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I got to visit the Wizard of Oz in late August, also known as Dick Schulze, the founder and chairman of Best Buy Co. Inc.
It really is like visiting the Emerald City, in their spectacular corporate campus in Richfield. You give your name to the security guard, then go through a metal detector. You approach the bank of receptionists in the visitors’ area and give your name again.
You’re greeted by Donna, Schulze’s assistant for 28 years, who shows you the fitness center and the Caribou Coffee shop and the Best Buy in-house store and the Minute Clinic. She points out the employees who pick up their babies from the in-house child care center and take them to lunch in the cafeteria, with about 20 food stations serving Italian or hand-cut sandwiches or fresh salads.
When my time came with Schulze, I told him that Upsize readers want to be just like him. That is, they’re owners of growing companies who would like to build big and profitable enterprises.
Best Buy is certainly that, with more than $30.8 billion in annual revenue. He calls it the largest consumer electronics retailer in the world, and the most profitable. But here’s the wonderful part for our readers.
He keenly remembers starting the company, and building it slowly over 10 years, and finally reaching $12 million in annual sales. He has some useful ideas as to what was holding it back from surging into the bigger time.
Turns out it was him. “In the early stages I felt I had the vision. I had the answers. So it was built around my view of the opportunities, the competition, the marketplace, everything,” he says.
“It was years down the road that I finally realized I didn’t have a corner on all that was right. I began to understand the value of teamwork, and accepting there was more than one way to skin a cat.”
The full interview with Schulze will be featured in the November issue, but I couldn’t resist previewing his insights here. When he opened up his management style, he says, and started listening to employees, managers and customers, things began to cook, so within the next three or so years they ballooned to $48 million.
That became $100 million. The next goal was $1 billion, and when he reached it he recalls buying a jacket for every employee in the company, at the time about 3,000. Now the company has nearly 120,000 employees.
Schulze details a key decision, which bubbled up from customers and staff, that accounted for the company’s revolutionary wave of growth. In 1989, Best Buy was the first to open up the sales floor and turn it over to customers, in a business that was dominated by commissioned salespeople pushing the products they wanted to sell, in a closed, showroom-like environment.
In the first year they tried it, stores “doubled down,” he says — they doubled the amount of sales per store. In the next five years, he says, more than 500 competitors went out of business.
His goal now? $100 billion, he says, in almost an offhand way. I say, is your goal really $100 billion? Will you reach that? “Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Absolutely,” he says with a smile, then rattles off the reasons.
He returns to his original epiphany, that entrepreneurs like him, who like to control everything, have to give it up. “That’s when my job got easier," he says. “That’s why you’ll see me fall back on the teamwork. And the requirement today for that is times 20, because of the complexity.”
— Beth Ewen
editor and co-founder
Upsize Minnesota
bewen@upsizemag.com
