Los [tooltip text=”El distribuidor minorista, minorista o detallista es la empresa comercial o persona en régimen de autónomo que vende productos al consumidor final. Son el último eslabón del canal de distribución, el que está en contacto con el mercado.” trigger=”hover”]retailers[/tooltip] enfrentan alta competencia para obtener clientes que no están dispuestos a tolerar un mal servicio o estrategias deficientes de marketing. Los buenos retailers buscan formas de ir más allá de las expectativas de los consumidores para ofrecer una experiencia excepcional que genere lealtad y referencias.
Sobre todo en estas fechas es importante que tomes en cuenta estos 10 mandamientos para vender más:

1. NO DEBES CREER QUE ALGUIEN “SÓLO ESTÁ VIENDO”

Un consumidor puede “sólo ver” en sus tablets, smartphones y computadoras. Deshazte de esta idea y responde con: “90 por ciento de las personas que entran a mi local inician viendo. Pero, ¿por qué vinieron a visitarte hoy?”. Muéstrales especiales, novedades y otras opciones.

2. NUNCA DEBES IGNORAR A UN CLIENTE

Vienen para comprarte. No hagas que ‘cacen’ a un vendedor. Es mejor llenar a un cliente con ofertas que ignorarlo. Parece bastante básico, ¿pero cuántas veces has visto a varios vendedores congregarse en la caja registradora a platicar sin que nadie te atienda? Esto debe ser impensable en tu local.

3. DEBES VENDER AGRESIVAMENTE

En estos tiempos altamente competitivos, es esencial que establezcas metas mayores de ventas. Vender más allá de lo esperado requiere compromiso para vender agresivamente a cada cliente y sacar el máximo provecho de cada oportunidad. Empieza con un equipo que tenga la capacidad de cumplir esos objetivos; después dales las herramientas para que lo hagan.

4. NUNCA DEBES HACER ESPERAR A UN CLIENTE

Cuando los clientes esperan se agitan, cansan y sienten inseguros. Ningún cliente debe esperar por nada. Si tu sistema de pagos no es eficiente, pones toda la venta en riesgo. Asegúrate que tu proceso de ventas es rápido, amigable y fácil.

5. DEBES TRATAR A TODO CLIENTE COMO SI FUERA A GASTAR DINERO

No califiques la capacidad de un cliente de realizar una compra. Trata a todo el que entre a tu tienda como si tuviera dinero para gastar, sin importar qué diga o cómo actúe.

6. DEBES SALUDAR A TODOS LOS CLIENTES EN LA ENTRADA

Una vez entré a un retailer reconocido y me tomó 17 minutos antes de que alguien me saludara. Elige a una persona que haga sentir bienvenidos a los clientes y los dirija a lo que están buscando: “Gracias por venir. ¿En qué puedo ayudarle?”.

7. LA DIRECCIÓN DEBE INVOLUCRARSE CON CADA CLIENTE

Una forma de incrementar tanto la lealtad como la experiencia del cliente es asegurándote que el manager se involucre con cada cliente. Esto separa tu negocio de la competencia y añade valor.

8. DEBES OFRECER SIEMPRE LA MEJOR SOLUCIÓN

Las personas compran cosas para solucionar problemas. Los vendedores deben hacer las preguntas correctas, escuchar al cliente y saber qué tienen en inventario para brindar la mejor solución.

9. DEBES BUSCAR UNA SEGUNDA VENTA

Toda compra de un producto crea una oportunidad para otra venta. Espera a que el cliente elija el primer producto, después ofrece otros que pudieran complementarlo. “Tenemos unos guantos que van perfecto con ese abrigo. Déjeme mostrárselos”. Las personas están más abiertas a comprar para justificar la primera adquisición. La saturación de producto no sólo aumenta las ganancias, también la lealtad del cliente.

10. DEBES AYUDAR AL CLIENTE A AMPLIAR SU PRESUPUESTO

Nunca le creas a un cliente cuando te dice que no puede pagar algo. Puede y pagará más allá de su presupuesto si lo haces correctamente. Reconoce la idea del presupuesto limitado pero sigue mostrándole tus productos o servicios por un mayor valor.

