Brad Jacobs - Think Big and Move Fast - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY]
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On december fourth, i'll be hosting a panel discussion with Chris karson offenses V P, A product andivia narendra C E O of some zero for a discussion on a impact on investing, you can sign up by the link in our shown notes or head the alpha that sense dot com slash invest. This week, I spent some time with brad Jacobs and was reminded how excEllent and Operator he is to say nothing of how great a human being he is. So we are replying this hugely popular episode.

He's under his next big endeavor, Q X O, which we elude to in this conversation. This is one that i'll study for years to come. Please enjoy.

Hello, and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick onic's, and this is just like the best. This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you Better invest both your time and your money. Invest like the best is part of the colosse family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts showing tes and other resources to keep learning at join colosse dot com.

Patrick osongo y is the CEO and founding partner of positive sum and the CEO of oona y asset management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of positive sum or a onc asset management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum or oceana cy asset management may maintain positions in the security disgust in this podcast.

I guess today is brad Jacobs. Brad resume is remarkable. He's founded seven companies, all of which are billion dollar or multi billion dollar businesses. He's done five hundred ema transactions and raised thirty billion dollars of debt and equity capital.

Currently, he's the executive chairman of X P O, A commercial trucking company that he started in two thousand and has grown in one of the largest logistics businesses in the world. He's also in a book that will be on january tittle, how to make a few billion dollars, what the title rad's energy is infectious. And our conversation on taxes strategies for mina is propensity for speed and methods for earning.

Team bian, please enjoy my great conversation with brad Jacobs. So bad, it's hard to know where to begin this conversation because you have built so many interesting businesses across so many different industries. So maybe the united thread is, what are you looking for when searching for the next opportunity? Because there is definitely three lines to what you've done.

But there's also, you did pretty big jumps. I think maybe i'll make another jump and may y'll never stop. What is IT that you're looking for in an industry or a market or an area as you're sussing out what to do next?

In a word, scalability. So the only way I know to create huge value is to create a company that five and ten years after you started is much, much larger. And the easiest way to do that is through emini course, you have to have organic growth as well. But I look for industry where it's large enough. I want to create a company that's tens of billions dollars in revenue.

Then after doing industry that's hundreds of billion dollars in revenue, if I want to consolidate an industry that has to be things to buy, they have to be things to buy on a creative terms and they have to be things that we can buy at lower multiples and we're going to trade them. I look for industries where the synergy as you get bigger, as economies of scale is benefits size, that as you buy things and get bigger, you just don't get bigger, you get Better, you spread your actually out more, you get Better technology, you get a Better sales for, you get Better training. So the vantage the site have Better cost basis, you please the customer Better yeah more density, more advantages of being a national network or maybe even a global network specially come down a scalability.

So if that's the metric, why aren't there ten of you? Why is there only one distinct story like yours that somebody in a serial fashion sort of goals and builds companies with some similar ingredients in the recipe in different industries? It's strange that there's no other people that have had a similar story like years.

Plenty other people have done M A and created tons of value doing ma. I've maybe done little more ema than most people, and the teams i've LED of done very well in terms integration and optimization of those acquisitions. But I didn't vent ema is the around long time.

One of the things you said is the ability to do great decrease tive acquisitions, buy a little multiple than your stock trades that maybe I think you have every single ten or some of the great stories to history.

What are the markers of industries that have that features? Do they tend to be very mature industries? Do they ten tap anything else that you would look forward that would cause those low multiple to exist, hyper fragmentation or something else?

But not that they have to have low multiples. I tend to go to industries that are single digit multiples is not double digit multiple low double digit multiple book. I'm not a fifteen twenty times the dog kind of guy.

If you look at the five hundred of so acquisitions that I am, my team have done average multiples in the mid d high single digits. And I don't like to buy things that are Price for perfection and everything is going to go perfectly swiming ly, right, in order to achieve and maintain at fifteen or twenty times, even down multiple. I look for industrial companies for the most part.

I'm not a tech guy. I use a lot of tech. I invest in tech.

I am tech forward in my companies. We utilize, take every possible place we can. We automate anything we can. But I don't buy tech companies per save.

mainly because the multiples are too high. Can you tell me the story of the earliest acquisition that you did that stands out in memory as one that taught you a lot of lessons?

Earlier ones taught me more lessons than my more recent ones, because I messed up so many tags, I made so many mistakes in my first few dozen acquisitions. That's what you really learn. You learn from the new mistakes.

Don't learn as much from your success. And the main mistakes I made in the earlier acquisitions were around people and integration as too slowly. Integrate now real fast from I integrate.

When I integrate now I rip off the bandit and i'm on one C R M, one H R S, one E R P, one dashboard. One key performance indicator metric univerSally throughout the system is everything is one one. Because you have visibility into the business and you can manage IT Better.

You have clear understanding of what's going on in real time. You have a finger right on the possible what's going on. And this is really important when you're leading in a company particular growing so fast.

I have the controls in place, you have the oversight, have the governance in place. When I was Younger, I used to be concerned about the elevation fallout when you do integration, because people wine and scream, oh, I like this. I've been using this and some temporary, just comfort, but it's worth doing that got to do IT really fast.

The other types of mistakes I made earlier, my career and acquisitions were sizing up the people, thank you. Get Better, that you start seeing patterns in different times of personality types, in different character traits and so forth. And that's the most important thing you can do is make sure you get fantastic talent.

makes who we talk about the positive and negative patterns that have emerged in the people I assume are talking about both the seller, whoever is that is representing the cellar or the cellars themselves and their teams. What are the things that you've gravitated towards and away from as you've done more, more acquisitions first?

Well, I never buy a company if I don't really like the seller because i've seen a correlation between how I feel about that seller and how that deal turns out. One, two, three years later, the integrity of the sell is really important to me because the company that seller has created reflects the integrity or that of the owner of the CEO of the scene leadership team IT reflects the work ethic IT reflects the amount that they are collegial and respectful and collaborative or not, I really need to like the seller. It's very important to me that I have a personal affinities .

for them you to find integrity.

Integrity is real. Simples is being honest, is doing what you say going to do and being straight forward about IT not playing games. And i'd like to work with people that don't require a lot of effort to figure out what do they really mean. I like to work with people who they mean exactly what they just said. And they say, in very simple terms, are very predictable and restate forward.

What about the negative side of the ledger? Is, is just not integrity or the other things that you ve found lead to bad deals to three years after doing them.

two, three, four years down the line. If you find bad things with the company, it's really my fault if I fixed by then. But in the first year to sometimes is undisclosed liabilities.

Sometimes there's things in the company that you really weren't aware of because buy a companies a little bit like getting married. You don't really know who you got married. You and have you be made in a while fortunate. My case that worked out really well. But sometimes people get surprised. And when you buy a company, particularly if you buy in a process, if you buy in a banker on process, you don't get the full some amount of due diligence that you really need order responsibly by a company and conferences thinking not going to have a lot of surprises.

I've love ask a few more questions. The assembly line of the deal, so to speak. One, a great quote that I saw you right, was that there are three times that people go insane. And one of them is when they're selling a company, what is the psychology like of a seller? And how do you take that into account when you are negotiating the deal itself?

So I have a relative who's a psychologist, and he told me that in otherwise perfectly saying, person two times in their life becomes temporarily insane and develops IT to access to personality order for a short preter time. And those times are when they're spouse, tels them on divorcing you, and another time is when your boss tells you your fire and is just people have a very bad reaction to that and they can just lose IT.

And I ve noticed that I have noticed those two examples of many people, but i'm going to add a third to that as I write the book. Thank you for reading IT, which is when people sell business, when people sell a business, particularly if they've spent decades building IT up and they have family in the business, their prominent, including their identity, is associated with that business. They get really nervous and they get very anxious and they're very stressed out and is extremely important when you buying a company to be very understanding and very respectful and very apathetic towards the seller is not just a personal family business either.

Even a corporate one, even a corporate one of the stakes are high. And they have advisers tell me them to do this and do that. And it's usually not really good advice from terms of relationship batting in which for me is the most important thing in in M N. A is having a good relationship with the seller, with the other party. So they definitely do things that they Normally wouldn't do otherwise.

How tactically do run these processes? And i'm especially curious since obviously, you must build some sort of machinery around this. You are doing so many acquisitions, you're not personally and they're doing them all. So what have you learned about pacing, building relationship, but keeping moving very quickly, balancing those two things and any other relevant machinery that you ve found to be most helpful for doing so many as .

at scale and probably more involved in ein in the weeds? Like I said earlier, you need to know what you're buy. In order to do that, you have to gob up as much information as possible from every possible source you can get there from external and company directly.

