David Senra

May 22, 2023

Sol Price: The Founder who taught Jim Sinegal, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, and Bernie Marcus

Sol Price.jpeg

My top 10 highlights from the book:

1. You train an animal, you teach a person.

2. If you’re not spending 90% of your time teaching, you’re not doing your job. —Jim Sinegal.

3. If you want to be successful just put yourself in the place of a cranky, demanding customer. See your business through the eyes of the customer.

4. We have said that the best advertising is by our members. The unsolicited testimonial of the satisfied customer.

5. What does limited selection have to do with efficiency? Put simply, the cost to deal with 4,500 items is a lot less than the cost to deal with 50,000 items.

6. He was not a fan of training manuals because he believed that manuals were a substitute for thinking.

7. Sol kept a small sign in his office: "Do it now.”

8. He believed in developing strong operating efficiencies, and he continually emphasized passing on savings to customers.

9. He was always reading.

10. Sol was a poster child for the American dream. His immigrant parents were born in a small Russian village. Sol was the first in his family to graduate college. He earned a law degree. He became an exceptionally successful businessman and philanthropist, celebrated 70 years of marriage, was a good father who instilled high values in his sons, and he never walked away from responsibility. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Listen to the Founders episode on this book here

About David Senra

Learn from history's greatest founders. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast