Transcription
We've always tried to say to stay sane and other people, a lot of them like to go crazy. That's a competitive advantage.
Number number two, as we've gotten bigger, we've used this sort of golden rule that we want to treat the subsidiaries the way we would want to be treated if we were in the subsidiaries. And that again is a very rare attitude in corporate America and it causes people to come to us who don't want to come to anybody else. That is a long-term competitive advantage.
We've tried to be a good partner to people who come to us and need a partner with more money. That is a competitive advantage. And so we are leaving behind a a field that's very competitive and getting into a place where we're more unusual. This was a very good idea. I wish we'd done it on purpose.
He um a few years ago, a person who's in this audience, I believe, uh came to me and he was in his 60s and he said that um for about a year he'd been thinking about selling his business and the reason he'd been thinking about it was not because he wanted to retire and we're not we we very seldom buy business from people who want to retire. He didn't want to retire at all. He was loved what he was doing. But he had an experience in buying a business a few years earlier from a family where he had known the fellow who had built it. The fellow had died and then just everything bad started happening in the family and the business and the employees everything else. So he he really wanted to put to bed the question of what happened with this business. It wasn't that he really cared a lot about monetizing it or having the money. He just wanted he wanted to put his mind at ease that what he'd spent lovingly building up over 30 or 40 years was not going to get get destroyed uh or that his family would get destroyed uh if he if he made a uh if he if he died.
Uh so he said he thought about it a year and he thought about it and he thought well if I sell it to one of my competitors and they would be a logical buyer. They usually are. That's why we have antitrust laws. Uh if you sold it to a competitor, they would come in and basically they would they would put their people in charge. They would have all these ideas about synergy. in synergy would mean that the people that had helped him build the business over 30 years would all get sacked and that the the uh acquiring company would come in like a hunt and be the conquering people and and uh and he just didn't want to do that to the people that had had helped him over the years. And then he thought he could sell he might sell it to some uh private equity firm and they figured that if he sold it to them they'd load it up with debt which he didn't like and then they'd resell it later on and so he would again have lost control. They might do the same thing that he didn't want to have happen in the first place in terms of selling it to a competitor or whatever it might be.
So when he came to me, he said, he described this and he said, "It really isn't because you're so attractive, but he says, 'You're the only guy left standing, you know, I mean, you're not you're not a competitor. you're not a a private equity firm and and I know I will get a permanent home uh with Bergkshire and that the people that have stayed with me over the years will continue to get opportunities and and they will continue to work for me and I'll get to keep doing what I love doing and I won't have to worry about what will happen if something happens to me tonight." Well, that company's turned out to be a wonderful acquisition for Bergkshire and our competitive advantage is we had no competitors and I think well we will see more of that. We've seen a lot of it over the years. We'll we'll we'll see more of it.
Charlie any and I I don't think you mentioned the fact of developing a shareholder base too. That's different than you know we we we we do look at shareholders as partners and you know it's not something that a public relations firm wrote for us or anything of the sort. We we want you to get the same result we get and we try to demonstrate that in every way we can.