And that's really the main stuff I want to figure out. And i'm doing a deal. I want to understand what is this company really about? Every company is got positive things about IT, strong things about IT, opportunities, wins, successes. And every company also has negative part that's Normal. There is no company is all good or all bad, at least that i've come across.

So the do dilly gent process in emini is to try to figure out both of those, think what are the things that make IT a strong investment case? And one of the things that these are risks, these are downside, this is here on the deal, is this here we can take off, is this? The rest is that we can live with.

What are we in the chances that risk happening? And if the rist does happen is a fatal, destroy the whole investment. This is.

So you really got to get both of those things. And I write in the book about a friend of mine who's done lot. M A.

Once showed me a four quarter ant chart of M A. And the top two grants were large, easy deals with no hair on them. We don't exist below that.

On the bottom part of the four quarters are small Harry deals. Nobody should do a small hairy deal first. Smalls, are you going to create a lot of money to do a small deal? And it's Harry, so you should take the hair off.

It's a small deal. You're not going to make a lot of money on. And then the quarter in the bottom right or small unhesitating straight forward, easy, no problem details, but this small, so I kind of work which leaves you with the most important quiet in the Opera hand, one which are large Harry deals. And that's where you make the big money. You make the money on large deals that certainly they have issues, but the issues that you thought through you realized and you have good how you going to sell them, how you going to dress them, and if you can shape off the hair on those big Harry deals that they make a lot of money in everyday.

I'm curious in each of these different company stories, how much of the m na. was. You've got some grand vision. There are some puzzle and you know the puzzled ece you need and you're going out and finding them one by one to build this picture that you've prebuilt in your mind verses that being more organic and bottom up where you just say something comes up that could slot and we do that deal if it's a great deal. So is that more bottom up or top down as you built is both.

There certainly is a strategy and a plan and a vision of where are going. But you have we opportunities. You have to be adjure. You would be flexibly if we open minded IT can be origin on this. You have to take deals that come to you and say that's interesting, wasn't in my original plan, actually, this makes sense.

So you look at expo, for example, we started out, the very first company we bought was something called express, one where X, P, O came from. That was their tika semble. There were small, less than two hundred million dollars market cap.

And the ticker symbol, what was then called the m max, was X P. M. And they were in a few things they did.

Truck broke, which we like. They were doing expert ite, which we like, and they doing freight forwarding, which is okay too. And our original plan was okay.

Let's buy this company and let's keep by more companies in those three sectors, particularly the truck brokers. But that's also add into model. So we thought into model would go together. And few years later, we bought pater, which was a big intermodal company, and that was the original al vision.

Over the course of time, we had opportunities presented to us to buy newbridge logistics, which is the open in the best round warehouse contract logistics companies ever been around a loose the joy with selling at the time, and I never you like grosses now had a west banking at more instantly. Then he was turning transportation called me up on a sunday saying I get an interesting deal that i'm not Carolinum it's a little bit different here says that he wasn't in the original strategy. IT was a pivot and he said it's a little bit of what your original strategy was.

But face that fits real well as what is IT? It's contract logistics. And I said, okay, what's contract? I don't know. That meant that a part of the world I never explored. And so I got some fast education tutorials about the warehousing business has supply chain management, contract logistics.

I look at how the customers were saw opportunities to do things with those customers in original forward things we're looking at and made perfect sense. So that was an example of, yeah, we had a strategy. Yes, the strategy is working, but an opportunity to hence the strategy by getting the home line business and over time, we bought other contract logistics companies.

We put more together, integrated about global basis. Eventually we spend IT off. And today, that's called g XL logistics, which the new ork stock change company trading on on its own and doing super well. Another example of pivoting of the opportunities of having an opportunity fall on ahead. And instead of getting a headache we looked at said that's interesting was I was trying to buy this coming called mental logistics, which was the contract logistics subsidiary of convey.

And in the course of negotiating with the convoy team against snow them, and flying out to an arbor and learning business, but they had and fit in menlo, they proposed, me said, you know what? Why to spite the whole business? Why just buying contract logistics and L, T, L.

Business, the fantastic business. why? Why is that a fantastic business? But I kept open mind about IT. They persuaded me. They said as a business where there been no new entrance of any size for several decades is a big moat around the business, it's got great pricing power because capacity actually has been living in the in not coming in the industry, and there's ways to continually improve the business over time.

So I studied IT, I studied contained, and I was interesting because they told me this a bad one thing you need to know is there's not a lot of cost out opportunity here. okay? And I went in and I found times accost the opportunity.

I saw the organizational was like someone just took beghe ti a three years. All that was there were three different h organizations, three different IT organizations, three different Operating division. Everything was three for the different parts of the companies of having a shared services, which is more traditional way, doing IT.

And I say, wow, it's like a lot of money. We out of this is do to do that data, that a government relations division with a fairly sizable staff and signal budget, but they didn't really need that to make a different. So we of IT and we said, you know what, let's get into accipe. IT was a big pivot because we had been previously doing non asset businesses, although into motor was quite asic because at least the trail containers.

So that ended up becoming a fantastic had I turn that down, had I been rigid in my thinking on that, had I just start to the original initial strategy and said, you know what, that that slow off being path, we would not have created billions of dollars of value because we bought that company for three billion dollars. today. We're not sign. But if we were to show, that would be many times.

What are in your mind the components of a fantastic business for me to the .

perfect business, which does not exist, by the way, but I had the perfect business. Here's what I would look like, patch number one. IT would be highly respected in the industry by its competitors.

IT would be very highly valued by the customers. The customers would say i'm willing to pay more to do business with this company because their service is so great and their people is so great, they're technology is so great. Everything about that meets my knees and delights me as a customer.

It's a business that has less of organic growth, just growth by itself in terms of Price, in terms of violence. Some industry you not to build a race Price which is too competitive. Some ministries not will grow volume because there's just so much market out there, maybe the declining market, not even growing market.

So if you can find a business that can global Price and volume and you have ways to continously improve the Operations and grow your margins, that's a great business. And i'll go another step further. Perfect business for me, and this is a key point for me in every acquisition i've ever done.

What's there? Turn capital. Because at the end of everything, that's what creates shareware value, what create shareholder uis. You have a finite amount of decoration you need to put that to use and you have to get back a lot more capital than you put out. That's what about and a business that has a high R, Y, C. With this in favor, with this out of favor, with this fat moment does matter over long term, will absolutely create value.

When you think about the deals that you didn't do, how often was at Price. So you got this fantastic business on one side. There's no business for which a terrible Price can rule in the investment. So how does and has Price slaughter up against the quality of the business?

Many times i've seen an interesting business, maybe not perfect, but definite good enough, and would love to buy IT, but I can buy at a Price makes sense. So the ice, in our wise same matters.

So the ice and m na, is the purchase press and whatever you subsequently or put into the business of these capex improvements invested, you want to grow IT and have the court capital, the aggregate of the purchase Price and how much money going to put in over the next year to me, you going to put in rather than take out money, that's your invested capital and that's what you have to generate return on. So the purchase Prices is very important and you must stay disciplined on Price. If you overpay for an acquisition, you're a whole and maybe many years of destroying value before you creating value. That's sin. No management should do that.

If you were to boil down source returns and equities as simply as you could, you might say it's multiple change and fundamental change worth of the business. Change in the multiple IT sounds like change in the multiple mean buy well, buy a good reasonable multiple. Has been your strategy more than materially change the business? Is that roughly, right?

Not really. All the businesses that we've bought, we've integrated very tightly into the business. We don't run a loose confederation of lots of different companies, which you see some business models and some of the work.

I don't like doing that myself and fill out of control. I like everything standardized and one way of doing everything, the Price does matter, but the multiple matters too. For example, when we looked at ourselves in the mirror expo logistics few years ago and we said, look, we've been trading at eight fraction times, even down for a while now.

That's what the market says. This is worth. We didn't think IT was worth then. We thought if you looked at the some of the parts of the business that should be training many terms of multiple hired net, significantly hired net, but we said, I don't think we want to get there on our home because the market is spoken.

So we decided to do something that brave few companies do, which is to make ourselves smaller. And we divided the company up into three companies. And those three companies, we put the circles around the different parts of the business of how we going, divided up with two things in mind.

One was how can we run this business with greater focus Operationally, execution wise? And secondly, we'll get a Better mother because wall street generally likes peer plays as general, not always, but generally likes peer plays, likes to have easy to understand stories. Typical cell size animals, for example, cover thirty two stocks, so they don't have the Lucy of time to really go deep studying stuff.

We divided the company up into one company that was primarily L, T, L, X P L, another company that was primarily brokers, truck brokers, non asset, which is R X O, and a third company, which is we were talking about before, which is the supply chain business, was gx m. And now each of those companies gets ever multiples of eleven, twelve, thirteen times. It's a big change.

