Lessons - The Kinko's Co-Founder on the One Skill Nobody Teaches Entrepreneurs | Gary Kusin - Co-Founder of Kinko's (Now FedEx Office)

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In this lessons episode, discover why continuous change can matter more than simply improving existing systems.

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Understand the mindset of refusing to lose.

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Explore how effective mentoring helps people find their own answers and uncover why protecting time for family, personal priorities, and life outside work is essential to long-term success.

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You speak about a few different things, which I've heard, so just to itemize them, you speak about emotional intelligence, you speak about continuous improvement, you speak about resilience, strategic thinking.

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These are all traits that we've heard before.

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I want your unique take on some of these traits, maybe your opinions on them as to how they're useful, how they're not.

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You can go one by one or whatever because...

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Everyone's going to know continuous improvement.

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I don't think people are going to disagree with that, but why, why is that so important?

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How is it, how has that helped you in your career?

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Sure.

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Well, starting with continuous improvement.

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And by the way, my co-founder, Babbage's slash GameStop, Jim McCurry, and I were talking about this in depth last week.

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And I think Jim has convinced me that I may need to think,

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rethink continuous improvement and maybe drop improvement and make a continuous change because the world is changing wildly and dramatically and with a greater speed.

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The reason I've always said continuous improvement is

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You want to constantly be better at everything you're doing because that's a path to glory.

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If you think about scale, if you think about just improving year over year performance, continuous improvement is critical.

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But as Jim pointed out to me, yeah, it's critical, except sometimes you're so focused on the operational changes or the operational improvements that you'd like to make that you miss major strategic imperatives that are changing right underneath you.

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In the case of video games...

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Talk about a huge insight right now.

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Everybody thinks that's really, that's, well, of course you do that, but used video games and refurbished video game systems.

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Well, that's a big idea.

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That's a very big idea, and it ended up being $500 million of the profits of GameStop each year was simply their used sales and their refurbished hardware sales.

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But that's huge.

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Well, that's a change.

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That's not continuous improvement.

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That's a change.

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The migration after us out of the malls

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because the new leadership, and this is not Jim and me, these are the new leaders in the company, saw the way power centers were starting to pop up all over America, and it felt like the easiest, cheapest, highest ROI thing you could do to pivot out of major regional malls and into these power centers.

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That's a change.

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That's continuous change.

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You wouldn't have thought about that if you were just trying to improve operations.

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So those are those kinds of things.

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I do think the way I like hiring people who are going to report directly to me, if during the course of an interview I don't hear something like, I want your job, if I don't hear that, that's a bad thing.

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Because I tell them I need someone who wants my job, and then my job is to make them successful.

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And if they are successful, I'll do whatever I have to do to ensure they become a CEO.

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So that's important.

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But this other thing, and you'll laugh at this maybe, but I don't need someone to say I have a burning desire to win.

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If they have that, I think that's great.

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But I don't look for that.

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I look for someone who will refuse to lose.

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And that is a very different mindset than win at all costs.

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It refusing to lose suggests a tenacity.

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an aggressiveness and an ego thing that simply, no, in the face of insurmountable odds, you keep coming back.

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That's different than I have to win because those kind of folks sometimes throw in the towel a little too quickly.

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So I like hearing either one.

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But I have to hear, if I don't hear I've got a burning desire to win, I need to hear I refuse to lose somewhere else.

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That is critically important.

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It's critically important.

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And then just this...

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This whole leadership development.

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And the reason I did this book and the reason I'm doing this podcast with a friend of mine, Jill Lewis, is I started mentoring about 20 years ago.

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And it came to me.

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I did not go to it.

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I didn't read a thing about mentoring, but people kind of wanted my opinion about stuff.

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And that started growing.

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And that started growing.

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to where now I've got over a thousand mentoring sessions.

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We actually went through my date books from the last 20 plus years.

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And so this feels to me like a way that I can mentor more broadly where I don't have to sit down at lunch with one person.

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And, and that's,

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between this and the podcast, this fills me up.

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If I can hear someone say, wow, good timing on this.

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I was faced with a particular issue, and just reading this, I think I've sorted my way through it.

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Well, that's a win.

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That's a win for me.

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And it's about leverage too, right?

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Like you're leveraging like audiences, you're leveraging technology to get the message out because you can hustle your way to the first milestone, but after that it has to be leveraged.

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You can't, you can't mentor a million people.

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I mean, that is true and it's also true in our, when you talk about evaluating companies,

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You need to understand what scale is and you need to have some idea.

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Does this company even know how they could leverage their scale?

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Because that's a very important, if you're deciding whether or not to make an investment, that's something you want good line of sight on.

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You mentor a lot.

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That's actually an interesting point.

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As a mentor, how do you choose a mentee?

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As a mentee, how do you choose a mentor?

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Well, I do think that's a great one and one that I've been pondering lately, actually.

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So, again, I don't decide who to mentor.

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I am a very different, my background is episodic.

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So it's either someone I know or have worked for or someone that someone I know said, why you call Gary?

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And they essentially come to me and say, hey, I've got the situation.

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Maybe you can help me think about it.

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That's how it comes to me.

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And I might hear from them again.

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three or four years later and not before.

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I don't have a regular mentoring relationship with anybody and I never have.

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They do people just kind of come to me and I like the episodic.

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I like to believe that perhaps over a lunch, uh, I could ask enough questions and I go into detail in the book about the Socratic method of teaching and I've really embraced that.

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So, uh,

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and the danger of the word should, I simply ask questions.

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And if I do my job correctly with someone who's trying to solve something of importance in their life, they will have an aha moment when they come to the answer that's right for them.

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Because there's never just one answer.

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There are an array of answers, and you just have to pick what's best for you.

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Very wise.

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I love it.

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And everybody always has the answer inside.

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They just need somebody to pull it out of them.

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We always know what we have to do.

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And it's not just...

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It's giving them confidence to listen to themselves and to decide what might be right.

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I love when people... Because it's almost like a...

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Like a cartoon, they sit up straighter, their chest kind of bows out, their shoulders get, I know what I'm going to do.

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And I like, I love being in a situation where I can say, well, what is that?

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Because we haven't talked, it hit them in their brain and it resonated in a way that all of a sudden they felt awesome.

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For me, that is success and that fills me up and that's what I've done and that's what I want to keep doing.

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I love it.

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Okay.

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I have one last question to bring it home.

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You look back over your entire career.

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You've had multiple successes.

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If you were going to tell your 20-year-old self one thing, what would that thing be?

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and of your community.

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And I've been married 47 years, so I'm not, I didn't fail at that, but, boy, I could have been better.

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I could have been better.

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And that's probably this work-life balance thing that everyone is complaining about with Gen Z and all that.

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I'm not complaining so much about that as other people are.

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I do believe and tell people, look, if you're going to be an accountant, guess what?

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March and April, you got to check out because you're around the clock.

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Or if you're in a Christmas business, guess what?

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Thanksgiving to Christmas, you don't get to hang around.

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But you better find a time when you are around and you need to.

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Like I always knew, I would be home.

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If I was in Dallas, I would be home at 545 at night so I could have dinner.

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and spend the whole evening with the kids with their homework, baths, putting them to bed and all that, I'd take it out the next morning.

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I've been known to be at my desk at 3 in the morning, but you have to be able to say these will be the blocks of time that I will not violate, and they are for my other interests.

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If you don't have a family or if it's a small family, you've got something, whatever it is, whether it's a workout regime, whatever it is,

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You have to be able to tell your, you've got to be able to compartmentalize your life in a way that you actually can do it, not go crazy.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

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And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.

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See you in the next one.