5 secretos para ganar más ventas

Te compartimos cinco formas de ‘cazar’ consumidores y convertirte en un vendedor exitoso en tu propia empresa.

Por Grant Cardone
Las ventas son el rey de la nueva economía. Tu éxito se determinará según tu habilidad de generar ganancias y de vender, no sólo tus productos o servicios, sino también a ti mismo. Te compartimos cinco estrategias para posicionarte bien en el arte de las ventas:

1. Recuerda que estás en el negocio de la gente
Muchos vendedores se enfocan únicamente en lo que están vendiendo y se olvidan que están en un negocio donde la base es la gente; tus clientes quieren ser tratados de forma personalizada. Recientemente estuve en un consultorio donde sus miembros habían olvidado que no estaban en el negocio de los dientes, sino en el de hacer sentir felices y cómodos a los pacientes.

Atraer la atención y mantener el interés de tus clientes es un gran reto en la actualidad. Por eso, antes de visitar o atender a un cliente recuerda que es una persona única que se merece un trato único.

2. Enfócate en los resultados, no en el esfuerzo
El juego de las ventas no se trata de organizar, planear o asistir a juntas… se trata de conseguir resultados. Algunos vendedores intentan engañarse de ‘estar haciendo el trabajo duro’, en lugar de ponerse frente a consumidores que puedan comprar sus productos.

Tu éxito en ventas depende de obtener resultados, y esto significa poner tu producto en las manos de más clientes. Un buen vendedor sabe cómo atraer la atención del consumidor y presentar su producto o servicio de tal manera que lo compre. No confundas resultados con esfuerzos; no intentas vender, vende.

3. Haz lo incómodo
Los mejores vendedores que he conocido están dispuestos a hacer lo que sea, no importa qué tan doloroso sea. Convencidos de su oferta, están dispuestos a ponerse frente a clientes difíciles, hacer las preguntas duras e ir por el cierre de la venta.

Siempre llamo a mis clientes difíciles primero y sigo llamándoles cuando todos los demás ya se dieron por vencidos. Una vez al mes hago una lista de mis clientes más difíciles y creo un plan de ataque para conseguir esas cuentas. El primer mes que incorporé esta estrategia conseguí una de las mejores ventas de mi carrera. Y es que no puedes obtener los mejores tratos sin meterte a las aguas profundas donde nadan los peces grandes.

4. Sorprende al cliente
Los súper vendedores buscan formas de inspirar a los consumidores a involucrarse emocionalmente y crearles la urgencia de comprar su oferta. Cuando sorprendes a un cliente haces una diferencia y le provocas querer experimentar algo. Puedes tomar cualquier producto –incluso uno aburrido- y hacer una presentación sorprendente.

Una vez le mostré a un cliente unas puertas de vidrio en una casa demostrándole que eran a prueba de huracanes golpeando ambos lados para demostrar la calidad de su construcción. Esto inmediatamente capturó la atención del cliente y nos separó a mí y a mi oferta de la competencia.

Y es que ser promedio no se paga con ventas. Por eso debes sorprender a los consumidores con tu presentación, tu vestimenta, tu creencia en el producto y con el servicio que ofreces.

5. Pide la venta
Esto quizá suene demasiado simple, pero muchos vendedores se olvidan de pedir por la venta, aunque parezca difícil de creer. Recientemente hicimos un mistery shop en 500 negocios y en más del 70 por ciento notamos que el vendedor nunca nos pidió hacer negocios. Sin importar cuál sea tu producto, precio o profesionalismo, si no preguntas, sólo te comprarán aquellos que estaban dispuestos a comprarte desde el principio.

Siempre conservo un conteo del número de veces que le pido a un cliente hacer negocios conmigo. Esto me mantiene enfocado e incrementa mis ventas
.