So we unleased the value from getting multiple expansion by dividing the company up into a smaller companies. The multiple you get from wall street matters because IT goes back what we are talking about a few minutes ago, where you have your cost of capital, what you can raise money yet to put IT more simply, turn what multiple you can raise money. And then you have businesses that you can buy, acquisitions that you can do at a lower multiple.

So that has to be a spread. And when you look at all the ways that you create value in these dozen and dozens of levers and a business plan, that often is the most important lever, sometimes one of the top three. But the differential, the decision between the delta, between what you can raise capital at, what the mark give you money at and what you can deploy at acquisitions, that's a big value creator.

So you need to pay attention that in that value creative mechanism, the relationship with capital markets and with wall states specifically is obviously very important. How do you, as a CEO, manage that relationship? Well, what have you learned about sing with wall street in the most constructive way possible?

I have a lot of friends with portfolio managers and analysts and is very easy. They want to make money simply is that they've never bought my stock because i'm hand summer have a full set of here, anything like that. They want my stock and supported me because we create alpha. And we all did the competition and we were great investment, made a lot of money for investors.

And I think if the investment community understands what you're doing and you're through with them and you tell them, as we're talking about before, the good things and the bad things going on because it's always both and you can be one of these manage, which is like everything is everything is great, everything that's bloomy. It's not like that if you can fight in your shareholders of what's worrying you and what the chAllenges aren't at the same time what the opportunities are, what your vision is, and you consistently post up good numbers consistently with what forecasts didn't. They should be ambitious ones, then you'll get a following. I'm lucky and humble that I have pretty big following, but I have no illusions of what that is. The reason I have a big followings that made a lot of money from investors.

They get bonuses. Have you made any major mistakes dealing with capital markets?

I've made major was taking in everything, including capital markets, absolutely. So sometimes i've raised too much money and then I didn't have a youth foot right away. And then I was delusive. Sometimes I am really enough money, had these fantastic opportunities and I did not the capital.

And when you do acquisitions in particular, you know the money, you can't incredibly go to a seller and say, hey, let's sign a deal and I will raise the money, even if you can raise the money. Things change, geopolitical events happen, market crit, all kind stuff happen. And so the salis want to make sure your money good.

Sometimes I haven't capitalized the business engh. And I think in my next ventures, I will air on the side of raising more capital, rather less capital. I've lost so many opportunities over the years because I didn't have enough money on the baLance ship.

Can you tell the story of the large buyback that you did with X P O on the opposite side of the capital allocation letter from acquisitions?

So that was another example of opportunities where we had something fall in our lap that we weren't expecting to and wasn't in our plan. And that came in the form of this crazy short cellar report back. And without nineteen, I don't remember, guys, is name blanked out.

But this report came out dippel nonsense, that we were doing this, we were doing that, and and he was very fhsa cake in the sense that know all the right buzz ds to say, and we research in afterwards, he says pretty much to say about recovery. Does a short solar from on the world processor that just gets the box to repeat IT and then sell this dock and to get various media outlets to write the story. And it's a near certainty that when he comes out with that report, this just going to go down and is almost one hundred percent certain.

And they lever up quite a use derivatives. And if the stock had gone up like twenty cents, you probably would have go on back ground. The stock not going to go up twenty cents.

IT came down, in our case, came down like twenty six percent. The first day big drop. And IT was interesting because the day IT happened just as IT happened, just like queensland.

And I had adam car and md ataman in my office. The two top guys running lower billion dollars sit at the time in X, P, O, visiting my office. Now I was them in a room, and someone walked into the room and pass me a paper or screen shot, actually, of what had just going on.

If the stock is down twenty something percent as of short cell's making all this crazy stuff that and so we don't real time we talk about IT every situation disappear, every situation. There's a way to make money if you're stay cool and you're smart and you keep me on mind and don't take IT too personally, you'll find ways to capitalize on that situation. In this case, we said, okay, look, stock is down a lot, but for no reason.

It's not like our numbers got worse, not like we did to prancing cement. And we're going to miss by mile our earnings, not because there was some big lawsuit that was very vicious or the government regulator was no reality to this. There was just much of silliness.

Ss, and so IT temporary. This dock was dislocated. So if IT, what's the right move here? The right move was really obvious. Let's go buy back our stock. And orbis bought, I think they bought over billion dollars of stock, and we bought about two billion dollars of our stock back.

And remember talking to the bankers when we were mobilizing to do this, and they said nobody have done this before in terms of the percentage of market cap and buyback in a short period time, IT would be blazing new ground and territory here. And so what that's interesting data point. But the fact of the matter is we definitely to make money on the right.

We take two billion dollars and buy our stocked was already on a low sight. But after IT fAllen down like this, I was ridiculous. Ly cheap by any measurement, let's do IT.

So we bought IT back. And two years, latest dog was three times what the Price was when we bought IT, we made six billion dollars in that trade. So there was a very advantages thing for us to have done.

There's a great winston churchill quote, which is always more audacity. What do you think that quote?

I don't know. You don't want to add audacity just for the sake of audacity. You don't want to be reckless.

You want to be disciplined. You want to be rational. You want be logical. But you should be able to. You be created is a baLance. Like most things in life, you want to have one ounce of darkness and one ounce of causal ously baLanced to out and come up with really good moves, good strategies, good tactics. How do you think about setting .

your own scope of ambition? Because when was talking your colleague before we started and ask them to describe you in two words of two phrases, one of them was related to the scope of ambition, and the second is related to th Epace e xecution. Will talk about both, but starting with scope of ambition, IT does seem as though that span a common team in your various entrepreneurial stories that maybe you're just wired to click the ambition, dial a couple points higher than most people are. Some curious how intentional that is, also whether you think more people should think that way.

What's funny say that I wasn't part of that conversation because showed up really here, but that's what I would have said. I would have answered, think big and move fast. I don't think I invented that phrase, but that's a very good phrase that describes my team, that our cultures to think big and as you fast because things don't get Better over time, law, physics, entry, be thinks in.

I think it's important to thinking very big scales because often you're not going to accomplish a hundred percent of what you are achieving if you're not thinking huge to begin with, if you're not going to accomplish anything big and life goes by fast. I'm sixty seven years ago. I feel I am thirty seven.

But technically speaking on sixty seven as I am my biology lage, if I live to, I don't know, eighty seven, twenty years, you take twenty years, you multiple that times three hundred sixty five days, it's only about seven thousand seven days. That's not a lot of days. And your last one or two thousand days usually are your best days.

Five thousand great days left here. I want accomplish something really important every single one of those five thousand great days. And so I think time is important to realize properly. Time is not something to waste with frivolous things. So the goal of the CEO is to get the whole management team to collectively to buy into a big vision, big goal.

They clearly thought out very clearly, envision what that is, and then for everybody to sign up for what are they going to do in order to help materials that goal. So thinking big, but then you got to get a team. You can just think big. You've got to get a team together to get mobilize to materialize that big goal you put out. It's not unique, by the way, plenty of other companies that think big move fast, but we've been consistently thinking big and very big, and we be consistently executing with discipline on that big vision.

What are the keys to moving fast at scale? The O. S.

Here that this is the advances of the start up, right? That they can be a lot faster than the incoming. But you are going to do this at scale. So what's specifically about moving fast even when there's lots of people and lots of companies and lots of stuff going on, what have you found on locks speed for union teams.

the most important thing in order to lock speed is have people on the management team who are comfortable with moving fast, but moving fast in a discipline way. Use this analogy, have a car driving down the highway as fast as IT responsibly can. The hubcaps may be shaking.

Little gonna fall off. You don't want to drive so fash that you're gonna self created problems. You can be reckless, you need be discipline, be professional, but he wants to move fast.

Jack welch was a big proponent of speed, was always advertizing throughout the whole organization. You got to move fast. Things get worse, not Better, particularly deals. By the way, when I do M A, I don't very, very fast. I get a deal, not in two weeks where as i've got suped, i've interfere.

I've preempted many side processes where bank has a book in a data room at all schedule of here's the first round, here's the manager meetings, here's the second round. I guess their consultants and they Better spent ell this time and money doing all to do diligence. I know what i'm looking for, but I don't need a lot of about to diligence.

I need to meet with the people. The basic fundamental paperwork is obviously, but I don't need to know why sga is an eighth of percent higher than IT was in the forecast and higher consulting to right report on that nonsense. And then you just take the report and no one ever does not anything with afterwards, I need to meet with the people. If I can meet with the top doesn't, or show people in the company, and I can spend an hour and a half of each one of those people I know, everything I need know about that company.

do favorite questions to ask in this processes of those people.

little change. It'll change from company to company because what's pertend is different from company to company. So there are some things that are the same things about how they make money.

