Orfalea was a D-minus student who had already flunked two grades. He suffered from both dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), making it hard for him to sit still in a classroom. He had even been expelled from several schools as a result. Despite the obstacles, Orfalea would go on to turn a 100-square-foot store with a single photocopier into a multi-billion-dollar operation. Today, Orfalea’s Kinko’s is the most successful copy store chain in the U.S.
“Keep your nose in the window long enough, and they are going to let you in.” That is Orfalea’s advice to up and coming entrepreneurs; he got in and he has not looked back since. But how did his hyperactive dyslexic who flunked two grades in school turn his condition into a recipe for success?
“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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.“
