Conference. Thank you. I appreciate that. W when you get to be 87 people stand around up and applause because tlaheyre not sure if youll be around at the end. It was eight years ago. I just turned 80. I never really talked to any graduation groups of any sort. It was not on my bucket list. Then i got invited to go to la guardia to the la Guardia Community college. I met a threwly Remarkable Group. Whatever it might be, these people have one thing in common. They knew they had it in hemss. They knew they could be something beyond where they were. They were willing to put their time, energies to better themselves. Behind them as i saw when i got to graduation they had parents who were crying. They had spouses, siblings. I went to new orleans, detroit, chicago, cleveland, baltimore. I met the most Remarkable Group of people. Those people would be here eight years later of having proven yourself, what you could do with more skills, its just remarkable. I would like to tell you a couple of short stories. Maybe a couple of lessons from them. Mike was talking about talked about immigrants. I echo his remarks. I would like to tell you two women that each sold a business to me if more millions of dollars it was everything they had in the world. One of them was a woman who landed in seattle in 19. 17. Couldnt speak a word of english. Had a tag around her neck. The tag said fort dodge, iowa. The red cross got her to fort dodge where she was reunited with her husband who had come to the country a couple years earlier. She lived in fort dodge for two years. She couldnt pick up the language. She couldnt learn a word. She and her husband decided to come to omaha. There she found a small colony of russian jews so she started feeling more at home. As her oldest daughter went to school, she would come home, this daughter, francis, she would teach her mother the words she learned in school that day. This woman spent 20 years saving money, bringing first her siblings over, her mother and father, 50s at a time. She sold used clothing to do it. She had four children. After 20 years, she saved 2500. She went to chicago and bought what she could to furnish her dream. It had always been her dream to open a furniture store. This woman with 2500 but with the same spirit that the people in the room had about having a dream and working to accomplish that dream, she built a business which she sold to me in 1983 for 60 million approximately, which did a billion and a half dollar worth of business last year. The fourth generation is working in that business. This woman rose blumkin worked for me until she was 103. Then she retired and died the next year which is a lesson to all the managers, premature retirement, you cant tell whats going to happen. Mrs. B with her 2500, one further fact about her, she could not read or write. She went into a furniture business and didnt bring anything unique in furniture. She brought a determination to succeed. She knew she could out work anyone else. She cared about her customers. She built this incredible business. I saw one other woman who did the same thing with 2500. I gave her hundreds of dollars. I decided to go to the source. I dont want you guys coming around at me asking me hundreds of millions of dollars. Id like to join in with you much earlier. Today id like to tell you about one other Small Business person. This person i went to buy his business from him and he turned he down, which was very wise. This was a fellow born about eight years before i was. He was born in 1922. He was a well call him jack. Lived in the midwest. He was a pretty good athlete. Didnt like school much. Im going tell you one thing early in the story, maybe you can figure out who the guy was. The company he built hires more College Graduates each year than any other company in the united states. This fellow who was decembstiner this, went to college for a year and then dropped out. He wasnt that interested in school. The year he dropped out was 1941. He went down to the army rekrutsirekruts i recruiting station. They turned him down because he had hay fever. He went to the navy. Volunteered and they took him. They put him on an aircraft carrier. He flew small fighter planes during wofrrld ii. Probably by this time he would be 23 or 24 years old. He got back to the midwest. He went from one job to another for a short not such a short period of time. He finally became a used car salesman at a cadillac does he recallship in st. Louis, missouri. At age 35, he said to his boss, can i go in the car leasing with you . The boss said if you cut your sally in half. It was 25,000 he borrowed. We can become partners in the car leasing company. My friend jack started at age 35 in the car leasing business. He had seven cars. It was pretty slow. When ever the phone rang, he let it ring three or four times so people would think he was very busy answering other phones. Its the only call he was going to get all day. Theres a lesson in this. At age 40 he decided with 17 vehicles, 17 cars, he was going to go in the competition in the rent a car business. Now hes taking on hertz and national and things like that who have hundred of thousands of cars. Hes got 17 cars. His cars arent any different from them. Hes buying them from general motor, ford, chrysler. He cant get the airport locations. Those companies have them all sewed up. He was determined he would offer the customer, got to offer a different car. He can offer them friendlier service than theyve seen. He started the company. He named it after the battleship that hed flown from in the pacific which was the uss enterprise. He died about a year, year and a half ago. When he died, his