What's the game here? What is different about their company of the next guy? What's their advantages?

What are the disadvantages? What are the opportunities? If they were C E O, had they been C E O, what would they have differently? What if I buy this company? Should I change because it's not optimal? What do I buy this company that I should definitely not change because it's really good and it's working really well.

And my list questions, our brief because I want to hear what the answers are. And then based on listening carefully to those answers, follow up questions are much more interested in what they wanted, set the agenda. I want to set the agenda.

They know the business. I'm just learning the business. They've been living the business .

man for ten or twenty years. What is your favorite part about post acquisition integration speed?

Getting to the point where you no longer can tell that this is the company we bought three months ago to the company that we can grow. Or ten years ago, we bought IT, and it's been with us for decade. You get the same look and feel, the same brand, the same IT, the same culture, the same excitement they're using, all the same eternal social media.

I would like to communicate a lot through our internal social media, and IT just is identical in every way. Now I ve just to say in every way, because every branch, every location, every district, every region does have its own flavor, has its own personality because of cultural differences in different parts of the country or in different countries, but the general blood, guts to the businesses is the same. And for me, that's the goal, the goals to get to the point where you have fully integrated this business on every level into the rest. The company is part of the family.

How do you do the cultural component of that, especially if the culture leads most different from the culture that you've been running.

listening and demonstrating sincere pect fulness. So this is probably my most important learning in integration is not to come into an acquisition thinking I know all, and getting up there on stage until gay giving them a log speech of here, what are going to do, not what I want to do. I want to come in with a very open, receptive mind to say, look, we've just paid millions and millions of case, billions of dollars for this business.

Obviously, we think it's valuable. And these are the people who are gonna this company work. And I look at those people as extremely valuable source of information about the company that we just spend all that money to buy.

And I often find, I write about this in the book, that I often find that employees at all levels with the front line, little management, senior management, have never been asked, what's your best idea? Improve the company? Tell me everything that you would do if you had my job and when you asked them that and then shut up and just listen carefully what they're saying right IT down.

It's an amazing experience. So as you asked those questions and then for forty five minutes, all the people your interviewing is are piling on and in dropped. This is just an exciting experience.

To say how they could improve the business is unleashed. These perspectives, this knowledge, is information about the business that you don't get. Otherwise, I find a lot of companies, many companies, the majority of companies, they have this valuable thing there in terms of this repressed information that's not unleased. And if you can go in there and figure out ways to unleash this information flow and get this feedback loops going and recognize people for contributing to this improvement plan, wow, you can create tremendous opportunities, tremendous, and make a lot of money for everybody.

Are there most common sources of bloat that you've seen in companies that you've required?

Oh yeah, I seen lots of boat I should Carry at that. I've seen two types of travel. One is where a company just has way too much expense, this bureaucracy and red tape. And people aren't really triple .

kts of every .

division will say, so how do you contribute to the value of the company? And this is long pause. They're really not just wasn't managed.

People grow up like a but I also see companies that are on invested that haven't put enough money into the business, and we've lost up to grow the business as a result of not investing in the business. Both of those too much bloat actually just blow and two skinless in the overhead. Both of those things are bad things you want to find, like most things in life. You want to find that middle path. You want to find that good harmony.

Can you tell me about .

loading justle son, so is my s so lurid justice made recent peace. He died nineteen ninety three. Lord jesus son was the head of filter brothers, which was before they were, hedged funds that were didn't exist back then.

But he was largest hedge. Fn, I would call my head flicks. They were commodation ded.

They traded IT oil, traded medals and a global business. And mr. Justice in, I never heard anyone called with mr.

justice. I was called sometimes mr. jay. Mister jesus son was an amazing individual, and he was my first big business mentor. And any time I met someone in my business career who was older, I was and was very successful.

I tried to climb onto them, and I just just pick their brain, just asked them, so how do you get so successful? How do you accomplish all this? What are your secrets? What do you achieve? And I found that every time I did that, the very generous doing that, mister Justin was my first big business mentoring.

And he was a customer of mine, phillip brothers, because I had mx or a broker firm, and philp brothers is a big trading firm. So I was getting oil for them and matching them together with x on and shell and bp and texaco and golf in all different major oil companies and independent refiners. And I started doing a lot of business with them because we came out of nowhere, and suddenly we were, after really short Peter time, we're doing billion dollars of broken fine.

And phillip brothers was a big player. Naturally, our past crossed. One day I got ta call from his secret, saying, mr.

Justice would like to have lunch with you. 哇哦， some big break, i'm IT tell me. Went, I went in and this became one of many lunches.

I went to the new york er's office and and during those lunches, I paid attention. I just served in on everything he said. Everything he did is nuance, is face everything, asked what's the questions? And he was very generous with sharing his insights on stuff.

And I learned a lot about business. I lead a lot about life. He was a very religious person, much more religious than I am.

And he believed in principles. He believed in certain basic concepts. And in duty as a jewish, or dog tube, IT was bad about morality, was about ethics.

IT was about right and wrong, and about certain things are not great. The black or the right murder out, murdered, not good. He saw life in terms of honesty. He saw life in terms of people who he could trade with, who would be reliable trading partners, and people who were in you really called ganas these. And he tried not to do business with the ghana.

And when he had a trading partner that was honest, that was ethical, he did a lot of business with them because back then removed, there was no email, there wasn't even the facts machine. There was was telexes and twists. Is that barely worked.

And so your word really was your bond and you needed to trade with people that we're gonna perform because if you bought a cargo oil for someone twenty three dollars and the market and up to twenty five dollars, you didn't want a partner that say i'm not honoring that deals. Nothing right. You needed people who would honor their work had integrity. He placed a very high value on integrity and dealing with people. And he put a lot of emphasis on dealing with people who would perform what they said they were going to perform.

If you could have five hour session around a nice fall fire with mr. j. And two or three other people, who would you pick? Who you add that conversation?

I was fortunate to hang around with his family a lot times on shabi, but unfortunate than shabi. You can't talk business, so I can talk business. That's okay, which are my life, but many ones es with him and his son Michael, who's a good friend of my.

Now i'd spent watch time of his wife, mrs. Jesus, Erica jesson son, as an amazing stories. He came out of the holocaust before the holocaust had dozens and dozens of SHE.

Had pretty big family, poppin ham family and australian vana SHE. Had dozens and dozens cousins, and after a whole car, SHE had handful. Large majority were differently die.

And that really formed to a world view that, wow, evil in the world exists. And I can have very serious consequences of this not addressed right away. I spent my time with mr. Justin and his family as fortunate .

to do so pretty wonderful. If you think about the process of employing technology in your businesses, what lessons have you learned there? Because you see before you're not a technologist, but you use a lot of technology.

I imagine that today the eye is probably on the front of your minds. And some way you perform, if you're user technology, how do approach problems like this OK? There's a tool kit out there in the world that keeps getting Better.

Pretty cool. I got to use that stuff. When do you know how to be an early adoors related dr. Plastic technology business? Admits question for you, and particularly seems very interesting.

So one of the things I learned from mr. Jesus and I write about this in the book is you can mess up a lot of things if you get the major trend right. And if you get the major trend wrong, you can do a lot of things right.

You not can make a lot of money. So getting the major trend right is very important. In any business, you can be on the wrong side of the trend. The biggest trend of them all, this technology.

So in the book I have a two million years son ops, I think it's really interesting chron logy of technology inventions, starting from over two million years ago, when k men started using pebbles for tools, and then invention of fire little time later, and then when I say a little time later, like a half a million years later, and then invention of shelters, another half a million or more years later. And then all the inventions that accelerated in time, leaving up to today where we are in the very a essential world, technology is critical to get right. And you cannot be in a business where technology is going to disrupt you and technology is going to diminish the value of the service of the product that you're providing.

And on the other hand, you must be a business where technologies or allies, your friend, is when your back. And all my businesses fortunate we ve been on the right side of technology. On technology.

If you look at today, the three companies that I chair no longer CEO that I chair. Technologies is all over the place. So you look at X P O. The third person I hired, X P O back in two thousand eleven, was guy called mario hark, mario heart. And I advance degree M I, T in machine learning in A I and I loved him.

The first second I met him and I said, i'm going to hire this guy because, like me, he talks fast and thinks, and we were just completely got what my vision was of automating broken age. My gino hypothesis for broken age back in two thousand and eleven was this is going to automated eventually. You not have people in rooms talking on phones.

You're going to computers talking to computers. And we ve got to get ahead of the curve on that. He understood that immediately, and I hired him very quickly, and he was my cio for a number of years.

Then he became chief customer officer to a great job there. And then he ran L, T, L. In today's CEO of the whole company and is a fantastic job.

This morning, this stock was up twelve percent. And our earnings, and they did a great job, is good quarter. So technology has been a big part of the culture of expo, largely, mario and my support of that rightly get go.

And if you look at the companies we spin off, R X O. So R X O is a very tech forward broken age company. So we're matching together shippers and delivers trucks and shippers and doing IT in an automated went we started that business.

Zero percent was done automated today. Ninety seven percent, almost one hundred percent, ninety seven percent is either generated or fulfilled electronically. So it's complete transformation of a business using technology.

If you look at the third company that I chair, G X O logistics. So G X O is the largest peer play warehouse companies, get over two hundred million square feet of warehouses with about a thousand warehouses in dozens of countries. And it's probably the most tech forward warehouses you'll ever see.

Not you'll ever see in the future that all be like, but you will be able to see today there's warehouses that are large warehouses that a competitor may be running and having hundreds of people running IT. And g XO is running IT with fifteen people and everything is well engineer and well designed using stadium technology. And IT has big joint venture with nationally over europe of the warehouse of the future, which now is the warehouse of today. So i'm just give me a few examples of utilizing technology, but I can give you hundreds of examples because that's a mindset that in every company i've run is how do we use technology and capitalize on the trends, how we make technology our friend.

not our enemy. In your entire history of studying trends and making sure you don't miss the big ones, what is the fools gold that you've seen? When does that seem? Sometimes there might be a trend. And what might be the reasons that something that initially appears to be the next big thing, in fact, is not.

I give you one very graphing example of something. I thought I was a trend, and I wrongly thought I was a trend. And I did up, losing a lot of money on IT back on to say, around one thousand nine ninety nine or so, there was this transportation equity act for the twenty first centuries called t twenty one.

And the idea was to repair all the bridges and the tunnels and the roads and all the decaying infrastructure across the states. And the government was going to spend six hundred billion dollars to do that. And I thought that was a trend, is, wow, I got to get on this trend.

We going to see a lot of, by the way, six hundred billion dollars back in one thousand and ninety nine was a lot of money today. I would not know how many headlines would even guess not true this. But back then, I was equivalent today to in order, and I we need to get in this game, and I went out and I bought a lot of barraca companies and corentin and stripping and all those things that are orange on the highway of doing reconstruction bridges and tunnels.

And as i'm going to be like the big moreno guide, this burgeoning trend of the government refixed all the roads around the country in the infrastructure, and of course, says governments often do. They didn't spend the billion dollars, spend a much more fraction of IT and didn't go to companies like an intervention for large part. So I just didn't work.

I am getting out of business because I was turned out to be loud business and I resolved for a half a billion dollar loss. So sometimes you spot a trend to get all excited about and act on IT is how a real trend that's an example of that. You'd be careful that you don't have false trends.

When I was reading the tech chronology in your book, IT gave me flashbacks. S to reading ray urts files. Work back my twenty years or something. The singularity is near.

What do you think of that notion? Surely anyone that looks at this, if you put on a visual chart, you see this very curse, really an exponential growth. What do you think about this notion .

of the singularity? So you'll notice the very beginning of the book, I had the acknowledged section, and usually in the acknowledge ment section, you think you're new public, is your publisher new wife and god, whatever. And the pretty little thing, and I see, I want to waste the readers time, do some boring thing.

I tried not to put anything silly in the book. I tried to b nappy. I tried to make IT subject and respect the readers because people are busy and they're doing me the privilege of reading the book I wanted.

Give him something in return, something that's worth reading, so that in the acknowledged section, I picked about fifteen or twenty people that have been my mentors, that have been my teachers, that in my friends, I learned stuff from just people that I really benefit IT a lot, gain some wisdom, gained some insight, that I won't had othe wise. And that's what I put, I put the person's name. And then in one sentence, what did I learn from them was one of the most important things I learn from them.

One of the acknowledged actually is criswell, because current wrote a book, and I would take two thousand six. Two thousand six or so called the singularity is near, and its premise was the technology is advancing at ever increasing speed, is accelerating, and humans are not evolved fast as machines, as technology is software and hardware. And ultimately, we're going to keep using that technology that we're creating.

Technologies is a tool that we're creating, just going back to them, don't tools I talked about two minutes ago, just like fire, just like the wheel, just like the telegraph, just like all the tools that we've invented over the years. This technology that we've been creating is becoming more, more integrated with us. And we're using IT to enhance our senses.

We're using IT to enhance our cognitive functioning. We using IT now to enhance our feelings, our relationships, so many things that A I is generally are writing and now generate A I and his hypothesis was and stealers that we're merging with technology. And just as ninety nine point nine percent of all the species that i've ever existed on the planet have gone to extinct humans, we're gone to someday, too.

He thinks we're going to go extinct not too long from now. He thinks going to go extinct the next decades, not the next centuries or millennia. And he thinks the next species will be a combination of humans and machines, humans and technology that will be so different that you have to call the species. I don't know about the timing on that, but directionally makes lot .

of sense when you're evaluating how to deploy a new technology. Let's just take A I is the one of the day for sure inside of a business. What are the tactics of doing that is IT pushed down to your team is a Normal way that you run this process in some regular intervals, say, are we're using.

The technology of the day efficiently enough. How do you actually do IT? Especially because your businesses have been so real world heavy capex, heavy acid intensive. This is not a bunch of software flying around.

So the exact opposite of what you would originally think. I don't say, kay, here's all this technology. How can we you use IT, the exact reverse. Ask all my employees. And I have former ways to do that through questionnaire, through emails.

I also do town hall with a big campaign to task all our employees if you had a wireless and there was no financial impediment, just an initial exercise, don't worry about IT what to cost. And you could design any technology you would not want to have. What would make your job easier.

You could do job faster if you had IT. What would you be able to please the customer more if you had IT what the customers asking you for what are ways that instead of something taking ten minutes, we done in ten seconds and finance, anise, your perfect technology, your deal world of technology. And then you get all these ideas come in, then the tech people who have to be very tightly integrated with the commercial people, otherwise, they're creating stuff that is no application for they're very much involved this process.

They then take IT together with fpa with the financial people and look at each one of these ideas and say, okay, what would be the financial part? Supposing we did this? So post, we automated this function, for example, how much more money with that save and we could pass long someone actually customer, and keeps something that for our shells, and we grow margin here.

And then what would the cost and how much time would you take? All the timetable look like on that? What would be the investment in that? And then IT all becomes down to R, I C, which is the basic thing of businesses.

R, R, I C, you to point capital and getting money back and then they stack rank all those. And now we've got the begin of a business plan for our tech group. Here's what we asked our employees.

What's the fantastics tech you can imagine? And now we've gone into detail what we're cost in, what the return would be in timing for IT. And we stack rent them.

And now we have a plan. And then we track that plan. We execute that plan based on a time scale. We assign responsibility, lie s to people. Now we have a checklist, and we have weekly and monthly meetings where we color code our progress on that of how likely are we to hit the goal by that date that we initially said is a Green as yellows are red and then attention direct based on that. And we don't just do with employees, we ask all of our customers and our vendors.

We say, what could we do in technology that would make you love us more, that would make you want to do more business with us, that would make your life easier, that would delight you. And then we do the same exact process I just described, if that all down, maybe have hundreds of thousands of ideas, and then we stack, rank them based on R. I. C.

You seem to love problems.

Yes, I do. And by the way, you mentioned mr. Justice before.

One of the things I learned from mr. Juan is that problems are your friend. Problems are your opportunities. Problems solving problems. That's the way you make money. So if there's no problems to solve, if you're not going to make any money, shareholder value comes from identifying problems, running torch the problems, solving the problems.

touching about thought experiments in the role.

thought experiments in your life. I haven't a lot of time for a lot of hobby, could have been very busy building great companies, leading teams and just running fast. I have had a lot of time for huge moto hobby, so a little time, and I ve had my biggest hobby, meditation.

So I never take twice a day. And I been doing this. I've been sixteen years old o fifty one years.

I've been almost no days. I do almost every morning, every afternoon. And i've tried last different for meditation. And i've math all together, made my own personal meditation that works for me.

And one of those approaches to meditation, or thought experiments, thought experiments, actually, it's not a phrases I made up. This comes from abbott, stan. Actually, abbot, einstein had a german word that I can't pronounce.

That is financially something like the duncan experiment, which translates to thought experiment. In fact, using a thought experiment is how einstein discovered relativity. s.

He pictured himself, imagined himself, you thought experiment of riding a beam of light and picture what that would be. And he saw the relationship between time and space, and all became clear to him. So thought, experiments are picturing things intentionally in your mind.

