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Staff post about: Paul Orfalea Become an Author

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If you’re going to enjoy the picnic that life really is, you’d better learn to like yourself not despite your flaws and so-called deficits, but because of them.

In second grade, I was in a Catholic school with 40 or 50 kids in my class. We were supposed to learn to read prayers and match letter blocks to the letters in the prayers. By April or May, I still didn't know the alphabet and couldn't read. I memorized the prayers so the nun thought I was reading. Finally, she figured out that I didn't even know my alphabet, and I can remember her expression of total shock that I had gotten all the way through the second grade without her knowing this.

Every summer, I went to summer school, and during the school year I was in every little special group. I was in the speech group, the corrective posture group, the purple reading group, the green reading group. In third grade, the only word I could read was ‘the’. I used to keep track of where the group was reading by following from one ‘the’ to the next.

But I could never spell.

I was a woodshop major in high school, and my typical report card was two C's, three D's, and an F. I just got used to it.

I was eighth from the bottom of my class of 1,500 students. To be honest, I don't even know how seven people got below me.

Everyone in my family and all my parents' friends had their own businesses. So, for me, college was just for fun because I knew I was going to have my own business. In college, I majored in business and ‘loopholes.’ I knew who all the easy teachers were.

I thought that anybody who worked for me could do the job better. I wanted to make sure my employees were happy and that they would continue working for me.

Of all the people on earth to be in that business. You’d think I must love term papers – but I just told people to Xerox them. I just collected the money.

The people in the front lines are my customers. I need to keep them happy. And, the best way to take care of your customers is to take care of your workers.

I’m lucky, I can’t read well, and I’m not mechanically inclined. So I know anybody else could do any particular task better than I can.

You need to first understand what their needs are. You have to empathize and understand what their problems are. You might not be able to solve everybody’s problems, but you have to at least be able to understand them.

The people in the middle are my employees, and if they’re not aligned to those customers, then it is my job to make them aligned. A lot of times middle managers take their eyes off the ball, which is to take care of their customers and workers.

I battled very hard for daycare, orthodontics coverage for our company. I battled pretty hard for twelve weeks off for our workers after pregnancy, childcare leave.

I always believe that a corporation’s first responsibility is to its workers.

I’ll tell you what my biggest challenge at Kinko’s was. When we had two and three workers in the store, the manager knew everything about everything. Now you have forty or fifty workers. Now you want the manager to know about people, not about things. So, as an organization evolves and grows, managers need to have good people skills more than good technical skills.

When you are dealing with employees, you are dealing with a total person - the whole enchilada of the worker. A worker might have a problem with her husband, but you’ve still got to get a smile on her face. That’s your problem. When workers have mood problems because they’ve got baggage, that’s your problem.

These great guys who ran corporate businesses in New York…they’d ask me what our greatest competitive advantage was with Kinko’s, and I said it was a spark in our workers’ eyes. And they didn’t realize that.

It was an easy business…My dad made women’s clothing, and he had all this inventory to worry about. So I thought, this inventory thing is bad news. I don’t want anything to do with it. With a Xerox machine, I can dial a button and what comes out the end I can sell. It’s actually a simple, dumb business really.

We decided not to franchise because we like the idea of making money with someone on the bottom line rather than on the top line. We thought that was a better way of doing business, sharing the profits. The franchisor takes money from the top, he takes a percentage of sales. I just like the idea of working with people.

It just seems like it would set up an adversarial relationship. I think all organizations have difficulties with this. The franchisee has an expectation that the franchisor is going to make [it] successful. We wanted to have a good relationship with the field.

Imagine yourself if you were in business with someone, and you sold $100 worth of stuff, and they took $6 off the top. Or if you made $6 in profit, and you split...with the other guy. What would you rather be, splitting the profit or having it taken from off the top? I'd rather have it on the bottom line where you split the profits. It is a little more equitable, and the other guy listens to you.

It’s different strokes for different strokes. In certain instances, it is a good deal, but generally I have drifted away from the traditional franchise.

I think we are blessed with one of the only recognized trademarks in a $100 billion-a-year business called printing, and all of that printing world is coming our direction. It is all going digital, and we are perfectly positioned in the digital world.

Do it yourself or maybe go in as a partner with someone, 50-50 partner or 60-40 partner would be better.

