Purple Spots

Seth Godin has a new (oops/almost new -- 2002) book: Survival is Not Enough. This is an excerpt.

The Paul Orfalea Story: A Process, Not a Plan
One of my favorite entrepreneurs is a guy named Paul Orfalea. Paul is brilliant and quite successful, but he’s unbelievably modest and also very honest about his shortcomings. Paul is profoundly dyslexic. He didn’t learn how to read until he was well into elementary school and did nothing in high school that would be associated with the idea of success. He went to college but didn’t care an awful lot about his classes. It was the perfect background for an entrepreneur.

Paul started a little copy shop (so little he had to wheel the machine outside to make room for customers) on his college campus. He sold pens and paper and made copies. That store grew to become Kinko’s, a chain with more than one thousand outlets that he was able to sell for more than two hundred million dollars to an investment group.

The secret to Kinko’s success is disarmingly straightforward. "My reading was still poor and I had no mechanical ability, so I thought that anybody who worked for me could do the job better," Paul explains. He set up a unique co-ownership structure that let him grow the business with more flexibility than a franchise could offer. The end result is that for years, Kinko’s stores were partly owned by someone local.

Paul described his job to me this way, "I just go from store to store, see what they’re doing right and then tell all the other stores about it." By allowing local entrepreneurs to make millions of low-cost experiments every year (just three per day per store gets you to that level) and then communicating the successful ones to the other stores, he was able to set the process in motion that led to that all-night store I found in Cleveland.

The Cleveland store wasn’t part of a specific plan, but it was very much the outcome of a specific process. Very little specialized knowledge is required to open a copy shop. Yet Kinko’s dramatically outpaced every other competitor by reinventing what a copy shop was, every single day. Kinko’s did not have a patented new technology. Instead, it had a posture about change that treated innovations and chaos as good things, not threats.

The more successful Kinko’s got, the more likely it was to get job applications and co-venture deals with people who made the company even more successful. The more Kinko’s stores there were, the more likely it was that people would seek one out. The better Kinko’s did, the more successful it became.

Kinko’s became a success. Working there was fun because the company attracted people who could compound its growth. Kinko’s stopped worrying about surviving and enjoyed the ride.

It’s interesting to see that since the takeover of Kinko’s by an investor group, new management has bought out the individual owners and installed a command and control system. Kinkos.com is regrouping and the entire chain is experiencing slower growth, despite external economic and technical conditions that should have allowed it to grow even faster. Paul was right. All of us are smarter than any one of us.

SG

http://www.zoometry.com/zoom/excerpt.asp

Doug Stevenson for The Innovise Guys