And I try to do things that are nominees. I try to do things that are novel, that are different, that are inspiring, that take me out of my comfort zone, that give me a perspective that's not Normal sort of speak. Because if I just have Normal perceptions, I am going to achieve Normal results.

And I want to cheap super on herself ves. I want to lead teams that create huge amount alpha. In order to do that, i've got to have people think differently.

I had people think out of the box. They in a different way than ordinary thinking. So thought experiments for me help me do that.

So sometimes I think, in terms of different perspective on space, either very big, rather than the universe, an infinite number of universes, a multiverse. Sometimes I shrink my awareness down to tiny spaces like i'm an inside, and adam, even on the court levels as elementary particles. Sometimes I do that, not just what space to do.

The time I go back in time, maybe decades of memories from my childhood are growing up, smells, or sites, or sensations, or faces, or places, and sometimes as I go back thousands of years or millions of years, and I picture what would have been the past, just giving a few examples of different ways of thinking. And that's the time that space apply similar ways of looking at sensory activity, feelings, emotions and some of the best emotions in life, like love, and fight out ways to amplify those emotions. And I have a lot of fun with that.

Sixty is very early to start meditating.

But harish, man, sugar, I saw a poster of, I was in north film on her school. I was a junior. I was sixteen.

I saw poster of this man with a beard. And that was a saying under the poster said, life is bliss. So that's nothing that's a different. You only really think about life. Being blessed has not like a Normal saying, that was a free lectures.

So I went to lecture, and is this red head woman to janus all when I think her name was, was I member to this day? And SHE seem to have something interesting about her, a certain communist glow about her. And I learned T.

M. I learned T. M. And I did IT for decades.

And I hunger out with harsh about a student when was Younger. And then eventually I left the T. M. movement. And I started studying other types of meditation, and I built on that foundation.

What was he like to be with?

What was the effect? He was a very interesting guy, and a person who was complex had a lot of different things about him that were opposite. On the one hand, he was very humble man, a lot of humility and a lot of sensitivity and a lot of Carrying this lot of love and very kind harder person.

Gender and another angle had a lot of big plans himself and a lot of big things. And you really on the bus or off the boss, if you are not helping with that, you were off the bus. But he was a very bright person, extremely intelligent, very Chris matic.

He was able to charm thousands, matching millions of people to follow him. I liked following him. I like being part of a group that was different, that was learning new things I was experimenting with.

He called the consciousness as a field of all possibilities, cool, saying he knew a lot about meditation. He had studied meditation deeply in india, had met many different rules that he had met with. And he had formulated that was, something was easy for western nds to do. So he was very brilliant with meditation techniques.

What formative experience comes most easily to mind? Prior age sixteen.

for me, IT was education. For me, I was lucky. I was privileged to be able to go to summer enrichment camps instead of Normal camps.

Kids go to my mother, put us into geeky, nerdy camps that were for the sciences, for the arts and educational, basically extensions of the school year. And there was one at modest Browns school in providence, and there was one that was called the governor school for the gifted. I participated in the summer programs that I learned that is a lot of people with a lot smaller and gifted than I am.

I learned that was really nice to be around IT was very enlivening to be around people who are smarter than me, people more talented than I was. Because when you're in your own school, you may be in the top student in the class, from the top one or two students in the class, you think you really smart. When you go to school for the gifted, you realize suddenly you in the lower court, tar on that, the top one or two student in your classroom.

I found that very enriching fact, they were called enriching camps. And I remember the excitement of being in a group of really bright people, maybe twenty, thirty people in a class, and a very talented teacher up in front, and that teacher bringing out a lively conversation. For me, that was a learning of an electric experience, how to run an electric meeting, which, fast forward to today, is the title of animal chapters. My book is how to run an electric meeting. And one of the keys to that is to make sure that people in the room are the right people in the room.

Yeah, you do my job for me. You got to talk about the electric meetings.

all the components to our meetings. In all three, those companies are different, very different than the typical boring meeting that most companies have. Most companies have a meeting where someone is up there, the good of power point, they're ta speech that they prepared. People who sort of send my, listen to this be torching, going back to our same before, when you at my age only have five or seven thousand days left. You want to have every minute of that something exciting to something valuable, something rewarding.

That's not the kind of way I want to spend how my day is going forward, the way we get those meetings very exciting and very valuable and productive is the first, have the right people in the meeting, people who are very honest, who are very intelligent, who are very hard working, who are very collaborate. And people understand respectfulness. People understand how to listen.

And how to be open and receptive to other people's ideas, to what other people's perspectives are, and people who can think dialectically meaning, thinking from different perspectives on the same problem, not thinkers, not black and White dichotomous thinkers, not people to think. I've going to all figured that out and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong and i'm never going to change my like you don't get anywhere that so you want to have an atmosphere where people are encouraged to disagree, but disagree respectfully. And if you can create a safe zone for people to lean in and disagree with each other in a nice way, where the person who is being disagree with doesn't feel bad because you're not tacking that person, you're debating that idea, where are different? You're not labelling the person or denigrating or demanding the person bullying or any that kind of stuff.

This is passionate. Those meeting is this energy and those meetings, but it's the energy of ideas. It's the energy of a shared purpose between all the people that meeting that we want to get to the right decisions on these things.

And we want to then, as leaders of the company, go back to the field and mobilize large numbers of people to create a ton of alpha. That's a fantastic meeting. The way you run an electric meeting is the leader doesn't set the agenda for the meeting.

The people set the agenda for the meeting. So what I do is I sent out what would Normally be the powerpoint presentation of the agenda for the meeting ahead of time, and people expected to read that. And then I have everybody, we have an APP.

Everybody should have to fill out the up, put in their biggest takeaway. They learn for reading that and from being in the business, unrelated subject. And secondly, they have to put in, okay, now we've read what our chAllenges are, what our opportunities are, what our goals are.

What do you think our questions that are worth going around the room once we meet person, it's a good use of everyone's time. It's going to help us achieve goals of creating value for shareholder, for delighting customers, for improving their elodie engagement. So for and then we take all those, we eliminate the dupes because often you get a lot of dupes on the good take away and the good questions, and we send them back.

And everyone rates each one of those takeaway and each one of those questions on a scale of one to ten in terms of the importance of the value that they think, discussing that in the group. With that, and now we ve got our agenda. We start with the ones that we have a highest rankings, and we go down until classes over on jokey class until the meeting is over.

And that becomes an inclusive, democratic way to set the agenda that people really buy into. They really pay attention to what's going on in the medium, because they set the agenda is what they wanted to talk about. And that's a rule of the meeting, is that there are no devices on, there are no side conversations, there are no distractions.

Here you have to pay attention. If you have the privilege of being invited to this meeting, you're concentrating on the one person who's speaking at a time, and you're giving that person you're one hundred percent attention. Your eyes are right on that person, your ears listening right and moving from that person's mouth and you're feeling what they're feeling and you've get really in tune with person and is such an exiling ating experience for the speaker and for the people are listening for the person speaking magine.

How validating that is factory that you're in the meeting, you twenty of your colleagues of your peers there and everyone is just looking right at and really, genuinely interested in what you have to say IT. Just build up your confidence and also gets you in the flow, get you in the zone and you also feel a certain inspiration and motivation to say important things because you've got all these people paying attention to what your same, so get you really in the zone and then all the people are listening. And a cultivates and flexible mindset which is so critical and leadership in business where your constantly reevaluate in your hypotheses based on new evidence, new information. And that's what those meetings are like. And people really want to be in those means.

Who is the best leader you've ever experienced?

I've had the fortune to have lots of great leaders in the company that i've LED. If I had a point to the best leader, i'd have to say three, because by definition, I thought they were the greatest leaders in the company because I promoted them to be CEO of the three companies. These are the people I felt that were most qualified, most suited to lead over hundred thousand people.

And they're very different. So you look at mario arx for X P O. You look at Michael Wilson for J X O. Look at june wilkerson for R X O. On the surface, very different ages, different backgrounds, different cultures, different accents.

Once from lebanon, ones from england, once he was out CarOlina a, they look very different from each other. But when you dig down to the things that matter, not the superficial stuff, with the more important things, these are people who are honest, one that's critical over leader. You won't get tens of thousands of people to follow you if you're B.

S. artist. People are smart. People are smart. They maybe making twenty hours an hour. They're still smart.

People can know if a leaders telling the truth, or they are giving a bony, they can smell IT is like the people are programmed for that. So these people have integrity. These people are hard working.

These people are not people who have check on on a problem because said, the people are all in line and all in and really take out of pride and doing a really good job. These are people who are leal, people who get along with people. These are people who are collaborative.