Charlie Munger



THE WISEST GRADUATION SPEECH OF ALL TIME

What if life came with a manual? An exact guide to everything you need to know about being healthy, wealthy, in love, and happy.
Charlie Munger And Warren Buffettt
When I was 16 I remember thinking "Man life is hard. I wish I could ask one person all the hard questions and get life's answers."
I was trying to figure out what to believe in (religiously), whether I should go to college, what kind of career I should go after, who I should date, and how I could be happy.
I remember asking my grandfather if he could be my guru. I remember his answer:
"Tai, the modern world is complicated. You will not find all the answers from one person. Over time, you can find many mentors each with their own insights."
He was probably right. But I have always entertained the idea that one person would have all the answers. I think that's the appeal of most religions ; quick, reliable answers to life's hard questions. 
So far in life, the closest one person I have ever found to have most of the answers is Charlie Munger. He is the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett. But more importantly, many people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett say Charlie is the smartest person they know.
Today's "Book of the Day" is related to one of the most important books in my library, "Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger" 
You will notice that the format for today's book of the day is going to be a little different.
Instead of me writing a long summary in my own words - like I generally do - I am going to basically just quote what Charlie said. His words speak for themselves and I don't have much to add.
Charlie is one of those rare authors that is so wise and dense that trying to summarize him can be rather pointless.
I will add a few comments in parenthesis below.
One thing. I'm giving it to you in a series of quote. Charlie's speech was dense so read it once or twice and then spend a day contemplating and mulling over his words. 
It will have a profound effect on your life.
I have also included the Youtube videos of his talks below at the end. The videos from the USC law school commencement are broken into 5 different parts. Trust me: they are worth your time to watch them all. 
So without further ado here it is - straight from Charlie's mouth - the answers to most of life's hard questions:
================================================================
Charlie Munger: "The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want. Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. [Memorize this and make it your life's motto.]
There is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust. And the way to get it is to deliver what you would want to buy if the circumstances were reversed.
There’s no love that’s so right as admiration based love and that love should include the instructive dead. [Charlie means we should mentor under people both dead and alive.]
Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. As a corollary to that proposition, which is very important, it means that you are hooked for lifetime learning. And without lifetime learning, you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you learn after you leave here.

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you...

…So if civilization can progress only with an advanced method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning. [He means that we don't naturally know how to learn quickly, we must acquire the skill of learning through practice.]

Nothing has served me better in my long life than continuous learning.
I went through life constantly practicing (because if you don’t practice it, you lose it) the multi-disciplinary approach and I can’t tell you what that’s done for me. It’s made life more fun, it’s made me more constructive, its made me more helpful to others, its made me enormously rich. You name it, that attitude really helps.
Now, there are dangers in it because it works so well that if you do it, you will frequently find you’re sitting in the presence of some other expert, maybe even an expert superior to you (supervising you), and you’ll know more than he does about his own specialty, a lot more. You’ll see the correct answer and he’s missed it.
That is a very dangerous position to be in. You can cause enormous offense by being right in a way that causes somebody else to lose face. And I never found a perfect way to solve that problem. My advice to you is to learn sometimes to keep your light under a bushel.

