My top 20 highlights from the book:

1. Whatever you do, you must do it with gusto, you must do it in volume. It is a case of repeat, repeat, repeat.

2. Life is hard for the man who thinks he can take a short cut.

3. I did write this 100% with my 40 year old typewriter. I didn’t have a ghost writer. I wanted it in my own words.

4. I hope to pass on some of my theories of business to our people, and I hope these theories are used in our business for as long as the Les Schwab Company continues. Should we fail to follow these policies toward customers and employees, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.

5. One of my biggest fears was that my father would come to school on Friday drunk. I was proud; poor, but I had a lot of pride.

6. My father was found dead in front of a moonshine joint.

7. My school was just a railroad boxcar with crooked window cut in one side of the boxcar. There were three of us in 8th grade. We all failed.

8. I was sometimes cocky; but this same cockiness helped me a lot in going through life.

9. The company paid low wages and had a lower overhead. The flaw was they didn’t get —with the low pay— near the quality of employees we had.

10. I encourage you to share profits with your employees. I encourage you in every way possible to “Build People.” If you make people under you successful, what happens to you? Aren’t you also then successful? What nicer thing can you do with your life than to help young people build their lives into successful people. The older I get the more proud I am of the profit sharing programs that I have created.

11. I had always wanted to be a businessman, but I didn’t have any money.

12. I was 33 years old and still wanting to go into a business of my own. Money was the main thing holding me up.

13. I thought the tire business had a future. I remember telling my wife I thought I was a salesman and maybe that ability could be used in the tire business. It was hard, knuckle busting, dirty work. I had never fixed a flat tire in my life.

14. We must constantly remind ourselves as to just why we are successful and what we must do to continue to be successful; because if we become complacent, brother it’s all over with.

15. The pressure on me was tremendous. My largest account was way behind on payments and it worried me to no end. My net worth was about the same as what they owed me. If they had gone broke at that time they would have taken me with them, and the Les Schwab story would have ended right there.

16. Some of our office people sometimes wonder about this. But I’ve warned them, don’t bitch to me because that is the way I want it. If you want to go out and start at the bottom changing tires and work into a manager job, then hop right to it. If it weren’t for those men in the stores working their butts off in all kinds of weather, missing meals, God awful hours, etc. you wouldn’t even have a job.

17. Now that we share with all people, if any one employee sees another employee steal they are a weak kitten if they don’t report it. Why? Because this man is stealing from them, from his children. If he won’t fight for his children, he can’t be very much. For a company as large as ours we have very little dishonesty.

18. We share 50% of our profits with all the employees in the store. My thinking has always been if I give away half the profits I still have half. If I share $10 million with people I still have $10 million left over. I don’t understand why businessmen can’t do this. It is being unselfish for good reasons. It helps a lot of people.

19. Success in life is being a good husband, a good father and you end up being a second father to hundreds of other men and women. Last night I attended a wedding of a young man from our office. This young man told me that two men had influenced his life, his father and me. That’s worth more than money.

20. We are different from most American corporations, as we think the most important people in the company are the people on the firing line; the ones who sell, do the service work and take care of the customer. Most American corporations have the fat salaries for the top people and treat the people at the end of the line as peons. I guess that is why, if you are on the ball, you can beat them on any type of fair competitive basis.