These are people are not arrogant. These people are humble. These are people who understand that we come and go in a few decades. We're not that important where just a little tiny flick and flash, and the whole universe is huge universe, and people don't take themselves too serious.

Ly, these are people who have, on the one hand, normous amount of self confidence, enormous amount, self confidence that a leader has to have at the same time, even those an opposite trade don't over emphasize to themselves how important they are, because we're not that important in the, they have humble ness. And so these people have the qualities, these three people have great leaders. They have the qualities I ve just been articulating.

They really eboe him. They don't have to be tuder and mentoring and get a coach to get them to be more honest, get them to be more collaborative and get to be harder working. So for this is what they are meta, this is their DNA.

What, if anything, about business are you interested in that you feel like you haven't yet figured out?

What i'd like to figure out more is something that i've figured out a lot, but I haven't got to the end zone yet, which is how do I motivate and deal with people who aren't thinking clearly, who are victims of their own faulty way of thinking of their biases, their prejudices, their cognitive distortions, their schema in life, the prisoner, they have to interpret all the things that are happening in life, and sometime to see people who have some significant weaknesses in the way they're thinking.

And I would like to figure out a way to Better communicate with those people, to Better mental, those people coach, those people to just unthink. They are still think, thinking as they say. That's something I would like to really get Better at.

I'm not bad at IT, actually a good at d. I'm good at identifying that. I'm good at being eaten tic and helping people, but i'm not proficient at IT. I'm not perfect at IT. I would like .

to get Better at IT. A related question is the key to getting the most out of someone. Everyone has something to offer various person to person, both in type and degree. What is the best way to get the most out of .

people in business? How about paying them? well? How about paying them a lot of money if they perform? So two things there, paying them a lot of money. But if finally, if they perform, so most people come to work if you want to want to make money, that's the purpose they're coming IT, not because they want to hang out. Although if you have have a fantastic company, that is a motivation coming because they like the people they work with maybe as much as the people they live with. But that's not the main reason why I person's is coming in.

The main reasons and persons coming in because they want to make a lot of money for themselves and actually for the people they love, in most cases, is for the people they love, is for their spouse and their kids and whatever else they donate to their whatever is important in their life, they want to give back and they want to support people, and they want to get the self is steam from enabling other people to live a comfortable live. And so if you can provide them with an opportunity to make a lot more money than they are going to make, ross the street, but tie to performance, tire to them, actually executing on the things that will help us materialize our big vision. People will create miracles. People do things they did even know they are capable of doing.

What do you want now? You are someone that has done a lot of thinking big, a lot of moving fast, had a lot of success as results of those see things across a lot of industries. You strike me. Someone is not gone to stop or slow down. So what do you want?

What do you still want? I have a big, long list of things to do. My wife and I actually have a bucket list, if little blog, where we have our date nights, and every time we come up with the place you want to go, something we want to do SHE put IT down IT.

We're not going to get through five percent of that list because this is one of day's left. But my main goal right now is to continue what i've been doing, which is to start company will scratch and make limit of big multibillion dog companies and make the shareholders a lot of money and make the employees really happy and make the the employees a lot of money. Also, I want to have a punta organization where everyone who touching that organization is getting their fair are of gold.

And for me, I get a lot of satisfaction out of that. And something that really turns me on. I really enjoy doing that.

I like the creativity of getting a big idea that starts off by definition, abstracts as all in your mind, just picturing something in your mind. I wanted create this large industry leader. I want to create this gargano company that's gonna respected in the industry and customers gonna love.

And so. And the shareholder are going to want to invest in and then making that concrete and then materializing that abstract vision with precision. For me, I really enjoy doing that. The creative process for me is the same process that the musician has, an artist has. We first got to conceive of something, and then you actually make that happen.

One thing that you have to do well, by definition, given you've started all these companies, all these industries, is no one to leave. How do you know when a chapter is done?

I was talking at James court in the other day, who was the retiring CEO of Morgan sani and some James, don't quit, be stepping down A C, E, O, and it's going to coming executive chairman. And I have great relation with him. I great relation with his bank.

And so I really don't want to see you go. You're still in your fifty is still, he said, no, I feel this time to go. I feel is the right time to go.

Everything is well and wisely put. I got good succession plane in place. I think I can leave holding my head high if you real good.

We accomplished. And I understand that because i've left many companies over. They have left life companies over the years, that I built up a very large companies and was time to move on.

That comes a point. time. When is time to move on? IT doesn't feel the same. You look forward the next few years and you say what I want accomplish.

And is that a mind with what the company is going to do? And if it's not perfectly aligned, you know, if your heart hundred percent into that, you should leave. You should leave and move on.

And if you feel the slight test bit board as a leader, it's time to move on because if you're doing your job right, you're not going to be bored for one set you're going to go through every day. You're going to have a to do list and you're not going to get through a quarter of you're to do list every day. We do you to do this is too short. And when you get to the point when there's some type of been they're done, that mentality this time, move on.

I love to do a really quick tour of the businesses and something surprising about the business that you learned building them that people might not appreciate may be starting all the way back with oil business and your couple adventures .

there for the first ten years of my business career, from ages twenty three to thirty three, I was in the oil business. And I love the oil business with this global business that back then, in nineteen seventy nine, thousand, thousand and eighty nine, there was no internet, there was no email. Future exchange were just starting tour into that and information was hidden, particularly information about pricing.

So you could go to no pet country and sign a contract for twenty three dolla barrel, and they only set the Price every three months or so when they would meet viana, they meet you. The meantime, the spot market is like thirty three dog bell, for example, and you can resell up for technology back to back with no risk. If the Price happened to go down, you just don't lift the car, go minimize the matter lifting show.

So this was a wonderful business to be an because of the information immaturity, the lack of free flow of information, you would find out the pricing of oil. You weren't in the game. If you aren't in the business all day long by a snail male newsletter, you get from a grohl, that oil great was gold.

And that's how people discover Price. Now you discovered every second is up on the screen with futures, and you see at every tick. So that was a big opportunity to make a lot of money.

I could no way make the kind of money I make back then today doing the same thing because that is not exist, that the pricing is transparent. And where the oil is, where he has to go, is transparent. And we did a lot of processing deals.

We do live deals where we would rent court the refining from shell, rather day B, P, N, top. And we would then get the oil charter ship, bring into that refiners, pay me a couple dollars, whatever would be process IT. And then we would sell what came out of that.

And people are was real risky business. And we were like, really was almost no rist. It's a little is almost no risk.

We understood these component of that. And today, everybody understand that, that's not unique proprietary information. But the time was really great. The next business I went in to was waste management. And this was I started a business in one thousand eighty nine, took a public in nineteen nine two called united waste systems. And the strategy that was really simple IT, was to go into this turns y markets, not even secondary mark, go into the upper epl action with Virginia.

Can tucky and go under rural mississippi buy up the lander capacity and buy the halling companies, the collections companies that were coming, that was called tipping at those landfills and build up scale and build up a density so that you could run the business. You could run one truck, is that a ten truck? And pick up the same on the garbage, the same on the time.

Obviously, margins would increase quite a bit as a result of doing that. And we use technology to do right optimization, which now everybody does back. And that was revolutionary.

And on that business, we are performed the S M P five hundred from ninety nine two to when I sold IT to what's not called waste management for two million dollars by five point six x. If you bought one share of the S M P in one share of another way, you would have made five point six times more money on the other, waste one. What I learned from that was that the trend is important.

Again, we would not be able to make that company today. In the west business, we had a trend going on where right around that time, the E, P. A was outlying these dumps, which were on senators, and we're polluting the environment and really should be outlaw.

And amount of landfills decreased by a large amount. And the remaining landfills, which then cost about four, five million dollars to build up, made a lot of money because they were the survivor or so we capitalized on that. And then after that was to for ten years in other rentals, was based on one simple premise.

The premise was there was a lot of construction equipment that was being owned by construction companies. And by end users, there was only used like a few months, a few weeks, sometimes a few days out of the year. We said, this is not.

This is absolutely crazy. IT makes absolutely no commercial sense. And then you had to have a maintenance team.

So I was like the uber a nearby b inside before then in a way.

in a differential. Yeah, absolutely. IT was a form of sharing of crusher ing. And at the time, about fifteen percent of construction equipment in north amErica was rented, eighty five percent was owned. We said that's GTA flip.

Now come a point in time where we'll be more equipment rented for short periods of time and utilize over the course of the year by sharing IT with many different users, then is owned all your long. And of course, I turned out. So we had a tremens organic growth and we had in a tremendous ot of ma opportunity as well.