rent a car company starting with those 17 cars was worth more than hertz and avis and all the rest of the rental cars put together. The mans name was jack taylor. The son andy taylor is a good friend of mine. Runs the business now. A grand child is in the business. It will probably be a fourth generation. This man in the united states, he didnt invent artificial intelligence. He didnt do anything that just like mrs. B. , selling furniture. Any one of us could have entered those businesses. He lived by the creed basically of the delighting his customers and working with people and establishing the relationship with them so that they in turn would want to delight the customers. We couldnt go out there and take care of every rental car possibility. He learned how to project himself and his attitude watowa his fellow man and his desire to make a friend out of every customer. He managed to take very ordinary cars and turn them into this extraordinary business from virtually nothing. It illustrates several points. One is you dont necessarily get it right the first time. The car leasing business, basically were competing on the cost of money to finance cars. Its very hard to delight a customer when you tell them to send you a monthly check for five years. At the age of 40 with all of that experience behind him, he found, he found the golden key. He took a very ordinary business and turned it into an absolutely extraordinary operation. Just like mrs. B. , rose blumkin did with furniture. He didnt worry about whether the Federal Reserve was going to tighten or ease. He didnt worry about whether the stock market was up or down yesterday. He didnt worry about the things he couldnt change. He did worry he did focus on the one thing he could change and that was the customers experience. I have seen the one that got away, enterprise. I went down to florida and tried to talk him into selling and he was smart enough not to do it. Probably the value of the company has quadrupled since i made that visit. He was smart enough to see that he would find that business. Henry ford, as you may know, failed twice before he started the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The test isnt whether you get the greatest business idea in the world the first time out. The test is whether you keep learning as you go along what your strengths are and what you can do for your customers, what you can bring especially to the party. To do that, you need the education that i know youve received through 10,000 Small Businesses but you need a genuine, genuine desire day in, day out to delight the customer. Ive never seen a business and ive seen lot of businesses but ive never seen one that delights the customer that doesnt succeed. What you want is that customer the next day when they think do i want to rent a car or do i want to buy some furniture, what goes through their mind. Its the place where they had great experience. I dont know what i paid for this tie. Probably somebody gave it to me for purposes of this speech. I have no idea or the shoirt bu i will remember how i was treated when i bought it. You long forget about the price but you never forget whether you had a good experience or a poor experience with the purchase experience. [ applause ] youll have a hard time finding a person who has had a wonderful experience, a delighted experience in purchasing anything that isnt going to come back. Similarly, if the memory is of rudeness, indifference, whatever it may be, theyre never going to come back. As a Small Business owner and as you grow, you have to not only be able to project that interest in peoples well being in delighting themselves but you have to do it through other people. You wont be able to do it through people who do if the feel they are being fairly quicked and their views arent appropriately considered. You really do have to learn to multiply yourself through other people. I advise the young people who come to omaha and we have a number of classes. In terms of your person life, the most important decision is the spouse that most of you will likely have and its very important to surround your people, yourself with people that are better than you are. You are going to move in the direction of the people you associate with. Ive just had teachers and friends and a spouse that really was the better person than i was. I had enough sense to learn from these people that life goes better if you behave better yourself. Whatever it may be, look for the people that actually are examples to you rather than somebody that you need to think strengthen out yourself. Simple rules like that. It will cause you a better path than you might otherwise have, they will take you so far in life that its hard to believe. They took Rose Blumpkin without being able to speak a word of english, couldnt read or write, and they took her to what is now a billion and a half dollar business snaeand incidentally, theres been no money put in it since the 2500. Thats been the total put in it. I think if you looked at enterprise, i dont know their books the same way but my guess is that very little Equity Capital has been added to enterprise over the years. The business built on itself. So i want to tell you, i admire this group enormously. When i met the class on september 22nd, eight years ago, i was thrilled and i admire people that are doing what you have done. Working hard at your job at the same time you took on an added really lot of hard work to further your skills, 99 graduate. Thats a mindblowing statistic. [ applause ] im looking at 2200 people here who i admire, im cheering for you and i can tell you, the best is yet to come. Thank you. Pl