Marcus Cicero is famous for saying that the man who doesn’t know what happened before he was born goes through life like a child. That is a very correct idea. If you generalize Cicero, as I think one should, there are all these other things that you should know in addition to history. And those other things are the big ideas in all the other disciplines. It doesn’t help just to know them enough so you can repeat them back on an exam and get an A.
You have to learn these things in such a way that they’re in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life. [This is what George Lucas also said. You have to be eclectic, read many different topics, not just the ones exactly applicable to your life.]
If you do that I solemnly promise you that one day you’ll be walking down the street and you’ll look to your right and left and you’ll think 'my heavenly days, I’m now one of the of the few most competent people in my whole age cohort.' If you don’t do it, many of the brightest of you will live in the middle ranks or in the shallows.
The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs work is that problems frequently get easier, I’d even say usually are easier to solve if you turn them around in reverse. In other words, if you want to help India, the question you should ask is not 'how can I help India', it’s 'What is doing the worst damage in India? What will automatically do the worst damage and how do I avoid it?'
In life, unless you’re more gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems.
Let me use a little inversion now. What will really fail in life? What do you want to avoid? Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability. If you’re unreliable it doesn’t matter what your virtues are. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability. [Interesting that Charlie considers being unreliable the greatest of all sins.]
Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one’s mind. You see it a lot with T.V. preachers (many have minds made of cabbage) but it can also happen with political ideology. When you’re young it’s easy to drift into loyalties and when you announce that you’re a loyal member and you start shouting the orthodox ideology out, what you’re doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, and you’re gradually ruining your mind. So you want to be very, very careful of this ideology. It’s a big danger.
In my mind, I have a little example I use whenever I think about ideology. The example is these Scandinavia canoeists who succeeded in taming all the rapids of Scandinavia and they thought they would tackle the whirlpools of the Aron Rapids here in the United States.
The death rate was 100%.
A big whirlpool is not something you want to go into, and I think the same is true about a really deep ideology.
I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who support it. I think only when I’ve reached that state am I qualified to speak. This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is a very, very important thing in life. [My God if we all followed this wouldn't the world be an infinitely better place to live in? I am opinionated so I need to practice this better myself.]
Another thing that does one in, of course, is the self-serving bias to which we’re all subject. You think the true little me is entitled to do what it wants to do. And, for instance, why shouldn’t the true little me overspend my income. Mozart became the most famous composer in the world but was utterly miserable most of the time, and one of the reasons was because he always overspent his income. If Mozart can’t get by with this kind of asinine conduct, I don’t think you should try. [Charlie, of course, knows that in the USA the average person saves less than $4 for every $100 they earn. A surefire way to lots of stress and disaster.]
Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self-pity are disastrous modes of thoughts. Self-pity gets fairly close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity. It’s a ridiculous way to behave and when you avoid it, you get a great advantage over everybody else or almost everybody else because self-pity is a standard condition, and yet you can train yourself out of it.
Of course the self-serving bias is something you want to get out of yourself. Thinking that what’s good for you is good for the wider civilization and rationalizing all these ridiculous conclusions based on this subconscious tendency to serve one’s self is a terribly inaccurate way to think. Of course you want to drive that out of yourself because you want to be wise, not foolish. You also have to allow for the self-serving bias of everybody else because most people are not going to remove it all that successfully, the human condition being what it is. If you don’t allow for self-serving bias in your conduct, again you’re a fool.


The correct answer to situations like this was given by Ben Franklin, 'If you would persuade, appeal to interest not to reason.'