We bought well over two hundred companies in the industry, and we bought a met multiple lower what we are trading. So we a lot alpha, the first monday seven oclock in the morning showed up after we bought just by increase, and in the deal, all creative deals. The other thing I took away, another waste, was that was my first exposure of public markets.

Everything I didn't, the oil and was private. The waist e business was the first time I had had a public currency. And I remember when we IPO IT with the two banks, that then at that time were the two leading banks and environmental services.

That was pain webber. And there was alex Brown course. Now alex s. brother. Pain was party U. B. S.

By the time I went to two conferences, I saw jim grant, IT was of speaking for pain weather. And I saw a tami present who was the investment banker for this field, for alex Brown. These were the two big shot, bankers.

I said, I want to use these bankers. I want to work with the people who actually doing the most amount of business in the area, understand the business well. And so I did, and I form good relationships with them.

I took their advice. We took a public very quickly. Then I said, after we sold united ways for two and a million doors, I wants to build on the skill set that we ve developed, that we've honed of doing M N.

A, of doing integration, of running a business standardized way. I was in the town next over from day toy, who was the CEO of marylin in the time. Fantastic man. That he was peace.

And then this is the old days when you could meet with the banker in the analyst in the same room, the dance set up, and the sun was also in dance set up, a series of meetings. I said about a dozen meetings with different parts of mary linch that had ideas of what should be the next industry that I should consult date, where are there ema opportunities. And we looked at health care, rely, the financial services, education.

And we looked at that was a big win rental that started at the company was three dollars and fifty cents a share. I'm incheon ted today, but recently the stock has been four hundred and thirty five dollars. It's over one hundred.

Bear rental was A A durable business that we created. And X P, O, I started in two thousand and eleven and was a similar business place. IT was a business to consolidate an industry that was still framework.

That's what I did. I looked at over two thousand acquisition opportunities, and I bought eighteen companies, and we tightly integrated those eighteen anis. And if you look at those companies that we bought before we bought them, they were doing roughly about a billion dollars eva dog collectively performing.

You look at them today, you're doing something like two and a half billion dollars you would do. So we and my management teams that succeed to me have improved those businesses, made those business more profitable. And that's the other you can just buy stuff.

You have to buy stuff and then integrate them and optimize them. And that's a very important part of the value creation opportunity. That's what I learned that expo logistics is to. I just hold the skills and just build down the skills that we had done in the previous company.

What, having listened to this, would still surprise people about you.

I was talking to one of my investors the other day, and he's learned more about making the last three months i've been on interviews in different forums. I've been opening up a little more about my personal life. I've usually kept my personal life in my approach just out of IT and just try to just institutionalize myself and just be a corporate CEO and just do a good job and deliver the numbers and get results and people will appreciate that. Do as i've been interview a bunch of times last few months and i've taking questions like the good questions you've been asked you, you and i've been answering that. So I don't know what surprise people about me.

I really don't I think I saw somewhere that you would consider something like accounting as an area that you might go check out, but then decided against that. And i'm always so interested by why you might pass on something. Is that a real example that I have that right? And if so, why did you not to?

Over the last year, i've looked at over five hundred opportunities, mostly emini opportunities, industries that we could consolidation, businesses we could do our acquisitions in, and i've rejected the vast majority of them. I'm down to a very short list, and accounting was one of the ones I looked at. And I got be careful because every business I have as accounts, I don't my auditors, but I think there's a real existential risk accounting.

I think A I in five years, ten years, fifteen years, I don't know the time frame could do everything that accounts do right now, particularly the ones that are just doing individuals personal income taxes, for example. I think that's very mechanical and anything is a mechanical and just processing can be formulated. I'm gona rip that out.

Just do IT for cheaper for freeze. So I don't want to get into a business where technology trends are gonna my enemy. I want to get into business where technology trends, I know, be my friend. I want to get into something where A I is gonna us grow margins, help us grow the business.

Is anything else about software versus physical technology in the software sense of incredible software businesses obviously have been built. The software r can get disrupted by other software fairly easily. Where is disrupting united rental or something like this is possible, but it's not going to be done by a programmer in his closet.

I'd like to be in businesses that you can touch and take and physical to IT. That's unnecessary. Better just me that's right. Like I grade towards things like that. I like to be in businesses where the metaverse is not going to replace IT.

So the certain things like your house eventually, even if all day along you wearing goggles or contact lands, are somehow you in the metaverse for a large party time, you probably going to still sleep in a bed. You're probably going to take a real shower with a real shower, and you're going to bring the real to there's other things that will be replaced, will be placed by A I, and that no longer going to be. And I want to make sure i'm in the first category, not the same category.

I love the idea of think big and move fast. I interview almost as a chAllenge that something I can take and go do, try to do more of each of those two things. Is there any other way that you would frame a chAllenge to those listening to live what obviously has been a very full life?

The book is called how to make a few billion dollars. It's a little bit of this Normal because it's not just about how to make money. IT is is designed particularly with aspiring c OS in mind.

But that's not the only purpose. The book, the purpose of the book also is to help people achieve whatever they wanted achieve in their personal life and in their business life, in relationships. But anything important, something that's big life, goes by real fast.

And you can just dilly deli, throw IT and just die. Or you can do real fun stuff and real exciting things. And you can change the world.

If you want to change the world, you can help other people. If you want to help other people, you can learn things that are really important to learn. You can explore the arts, the science, so many things that are amazing in life.

Life is a wonderful opportunity. We have a privilege. The biggest privilege we have is just being alive, being a living, breathing orange m that has code into functioning and have sensory activity that has purpose and a meaning as feelings, and can know what love is and have relationship people.

This is not what most things have, but we don't have IT for a long period of time. We have IT just for a few decades. And IT goes by fast.

And you get older. IT goes by faster and faster. I mean, when I was a kid, summer seemed like forever. Today, summer seems like he goes by a week.

I think the book is to help people dream big, help people get out of the rights of thinking and explore bigger, newer, important ways, and increase their desire, increase their goals, and to help them please show me what's worked for me. Some of those things will resonate, will be applicable, will help people they can use those same techniques. But hopefully even the ones that don't will give them examples and ideas and illustrations of things that they can customize for themself.

I'm not a perfect genius. Know the answers to everything. I have something that are propriety in india synchro tic, to how I built these beautiful businesses.

Then I put in the book, one thing I learned to write this book is I have a few dozen, maybe one hundred, unique ideas, and I put them all in the book. I don't have book in. This is my, i'm not running another book. And this is not my plan, because I don't think I can come up with hundred things that are unique and special and different. But I did put down in that book every single thing that I think at least was responsible for the success that my teams and I have had.

How did you get the book done so fast?

Concentration, just really focusing on that, just what we have done, everything in businesses, having a clear vision of what we're trying to achieve and then laser focus on that. So we talked earlier about the acknowledged section where I listed various mentorians and friends and people i've met, that i've learned important things like changing things. And one of them I mention is lose to joy.

One of the people is now the postmaster, generally in nine states. And I got to know, look, is pretty well. I bought his company, and he was on my boarding actions for a while.

I went into government service. And what I learned from Lewis was laser focus on the things that matter and avoid distractions. He said that open over again, let's as a distraction. When he was running a meeting of the agenda, something that came in that was just not helpful to what we're trying to achieve. He was said, no, that we focus, let's stay, focus on the points.

And when was running a warehouse who had everybody focused on the KPI, the key performance indicators, the metrics, the measures of success that mattered and just kept coming down to that. And I watched him how we run the business and have these video conference with all the managers of the different warehouses. And he got into the great detail what they were doing. And we will always bring the conversation back to the tenor. So, K, P, S, how we doing on this, how we doing on this per hour, how we doing on this number, how we doing on this productivity, how we doing an employee engagement, how we doing a customer says faction, how we do any defect, focus, focus, focus on the things that matter.

The thing that gives me joy is something that happened today, which is i've done four hundred days. I've not met someone quite like you. Is this interesting combination of almost like john collison s endless curiosity and optimism, energy with Frank sluts, intensity or something like that?

Some really interesting combination I an lot of people really enjoyed. Your effect is really cool. The book is fantastic. I have one final question for you, and I ask everyone the same question. What is the kindliest thing that I ever done for you?

That's an easy question for me to I don't need any time to come up with the answer. IT was the president of bonk parry bar, was a gentleman called Christian rare W E Y R, Christian wire, and is still five hundred and one years old french. But living into you, you and Christian did two things for me.

And the second one is the most kind. The first was very helpful for me in business. He gave me a billion dollars line to credit from about party boat to go to oil trading.

So he had confident in me. He believed in me. I didn't let them down.

Really appreciated that. But the second thing was even kinder. He introduce to my wife, we've been together and after almost four years.

fantastic. Brad, thank you so much. You done.

Thank you. So if you enjoy .

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