I had a real problem with people overworking actually. They’d work sixty to seventy hours a week in the stores, and they were busy, busy, busy, but the store was dirty and they didn’t see it. I’d say, ‘Why don’t you get the windows cleaned,’ and they would say, ‘I’m too busy’.

Busy is not a good word, I think. It’s not a good excuse. Come on, it’s common sense. Get it done; delegate it. I never aimed for busy-ness at Kinko’s. How could a manager working 12 hours a day have work, love, and play in balance?

I reflect back on my career at Kinko’s. We’d make sure the worker was there at 8 a.m. That’s stupid. Why don’t you just say, ‘Here’s a basket of work you have to do, like pay the bills. Here are the bills you have to pay. If you do it all in ten days of the month, I don’t care; go home.’ I didn’t do that then, but I think there are a lot of tasks in a business that can allow a lot more flexibility. As long as you get the work done, who cares?

It comes back to ‘busyness.’ I was never that busy. I never worked past 5 p.m. or on Saturdays. So I was always out of my office, kind of wandering around the stores.

When you are wondering, you do the kind of work you should do – thinking about scenarios, planning ahead. A leader shouldn’t fall in love with the organization as it is. So I had my scenarios already worked out about what we would do if we had an adverse decision. That’s what a leader should be doing.

My restlessness propelled me out of doors. How many managers do you know who really understand what is happening at the frontlines of their business? I did.

My learning disability gave me certain advantages, because I was able to live in the moment and capitalize on the opportunities I spotted. With ADD, you’re curious. You’re eyes believe what they see. Your ears believe what others say. I learned to trust my eyes.

Whenever I felt down, whenever I started wondering what homeless shelter I would die in, [my mother] would buck me up by telling me: you know, Paul, the A students work for the B students, the C students run the companies, and the D students dedicate the buildings.

All my life I knew I would have a big business. That’s what I wanted from the time I was in second grade; there was never a doubt in my mind.

When I talk to college students about all of this, I tell them to work with their strengths, not their weaknesses. If at you're not good in reading, do something else. Go where you are strong.

Building an entirely new sort of business from a single Xerox copy machine…gave me the life the world seemed determined to deny me when I was younger.

I didn’t listen. I knew what I was going to do.

Because I have a tendency to wander, I never spent too much time in my office. My job was going from store to store, noticing what people were doing right. If I had stayed in my office all the time, I would not have discovered all those wonderful ideas to help expand the business.

During my years at Kinko’s, I worked very long hours, but I also took frequent, long vacations. And when I returned, the first order of business was planning my next vacation.

The goal was not to avoid work, but to improve my productivity. People do not learn new things and think new thoughts by doing the same things every day for months on end. My vacation schedule also defined firm deadlines for important projects, bringing a better sense of priorities to my time in the office.

If you go away for one week, you come back to an extra weeks’ worth of work. If you’re gone for two weeks, you come back to an extra two weeks’ worth of work. But if you’re gone for three weeks, everyone figures out how to get along without you and the work gets properly delegated and executed. It’s better for you, better for the business, and better for the development of coworkers.

People who exercise know they are more likely to have a brainstorm while running than while running a meeting. Unfortunately, many managers…buy people’s time rather than investing in their talent.

Real vacations afford adequate time for rejuvenation, but I think employers will embrace such policies voluntarily when they recognize the bottom line benefits, such as lower overtime costs, lower absenteeism, lower health care costs, better cross-training (and therefore better customer service), and higher individual worker productivity.

Keep your nose in the window long enough, and they are going to let you in.

You have to nurture your people.

At that moment, I realized my name was on the receipts and invoices. That's my money. Well, how do you treat people who are touching your money? You kiss their fingers. Happy fingers equal happy employees and that means more money. That didn't mean I was mellow. I had the velvet glove and the steel fist. And sometimes I used the steel fist. But you can tell how good a company is by looking in the employee's eyes.

I get bored easily, and that is a great motivator. I think everybody should have dyslexia and ADD.

If I find a great idea, I work on it at the beginning, then bring in other people to make things work. Actually, I've always been good at getting out of work.

You can either complain or look for opportunity in every problem. I prefer opportunity.

Trust what you see, rather than what you hear. And don't take life so seriously – just enjoy it.

It seems counter-intuitive in our work-obsessed society, but longer vacations are good for the employer, the coworker, and the economy.

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