Another thing, perverse incentives. You do not want to be in a perverse incentive system that’s causing you to behave more and more foolishly or worse and worse - incentives are too powerful a control over human cognition or human behavior. If you’re in one, I don’t have a solution for you. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself, but it’s a significant problem. [Charlie means, for example, if employees are paid by the hour and not by their results that they are incentivized to just spend time burning up hours on the clock to get paid more instead of focusing on making the company a profit.]
Perverse associations, also to be avoided. You particularly want to avoid working under somebody you really don’t admire and don’t want to be like. We’re all subject to control to some extent by authority figures, particularly authority figures that are rewarding us. Getting to work under people we admire requires some talent. The way I solved that is I figured out the people I did admire and I maneuvered cleverly without criticizing anybody so I was working entirely under people I admired. You’re outcome in life will be way more satisfactory and way better if you work under people you really admire. The alternative is not a good idea.
Objectivity maintenance. Darwin paid particular attention to disconfirming evidence. Objectivity maintenance routines are totally required in life if you’re going to be a great thinker. There, we're talking about Darwin’s special attention to disconfirming evidence and also about checklist routines. Checklist routines avoid a lot of errors. You should have all this elementary wisdom and then you should go through a mental checklist in order to use it. There is no other procedure in the world that will work as well.
The last idea that I found very important is that I realized very early that non-egality would work better in the parts of the world that I wanted to inhabit. What do I mean by non-egality? I mean John Wooden when he was the number one basketball coach in the world. He just said to the bottom five players that you don’t get to play. The top seven did all the playing. Well the top seven learned more, remember the learning machine, they learned more because they did all the playing. And when he got to that system he won more than he had ever won before.
I think the game of life, in many respects, is about getting a lot of practice into the hands of the people that have the most aptitude to learn and the most tendency to be learning machines. And if you want the very highest reaches of human civilization, that’s where you have to go. You do not want to choose a brain surgeon for your child from 50 applicants where all of them just take turns doing the procedure. You don’t want your airplanes designed that way. You don’t want your Berkshire Hathaway’s run that way. You want to get the power into the right people. [Charlie obviously brings up a controversial subject: Since humans are born with different natural aptitude do you make things fair or do you give out rewards according to talent?]
I like the story of Max Planck and his chauffeur. After winning the Nobel Prize, Planck toured around giving a speech. The chauffeur memorized the speech and asked if he could give it for him, pretending to be Planck, in Munich and Planck would pretend to be the chauffeur. Planck let him do it and after the speech someone asked a tough question. The real chauffeur said that he couldn’t believe someone in such an advanced city like Munich would ask such an elementary question and as such, he was going to ask his chauffeur Planck to reply.
In this world we have two kinds of knowledge. One is Planck knowledge, the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. And then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They have learned the talk. They may have a big head of hair, they may have fine temper in the voice, they’ll make a hell of an impression. But in the end, all they have is chauffeur knowledge. I think I’ve just described practically every politician in the United States.
And you are going to have the problem in your life of getting the responsibility into the people with the Planck knowledge and away from the people with the chauffeur knowledge. And there are huge forces working against you. My generation has failed you a bit… but you wouldn’t like it to be too easy now would you?
Another thing that I found is that an intense interest in the subject is indispensable if you’re really going to excel in it. I could force myself to be fairly good in a lot of things but I couldn’t be really good at anything where I didn’t have an intense interest. So to some extent, you’re going to have to follow me. If at all feasible, drift into something where you have an intense interest.
Another thing you have to do, of course, is to have a lot of assiduity. I like that word because it means: sit down on your ass until you do it. Two partners that I chose for one little phase in my life had the following rule when they created a design, build, construction team. They sat down and said, two-man partnership, divide everything equally, here’s the rule: if ever we’re behind in commitments to other people, we will both work 14 hours a day until we’re caught up. Needless to say, that firm didn’t fail. The people died very rich. It’s such a simple idea. [Now this is a concept that is lost in the modern world. People see too many stories about overnight success of the Instagram or Snapchat billionaires and forget that this is an exception to the rule. Most millionaires and billionaires have 'overnight success' that takes 20 years]
Another thing, of course, is that life will have terrible blows in it, horrible blows, unfair blows. And some people recover and others don’t. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He said that every missed chance in life was an opportunity to behave well, every missed chance in life was an opportunity to learn something, and that your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in constructive fashion. That is a very good idea. You may remember the epitaph which Epictetus left for himself: 'Here lies Epictetus, a slave maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and the favored of the gods.'
I’ve got a final little idea because I’m all for prudence as well as opportunism. Let me talk about my grandfather, Judge Munger, who under spent his income all his life and left his grandmother in comfortable circumstances, which he had to because there were no pensions for federal judges back then. Along the way, he bailed out Charlie’s uncle’s bank back in the ‘30s by taking over 1/3 of his good assets in exchange for bad assets of the bank. I remembered my grandfather’s example in college when I came across Housman’s poem:

The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers’ meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady,
So I was ready
When trouble came.


You can say, who wants to go through life anticipating trouble? Well I did. All my life I’ve gone through life anticipating trouble. And here I am, going along in my 84th year and like Epictetus, I’ve had a favored life. It didn’t make me unhappy to anticipate trouble all the time and be ready to perform adequately if trouble came. It didn’t hurt me at all. In fact it helped me. [Charlie's belief in not being an optimist is backed up by compelling research. The average billionaire is more pessimistic than the average person. This of course flies in the face of the modern 'Positive thinking movement.']
The last idea I want to give to you…..is that this is not the highest form that a civilization can reach. The highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another. That’s the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic. So never forget, when you’re a lawyer, that you may be rewarded for selling this stuff but you don’t have to buy. What you want in your own life is a seamless web of deserved trust. And so if your proposed marriage contract has 47 pages, my suggestion is you not enter. [I read in Michael Eisner's book on partners that most Hollywood big deals are done with just a handshake, like Jerry Weintraub's million dollar deal with Elvis]
Well that’s enough for one graduation. I hope these ruminations of an old man are useful to you. In the end I’m like an Old Valiant for Truth in The Pilgrim’s Progress. 'My sword I leave to him who can wear it.' "







