and have more resources? How do I do something they would not dare to do? So he goes, what can the big guy not do? Speed. And what does the big company not care about? Service. So he decides to differentiate his offering. So he says, if you call me, I'll have AC installed within eight hours.
It just starts with that vision. And he works backwards to figure out operations. How could I possibly do that? Well, I guess I'd need boys over here. I need a call dispatcher. I need to prioritize the most recent call, not the oldest call and deliver this eight hour service. And then the second thing he says is, look, these ACs, they break. They're running them all the time. Here's the deal. We will fix all the ACs, no extra charge. If it breaks, we fix it and we fix it fast and nobody else is gonna offer you this. And because of these two things, speed and service, he dominates the Caribbean market. He takes over Jamaica. He builds a powerhouse. And so out of this, he makes, that's his first kind of fortune that he makes.

**Shaan Puri** (3:26)
How much did it make?

**Sam Parr** (3:27)
I don't know his net worth at this time, but it's enough where he could go to Montego Bay and buy a rundown hotel that everybody else ignored. And so 1981, he buys this resort called Bayrock. And at the time, people think he's crazy because tourism is not that popular in Jamaica at the time. Crime was super high. This hotel was rundown, had a bad rep. And so he was buying kind of like a rundown, distressed asset, but he has his vision. So he's like, I love it here. I think people will love it here. I just have to find a positioning for this. And this is where Butch, the marketing genius, starts to inspire me.