Photo credit: Value Walk
More people would benefit from Charlie if his thoughts were more accessible and if he was as prolific a writer as he is a reader.  The best way by far to know Charlie is to read Poor Charlie’s Almanack.
“Charlie Munger is truly the broadest thinker I have ever encountered.”  – Bill Gates
http://www.sanjaybakshi.net/bfbv/    Full course on behavioral value investing and Charlie Munger


ACADEMIA:
“Warren once said to me, “I’m probably misjudging academia generally [in thinking so poorly of it] because the people that interact with me have bonkers theories.” …  We’re trying to buy businesses with sustainable competitive advantages at a low – or even a fair price.  The reason the professors teach such nonsense is that if they didn’t], what would they teach the rest of the semester?  [Laughter]  Teaching people formulas that don’t really work in real life is a disaster for the world.” Source

“There’s a lot wrong [with American universities]. I’d remove 3/4 of the faculty — everything but the hard sciences. But nobody’s going to do that, so we’ll have to live with the defects. It’s amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don’t see the big picture.”  Source

“…a different set of incentives from rising in an economic establishment where the rewards system, again, the reinforcement, comes from being a truffle hound. That’s what Jacob Viner, the great economist called it: the truffle hound — an animal so bred and trained for one narrow purpose that he wasn’t much good at anything else, and that is the reward system in a lot of academic departments.” Source 
“I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues — they may know a lot of French [however].” Source

ACCOUNTING:

“Proper accounting is like engineering. You need a margin of safety. Thank God we don’t design bridges and  airplanes the way we do accounting.”  Source

“ ‘F.A.S.B’  … ‘Financial Accounts Still Bogus.’ ” Source

“I talked to one accountant, a very nice fellow who I would have been glad to have his family marry into mine.  He said, “What these other accounting firms have done is very unethical.  The [tax avoidance scheme] works best if it’s not found out [by the IRS], so we only give it to our best clients, not the rest, so it’s unlikely to be discovered.  So my firm is better than the others.”  [Laughter]  I’m not kidding.  And he was a perfectly nice man.  People just follow the crowd…Their mind just drifts off in a ghastly way…” Source

“…accounting [is] the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I’ve heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was o­nce the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double-entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention. And it’s not that hard to understand. But you have to know enough about it to understand its limitations ‑ because although accounting is the starting place, it’s o­nly a crude approximation. And it’s not very hard to understand its limitations. For example, everyone can see that you have to more or less just guess at the useful life of a jet airplane or anything like that. Just because you express the depreciation rate in neat numbers doesn’t make it anything you really know.” Source

“You’ll better understand the evil when top audit firms started selling fraudulent tax shelters when I tell you that one told me that they’re better [than the others] because they only sold [the schemes] to their top-20 clients, so that no-one would notice.” Source

“Creative accounting is an absolute curse to a civilization. One could argue that double-entry bookkeeping was one of history’s great advances. Using accounting for fraud and folly is a disgrace. In a democracy, it often takes a scandal to trigger reform. Enron was the most obvious example of a business culture gone wrong in a long, long time.” Source

“I also want to raise the possibility that there are, in the very long term, “virtue effects” in economics— for instance that widespread corrupt accounting will eventually create bad long term consequences as a sort of obverse effect from the virtue-based boost double-entry book-keeping gave to the heyday of Venice. I suggest that when the financial scene starts reminding you of Sodom and  Gomorrah, you should fear practical consequences even if you like to participate in what is going on.” Source

ACQUISITIONS:

 “Two thirds of acquisitions don’t work. Ours work because we don’t try to do acquisitions — we wait for no-brainers.”http://www.tilsonfunds.com/motley_berkshire_brkmtg02notes.php
“At most corporations if you make an acquisition and it turns out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You’ve got denial, you’ve got everything in the world. You’ve got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. And by the way, I do the same thing routinely.”  Source

“We tend to buy things — a lot of things — where we don’t know exactly what will happen, but the outcome will be decent.” Source

“We’ve bought business after business because we admire the founders and what they’ve done with their lives. In almost all cases, they’ve stayed on and our expectations have not been disappointed.”  Source

ADVERTISING:

“If you were Proctor & Gamble, you could afford to use this new method of advertising. You could afford the very expensive cost of network television because you were selling so many cans and bottles. Some little guy couldn’t. And there was no way of buying it in part. Therefore, he couldn’t use it. In effect, if you didn’t have a big volume, you couldn’t use network TV advertising which was the most effective technique. So when TV came in, the branded companies that were already big got a huge tail wind. Indeed, they prospered and prospered and prospered until some of them got fat and foolish, which happens with prosperity ‑ at least to some people…” Source
“I’d say 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company (we’re the biggest share-holder). They want to be associated with every wonderful image: heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don’t want to be associated with presidents’ funerals and so-forth.”Source

ADVICE:
“Just avoid things like racing trains to the crossing, doing cocaine, etc.  Develop good mental habits.” Source
“A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.” Source

“If you have only a little capital and are young today, there are fewer opportunities than when I was young. Back then, we had just come out of a depression. Capitalism was a bad word. There had been abuses in the 1920s. A joke going around then was the guy who said, ‘I bought stock for my old age and it worked — in six months, I feel like an old man!’ It’s tougher for you, but that doesn’t mean you won’t do well — it just may take more time. But what the heck, you may live longer.” Source

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts… Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day, at the end of the day — if you live long enough — most people get what they deserve.” Source

ADVISERS:  

“You can hire your adviser and then just apply a windage factor, like I used to do when I was a rifle shooter. I’d just adjust for so many miles an hour wind. Or you can learn the basic elements of your advisor’s trade. You don’t have to learn very much, by the way, because if you learn just a little then you can make him explain why he’s right.”Source

AGE:

”Warren has gotten to be one hell of a lot better investor over the period I’ve known him, so have I.  So the game is to keep learning.  You gotta like the learning process…. there’s an apocryphal story about Mozart.  A 14-year-old came to him and said, ‘I want to learn to be a great composer.’  And Mozart said, ‘You’re too young.’  The young man replied, ‘But I’m 14 years old and you were only eight or nine when you started composing.’  To which Mozart replied, ‘Yes, but I wasn’t running around asking other people how to do it.’ ”  Source
“We’re not following the examples of any 40-year-old investors.” Source
“We get these questions a lot from the enterprising young. It’s a very intelligent question: You look at some old guy who’s rich and you ask, ‘How can I become like you, except faster?’ ” Source

ALLOCATION OF CAPITAL:

“We’re partial to putting out large amounts of money where we won’t have to make another decision.” Source
“I don’t think our successors will be as good as Warren at capital allocation.” Source
AMERICAN EXPRESS:

“It would be easier to screw up American Express than Coke or Gillette, but it’s an immensely strong business.” Source

ANNUAL MEETINGS:

“A lot of [corporations’ annual] meetings are set up to avoid groups like you – they’re in inconvenient locations and at inconvenient times – and they hope people like you won’t come.” Source

AUCTIONS:

“Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush: you’ve got social proof, the other guy is bidding, you get reciprocation tendency, you get deprival super-reaction syndrome, the thing is going away… I mean it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior.” Source 
“The problem with closed bid auctions is that they are frequently won by people making a technical mistake, as in the case with Shell paying double for Belridge Oil. You can’t pay double the losing bid in an open outcry auction..” Source 
BANKS:

“Banking has turned out to be better than we thought. We made a few billion [dollars] from Amex while we misappraisal it. My only prediction is that we will continue to make mistakes like that.”  Source
“Financial institutions make us nervous when they’re trying to do well.”  Source
“What’s fascinating . . .is that you could now have a business that might have been selling for $10 billion where the business itself could probably not have borrowed even $100 million. But the owners of that business, because its public, could borrow many billions of dollars on their little pieces of paper- because they had these market valuations. But as a private business, the company itself couldn’t borrow even 1/20th of what the individuals could borrow.” Source

BANKRUPTCY:

“I think much of [how bankruptcy is handled] is pretty horrible. It’s a  situation were courts themselves have gone into the business of bidding to attract bankruptcy proceedings…” Source

BEHAVIOR:

“How you behave in one place, will help in surprising ways later.” Source

“If you rise in life, you have to behave in a certain way. You can go to a strip club if you’re a beer-swilling sand shoveler, but if you’re the Bishop of Boston, you shouldn’t go.” Source

BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS:

“How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn’t behavioral, what the hell is it?”  Source
“How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist’s mind?… I think that these behavioral economics…or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don’t think it’s going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what’s right in psychology.”  Source

BEN FRANKLIN:

“There is the sheer amount of Franklin’s wisdom… And the talent. Franklin played four instruments. He was the nation’s leading scientist and inventor, plus a leading author, statesman, and philanthropist. There has never been anyone like him.” Source

BEN GRAHAM:

“The idea of a margin of safety, a Graham precept, will never be obsolete. The idea of making the market your servant will never be obsolete. The idea of being objective and dispassionate will never be obsolete. So, Graham had a lot of wonderful ideas.” Source

“Ben Graham could run his Geiger counter over this detritus from the collapse of the 1930s and find things selling below their working capital per share and so on….  But he was, by and large, operating when the world was in shell shock from the 1930s—which was the worst contraction in the English-speaking world in about 600 years. Wheat in Liverpool, I believe, got down to something like a 600-year low, adjusted for inflation. the classic Ben Graham concept is that gradually the world wised up and those real obvious bargains disappeared. You could run your Geiger counter over the rubble and it wouldn’t click. … Ben Graham followers responded by changing the calibration on their Geiger counters. In effect, they started defining a bargain in a different way. And they kept changing the definition so that they could keep doing what they’d always done. And it still worked pretty well.”  Source




BERKSHIRE:

“I’m a bull on Berkshire Hathaway. There may be some considerable waiting, but I think there are some good days ahead.” Source

“Personally, I think Berkshire will be a lot bigger and stronger than it is. Whether the stock will be a good investment from today’s price is another question. The one thing we’ve always guaranteed is that the future will be a lot worse than the past.” Source

“We stumbled into this two-person format. It would not work if it was just one person. You could have the wittiest, wisest person on earth up there, and people would find it very tiresome. It takes a little interplay of personalities to handle the extreme length of the festival.” Source

“I don’t think it would work well to have a half-and-half management. We don’t need an operating guy; we have people running the businesses, and the main thing is not to destroy or damage the spirit they have.” Source

“Berkshire has the lowest turnover of any major company in the U.S. The Walton family owns more of Walmart than Buffett owns of Berkshire, so it isn’t because of large holdings. It’s because we have a really unusual shareholder body that thinks of itself as owners and not holders of little pieces of paper.”  Source


“The future returns of Berkshire and Wesco won’t be as good in the future as they have been in the past. The only difference is that we’ll tell you. Today, it seems to be regarded as the duty of CEOs to make the stock go up. This leads to all sorts of foolish behavior. We want to tell it like it is. I’m happy having 90% of my net worth in Berkshire stock. We’re going to try to compound it at a reasonable rate without taking unreasonable risk or using leverage. If we can’t do this, then that’s just too damn bad. The businesses that Berkshire has acquired will return 13% pre-tax on what we paid for them, maybe more. With a cost of capital of 3% — generated via other peoples’ money in the form of float — that’s a hell of a business. That’s the reason Berkshire shareholders needn’t totally despair.Berkshire is not as good as it was in terms of percentage compounding [going forward], but it’s still a hell of a business.” Source